Chapter 19
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
The backstage air hums with electricity and sweat. The kind that buzzes in your bones before a show—before the lights, before the noise, before the fall.
Eli’s bouncing his sticks against his thigh like he’s trying to start a fire. Miles is pacing, humming scales under his breath. Drew’s tuning for the fifth time, pedalboard glowing like a spaceship. The crowd’s already roaring beyond the curtain—bass-heavy, impatient, alive.
A stagehand shouts, “Five minutes!”
Eli cracks open a mini bottle of Jack and grins. “One shot each,” he says, holding it up. “Tradition.”
Miles groans. “That is so not a fucking tradition.”
Drew shrugs. “We’re in Vegas, man. Everything’s tradition if you do it with conviction.”
I laugh, the sound sharp and nervous in my throat. “Fine. One.”
We pass the bottle around. The whiskey hits like liquid voltage. Eli whoops, slamming the empty on a crate. Miles grimaces, Drew coughs, I shake it off with a hiss.
Eli’s already grinning. “You ready to blow the roof off this place?”
“Born ready,” I say, though my pulse is wild.
The tech waves us forward. The house lights dim, and the roar turns to a thunder. My skin prickles. I feel it in my teeth, in my ribs. Every nerve is awake.
We walk out under the heat of the lights—Miles steady and focused, Eli swaggering like he owns the stage, Drew adjusting knobs like a surgeon. I grip the mic, glance at the crowd, and the rush hits like a punch.
Hundreds of faces. Blurred and shining, a sea of noise and motion. They’re chanting, clapping, already ours.
“Vegas!” Eli yells from behind the kit, and the place explodes.
I grin. “We’re Steel Saints,” I say into the mic, voice more level now. “Let’s make some bad decisions together.”
Laughter ripples through the crowd—loud, warm, hooked. Then the first chord hits, and it’s like falling into gravity.
We tear through the opening set—“City Static,” “Voltage Veins,” “Last Exit.” Every note lands like a heartbeat. The sound is massive, bigger than the room, bigger than us. My throat burns, my fingers ache, and I don’t care.
I prowl the edge of the stage, hair sticking to my forehead, sweat soaking my collar. The crowd screams the lyrics back at me, and I give them more.
Then it hits me—they know the words.
Not just the chorus. The verses. The hooks we wrote at 3:00 a.m. in our apartment when the AC broke and the neighbors banged on the wall to shut us up. The lines we bled into a cheap mic, uploaded half asleep to YouTube, thinking maybe a handful of people would ever find them.
And now an entire room is shouting them back at me. Word for word.
I grin, pointing into the crowd, singing along with them. It’s electric. Unreal.
They’ve been watching. Listening. Following.
It means the hours in that cramped practice room, the nights we wondered if any of it mattered—they did.
It’s mind-blowing and dizzying and better than any drug.
I lean close to the front row, mouthing lines against outstretched hands, and the noise swells until it feels like the whole damn city is breathing in time with us.
I’ve done this before, but never like this. Never in Vegas. Never with the stakes this high.
Between songs, I let the noise wash over me. “You guys are fucking beautiful,” I say, breathless. “Don’t ever stop being loud.”
Eli crashes a cymbal behind me like punctuation.
We slide into the next number, “Riot.” Halfway through, I start scanning the crowd—habit, curiosity, something else clawing up my spine. My gaze drags across the blur of lights and movement until it catches on one still point.
Him.
Ollie.
Front row balcony, hands on the rail, expression unreadable. He’s dressed down—dark tee, cap low, but there’s no mistaking him. The jawline, the eyes, the weight of that focus.
For a heartbeat, I forget to breathe.
My chest tightens. I don’t miss a note, but I feel every one differently now.
Because he’s here.
And somehow, knowing that—seeing him—turns everything up. Louder. Brighter. Meaner.
The next chorus rips out of me raw. Eli shoots me a look like What the hell’s gotten into you? Drew just grins, feeding off it.
I hit the final chord and lean into the mic, chest heaving. “You still with me, Vegas?”
The crowd screams.
Ollie doesn’t move. But I swear his fingers flex on the rail like he’s holding himself still.
“Good,” I say, voice lower now, almost a growl. “Because this next one’s new.”
Miles meets my eyes, a silent check. I nod.
“We wrote this a while back,” I tell the crowd. “Never played it live before. It’s called ‘Velocity.’” And fuck if Ollie being here to listen to this doesn’t shoot a bolt of lightning straight to my chest.
A ripple of anticipation moves through the room.
I step back, nod once. The lights drop to a slow pulse—red, dim, like the inside of a heartbeat.
Eli starts soft—just kick and snare, patient; Drew lays a shimmering line over it; Miles twists a low bend out of his guitar, a single sustained note that slices through the dark and hangs there, trembling with promise.
I close my eyes and start to sing.
“You move like a rumor that learned how to breathe,
I blink and the floor disappears under me.
I’ve sung for strangers, ghosts, and smoke,
But you’re the line I never wrote.”
My voice catches at first, then evens out. The crowd quiets—really quiets. You can feel the shift. The stillness that only comes when a room decides to listen.
I open my eyes.
Ollie’s still here.
“Every chord I hit just feeds the ache,
Every crowd blurs, every rule breaks—
Tell me, do you feel it too,
that pull that burns right through?”
The lights wash red over the crowd. Faces blur again, but not his. He’s sharp in the dark, like the song’s orbiting around him.
Every lyric lands heavier now—every word I wrote about him, now sung to him, in front of everyone.
My chest feels raw. My voice climbs higher on the chorus.
“Velocity—
You’re the rush that rewired my gravity.
I’m gone before the sound hits the wall,
But your name’s the echo I can’t outrun at all.
Spotlight heat, your shadow’s there,
I taste your breath in the LA air.
If faith is falling, then I fell clean—
Into something real, something seen.”
By the bridge, I stop thinking altogether. I just feel. I move. I pour every ounce of what I can’t say into the mic until it hurts.
“Maybe we break, maybe we bend,
Maybe we burn right to the end.
I’d still choose the crash, the spin, the dive—
If it means we walk out alive.”
Eli’s pounding the kit like he’s exorcising something. Miles’s head down, lost in the melody. Drew is locked on the groove.
I look up again.
Ollie’s still there, eyes locked on mine. His jaw is tight, his throat moving like he’s swallowing words he can’t say.
For a heartbeat, it’s just us.
And then the final chorus hits.
“Velocity—
No slow lane, no disguise for me.
You’re the proof that the noise was worth the fight—
The reason I stayed in the light.”
I let the last note hang until the feedback hums.
Silence.
Then—applause. Huge. Wild. A wall of sound that shakes the stage.
Eli throws a stick in the air. Drew’s laughing, breathless. Miles just exhales, the tiniest smile on his face.
I bow my head, gripping the mic stand until my knuckles go white. Because in that silence—before the noise swelled—I swear I felt something shift.
Not just the music. Not just the moment. Something in me.
When I look up again, the balcony’s still lit in red glow.
Ollie’s gone.
But that’s okay. I know with everything in my being that he’ll be waiting.
The last chord’s still vibrating when I drop the mic to my thigh, breathing hard, pulse still climbing instead of coming down.
The roar of the crowd hits again—deafening, alive, demanding more—and I can’t stop smiling.
Eli’s standing on his drum stool with his sticks in the air, Drew’s bent double laughing, and Miles just shakes his head and mouths, “Holy shit.”
We stumble offstage into the half-dark of backstage, our ears ringing, our hearts still pounding. A crew tech hands me a towel, but I’m too wired to use it. My skin feels electric.
“Holy hell,” Eli says, collapsing against a wall. “We just leveled that place.”
“No,” Drew says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, “we nuked it.”
Miles grins, slow and stunned. “That was… something.”
I laugh—loud, unguarded, the kind of sound that comes from the chest. “Something good?”
“Something legendary,” Eli says. He snatches up a bottle of water, unscrews the cap, takes a swig, then immediately replaces it with a small bottle of tequila from his jacket. “Post-show tradition, gentlemen.”
“You’re gonna be a tradition if you keep that up,” Drew mutters.
“Don’t act innocent,” Eli says. “You know the rule. One shot for the stage, one for the kill.”
He pours into four plastic cups he grabbed from fuck knows where. The smell alone makes my head swim. We each take one. The liquid glows amber in the flickering backstage light.
“To us,” Miles says, voice steady even now.
“To tonight,” Drew adds.
“To the madness,” Eli throws in.
I lift mine last. “To whatever the hell comes next.”
We clink, drink, and collectively groan. The burn slides down hot, then smooth, and the laughter breaks loose again, shaking the room.
We’re still laughing when a deep voice cuts through the noise. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
We turn as one. The man in the doorway is tall, mid-forties, skin the color of polished walnut, suit sharp even in the dim light. He’s got the kind of presence that makes everyone stand straighter.
“Simpson Cole,” he says, holding out his hand. “I run A&R for Horizon Entertainment.”
My fingers tighten around the empty cup. Simpson Cole. That Simpson Cole—the guy who discovered Waverly Lane and signed The Hush before their stadium tour. The guy every up-and-coming band prays will remember their name.
He shakes each of our hands in turn, grip firm, eyes assessing. Then he looks at me.
“Rafe, right? Front man.”