Chapter 10 – Rex
REX
Nash's grave is the only place in the world where I don't have to pretend.
The headstone is simple. Black granite, polished enough to catch the gray Seattle light even through the rain.
Nashville Steele.
Beloved brother.
The music lives on.
I'd hated that last line when the funeral director suggested it, but I couldn't think of anything better.
Couldn't think of anything at all, really, standing in that sterile office with Phoenix's hand on my shoulder and the weight of the sight of my twin zipped up in a fucking body bag imprinted on my memory.
Now I'm sitting in the mud with my back against the stone, guitar across my lap like a shield I can't lift. My fingers haven't touched the strings in over an hour. Maybe longer.
Time gets slippery when you're watching rain carve rivers through cemetery grass.
My phone is face-down somewhere to my left. Dead. I turned it off after the message came through.
STEPHEN
First photo's live. The rest follow in 24 hours unless you send Bells back to me.
I didn't respond.
What's the fucking point?
I'd seen the photo before I killed the power. Every disgusting part of my face captured in merciless clinical detail, tagged and shared and screenshotted by thousands of people who finally know exactly what I've spent half my life hiding.
I haven't seen myself that clearly in years.
I avoid mirrors. Avoid reflective surfaces. Avoid puddles and windows and the black screens of phones. Avoid anything that might catch me off guard with the truth of what I am.
But there it was. My face—what's left of it—staring back at me from my phone screen like something that crawled out of a morgue.
The right side completely destroyed, melted and reformed into something that doesn't look human anymore.
Exposed teeth where my cheek should be. That dead eye that won't close, black pupil swallowing everything, staring and staring and staring even in unconsciousness.
I'd thrown up in the studio bathroom. Barely made it to the toilet before everything came up.
Bile and coffee and the protein bar Phoenix had forced on me that morning.
Heaved until there was nothing left, then kept heaving anyway, my body trying to expel something that can't be expelled because it's part of me.
It is me.
My hands hadn't stopped shaking for an hour afterward. Still tremble now, even numb with cold.
The comments were worse than the photo.
No. That's a lie. Nothing could be worse than the photo. But the comments were confirmation of everything I already knew, everything I've always known, written in the casual cruelty of strangers who will never have to look me in the eye.
Monster.
And they're right. Not cruel, not unfair, not exaggerating. I am a monster. I've known it since I was sixteen years old, watching Nash's face try and fail to hide the horror every time he looked at me.
At least now the whole world can see what he saw.
At least now there's no more fucking pretending.
The rain has soaked through everything. Even the canvas jacket I grabbed on autopilot before walking out of the studio. Water drips from my hair, runs down the leather of my mask, pools in the hollows of my collarbones.
I should be freezing.
Probably am and can't feel it.
Can't feel much of anything right now.
I close my eye. The damaged one stays mostly open behind the mask, of course. It always does. No eyelid left to close it, just that constant horrifying, unblinking stare at a world I can't escape no matter how badly I want to.
And I do want to.
Not in an active way. Not like I'm going to do something about it. But the wanting is there, constant as breathing. Has been for years.
This quiet awareness that everything would be simpler if I just... stopped. If I let the rain fill my lungs. If I walked into traffic. If I bought enough of whatever killed Nash to guarantee I'd join him wherever he is now.
Hell, probably. We always joked about that, even though if anyone deserves heaven, it's him.
But at least we'd be there together.
Everyone would be better off.
Phoenix and Rafael wouldn't have to keep pretending I'm not destroying the band with my bullshit. Wouldn't have to walk on eggshells around me, wouldn't have to make excuses for my behavior, wouldn't have to watch me slowly implode and pretend they don't see it happening.
And Bells…
Bells would be safe.
Free.
Wouldn't have me holding her hostage with blackmail that doesn't even matter anymore because I can't fucking let her go for some reason I refuse to examine.
Wouldn't be caught in the crossfire of my war with Stephen.
Wouldn't have her name permanently linked to mine in every search result, every article, every piece of media coverage that will now and forever include that fucking photo.
She could go back to The Reverie or find another band or just disappear into whatever life she was trying to build before I dragged her kicking and screaming into mine.
The thought settles into my bones like the cold I can't feel.
I tip my head back against the granite, letting the rain wash over what's left of my face. The mask is plastered to my skin now, heavy and suffocating.
"I'm sorry," I say to the headstone, my voice coming out rough and broken. "I'm sorry you couldn't stop blaming yourself for something that wasn't your fault. I'm sorry I wasn't enough to keep you here."
The rain doesn't answer.
Neither does Nash.
And I never expected him to. The dead don't offer absolution. They just lie there, silent witnesses to all the ways we keep fucking up.
"I should've been driving," I continue, because the words are coming now whether I want them to or not. "You were always the worse fucking driver.” I manage a hoarse, bitter laugh. “Maybe you’d be alive and making music and falling in love with someone who deserved you instead of—"
My voice cracks. I swallow hard against the tightness in my throat.
"Instead of dying alone in some shitty hotel with a needle in your arm because of guilt."
The image is always there. Waiting. Every time I close my eye, I see it. Nash slumped against the bathroom wall, skin gray, eyes open but empty. The way his body felt when I tried to lift him, already cold, already gone.
The sound I made when I realized I was too late.
Didn't know a human could even make that sound.
He was murdered. I do believe that, even now that I'm letting myself finally fucking admit Nash put the needle there himself.
I know someone gave him those fucking laced drugs and I know the son of a bitch that did it was the same evil, miserable piece of shit that just unmasked me in front of the entire damn universe.
But I'm not so fucking delusional anymore to deny I'm the real reason why my brother is six feet beneath me right now.
"You were supposed to be the one who made it," I whisper. "You were supposed to have a life. A real one. Not this—not what I have. This fucking… half-existence."
The rain keeps falling. My fingers find the guitar strings automatically, but they don't press down. Don't make sound. Just rest there, cold and useless.
Footsteps.
My whole body goes rigid.
The sound is loud even through the rain.
Shoes sliding in mud, someone approaching from the direction of the drenched cemetery path.
Probably a groundskeeper. Someone who'll tell me visiting hours ended at sunset and I need to leave before they call the cops on the waterlogged freak having a breakdown at his brother's grave.
I don't look up. Don't have the energy to care.
"Rex."
That voice.
That fucking voice.
I lift my head just enough to stare out through my soaked hair. Bells is standing five feet away in the pouring rain, soaked through to the bone. Her white hair is plastered to her skull, makeup running in dark streaks down her cheeks. She's breathing hard, like she ran here, like she—
Like she's been searching for me.
Why?
"How the fuck did you find me?"
Nobody knows I come here. This is mine. The one piece of my brother I don't have to share with the world.
And somehow, she's here.
Standing in the rain like a ghost, looking at me with an expression I can't read.
It isn't pity. I'd recognize pity. I've seen enough of pity to last several lifetimes. And it isn't horror either, even though she has to know. Has to have seen the pictures by now.
Has to understand exactly what…
"I just… I had a feeling," Bells says, still catching her breath.
"A feeling."
"Yeah."
It doesn't add up. None of it adds up. But I don't have the energy to push, to demand a real explanation, to do anything except sit here in the mud and stare at this woman who tracked me down through a Seattle rainstorm to a place she shouldn't know exists.
"You should go," I say. "There's nothing here for you."
Instead, she crosses the remaining distance between us and sits down.
Right next to me.
In the mud.
With her back against Nash's headstone and her shoulder almost touching mine, like this is normal. Like sitting in a cemetery in a rainstorm with a monster is just another fucking Tuesday.
"What are you doing?"
"Sitting."
"In the mud."
"Observant as always."
I stare at her. She stares straight ahead, at the rows of graves stretching into the gray distance, at the rain turning everything soft and blurred at the edges.
She's seen the photo. She has to have seen it or she wouldn't be here.
But she... stays.
The silence stretches between us, filled with rain and the distant rumble of thunder. My fingers are still resting on the guitar strings, still not making sound. Her hands are folded in her lap, pale and trembling slightly from the cold.
I shrug out of my soaked coat and throw it over her shoulders. She pulls it around her smaller frame and scoots closer to me for warmth.
Another inch and she'd be pressed against me.
Minutes pass. Maybe more. Time does that slippery bullshit thing again, stretching and contracting until I can't tell if we've been sitting here for twenty minutes or two hours.
At some point, I realize I've stopped waiting for her to leave.