Chapter 31
The hands that used to hurt him now feel tender on his skin, and he's grateful for the darkness that he's learned to live within…
Kieran
The green room felt different now—smaller, the air thick with residual violence that clung to everything like cigarette smoke.
Kieran sat on the edge of the couch where it started, watching Vale’s hands move as they rewrapped his gauze.
Vale hadn’t spoken since the woman in white—Flake, the alto who’d burst in with her fake eyelashes and press-on nails scattered like evidence—left to get ice.
Just quiet focus and gentle touches that trembled when they grazed the worst of the damage.
His jaw was tight, hands moving through familiar motions of wrapping Kieran’s body like a gift, but something was wrong in how he avoided eye contact.
He’s not scared. Vale doesn’t get scared. But he’s... something.
Kieran’s split lip throbbed with each heartbeat, the taste of blood still sharp on his tongue.
His face ached where Nox’s hand had pressed, cutting off air, cutting off sound, cutting off everything except the animal panic of suffocation.
The gauze around his neck was too tight, even though Vale had wrapped it looser than usual.
Every swallow reminded him of Nox’s fingers, Nox’s weight, Nox’s smile while Kieran’s vision sparkled with black dots.
The door opened and Flake returned, her makeup slightly smeared where she had been crying. She carried a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a bar towel, holding it out like an offering.
“Here,” she said softly. “For your lip.”
Kieran accepted it with shaking hands, the cold numbing more than just the split in his mouth. She settled into a chair across from them, maintaining distance while staying close enough to help if needed, like she wasn’t sure if her presence was wanted, but couldn’t bring herself to leave yet.
“I’m Jericho, by the way,” she said after a moment of silence. “Flake is just— that’s the stage name my label gave me. But I’m Jericho.”
You didn’t fight back hard enough. You just lay there and took it until Vale saved you. Pathetic.
“We should go,” Vale said quietly, securing the last of the gauze with medical tape. “Get you somewhere safe.”
Safe. The word was a joke. Nowhere was safe. The bar hadn’t been safe. The green room hadn’t been safe. Vale’s house wasn’t safe. Kieran’s own body wasn’t safe—it had betrayed him tonight, freezing when he needed to fight, going rigid with trained compliance when he should have been screaming.
His mind drifted elsewhere, caught on the napkin he’d been scribbling on at the bar before everything went wrong.
The lyrics had been fragments then, half-formed thoughts about foster parents who wanted him to fail wrapped in methodological metaphors.
.. He’d started reshaping them at the bar, adapting the betrayal to fit his surroundings instead.
The key is wrong. The whole approach is wrong.
Kieran’s hands moved to his jacket pocket and pulled out the damp paper, lyrics bleeding into each other where alcohol soaked through and smudged the ink.
He could still read them and sense the shape of what he’d been trying to capture.
The song was there, just underneath the surface, waiting for him to find the right key to unlock it.
Not angry. Mournful. This isn’t rage—it’s grief for a trust that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
“I need paper,” Kieran said. “And a pen.”
Vale and Jericho exchanged glances. Kieran caught the concern in Vale’s expression, his hand stilling on the medical supplies.
“Listen to me,” Vale said, “you just went through something traumatic. Maybe we should—”
“I need to write.” The words came out sharper than intended, bypassing rational thought entirely. His needed to get the thoughts out before they slipped away. “Please.”
Vale produced a small notebook and pen from his jacket—of course he had them, he always had everything Kieran might need before Kieran knew to need it—and placed them in Kieran’s lap.
Kieran opened to a blank page and began writing, words flowing faster than his mind could track them.
The melody came next, hummed under his breath while his hands moved across the page.
Minor key, slow tempo, something that ached instead of burned.
Not the explosive rage of Library Card but something deeper, more devastating.
The kind of betrayal that dressed itself up as protection while destroying trust.
This is what I need to perform. This is what people need to hear.
He could feel Jericho’s eyes on him as he worked, but he pushed the awareness back. She’d probably never seen someone do this before—take fresh wounds and immediate horror and channel it directly into music without even a breath between suffering and creation.
But Kieran had. He’d done this with the other songs, with every lesson Vale had given him. Pain turned into art. Suffering turned into melody. It was the only thing he knew how to do anymore, the only way he could make sense of agony that would otherwise drown him.
“Are you okay?” Jericho asked softly.
Kieran didn’t respond, he couldn’t spare attention for anything except the words and notes clicking into place like puzzle pieces.
The bridge needed harmonies—alto harmonies, the kind that would make everything seem inevitable rather than shocking.
The verses were his, but the bridge needed someone else’s voice to complete the devastation on the backend.
He looked up from the notebook, meeting Jericho’s eyes with sudden clarity.
“I’m g-going to perform,” Kieran announced. “T-tonight. This song.”
Vale’s hands squeezed his knees. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m alr-ready dressed. I have a song.” Kieran’s voice carried conviction that surprised him, cutting through the hoarseness and the stutter that wanted to catch on every consonant. “I n-need to do this.”
“Kieran, you just— what happened in here—” Vale’s expression was flat, but something darker flickered underneath. “You’re in no condition to perform.”
Kieran turned to Jericho, who was watching their exchange with bright-eyed curiosity. “C-can you read m-music? Or at l-least improvise harmonies?”
“I can harmonize with anything,” she said immediately, excitement building in her voice despite the heaviness of the room. “Just don’t ask me to do soprano or falsetto. My range is—”
“I n-need an alto.” Kieran nodded, mostly to himself.
The echoes of Nox’s hand covering his mouth and nose burned his skin, but he could feel it tingling, numbing as he translated the burn into corresponding chords in his head.
“For the—the bridge. The harmonies n-need to be lower. Can you d-do that?”
“Yes.” Jericho leaned forward, fully engaged. “Absolutely. What’s the melody?”
Kieran hummed the bridge, watching her face light up as she found the harmony. Her voice was rich and textured, exactly what the song needed.
“Perfect,” Kieran breathed. “That’s exactly—yes.”
Vale just stared at him with something between concern and fascination. “What are you doing? Coming up with a duet on the fly after—”
“I g-got this,” Kieran interrupted, meeting Vale’s gaze steadily. This is how I push back. “I kn-know what I’m doing.”
Jericho stood abruptly. “I should change before we do this. Get out of this fucking Flake costume. And I should probably run it by my manager too, make sure I’m not breaking any contracts by performing with you.” She paused. “What should I dress like? For the aesthetic?”
“Whatever you w-want,” Kieran said without hesitation. “What would Jericho want t-to look like on stage? N-not Flake. You.”
Her entire face transformed, a smile breaking through the tear-stained makeup. “Do you have any extra gauze? And can I wear your jacket?”
Vale helped Kieran shrug out of his jacket and held out the spare gauze roll. She grabbed both and headed for the door with renewed purpose. “Give me ten minutes,” she called over her shoulder.
The door closed behind her, leaving Kieran alone with Vale.
The silence stretched heavy between them. Vale was still kneeling beside the couch, supplies scattered around him, hands resting on his thighs. His eyes moved over Kieran’s face.
“You want to perform. Right now. Tonight. After what just happened to you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because if I don’t make this mean something, I’ll break.
“B-because I have the song,” Kieran said instead.
Vale was watching him with that expression Kieran had learned to recognize over two months of captivity—the look that meant Vale understood something Kieran hadn’t articulated, was reading subtext Kieran hadn’t consciously written or said aloud.
“You want to make it mean something,” Vale said, and it wasn’t a question.
He moved closer, settling onto the couch beside Kieran.
One hand came up to cup Kieran’s face, his thumb brushing just below the split lip with feather-light pressure.
“You’re in pain, and you need it to transform into something. To make it serve a purpose.”
Yes. God, yes. That’s exactly it.
“If I d-do this,” Kieran said desperately, “then it—it matters…instead of being—”
“Just violence,” Vale finished.
Kieran nodded, unable to speak past the tightness in his throat.
Vale’s smile was soft, almost tender, with that edge of darkness Kieran associated with approval. “That’s my beautiful boy” His hand slid into Kieran’s hair, gripping gently.
The words settled into Kieran’s chest like validation and damnation. This was what Vale had been teaching him all along—not just how to perform, but how to need the performance. How to transform pain into purpose or else drown in the horror of meaningless suffering.
I can’t just hurt anymore. I need it to mean something. I need it to create something. I need—
“But first,” Vale said, his voice lowering into something quieter, more serious, “we need to talk about why this happened.”