Chapter 9 Vegas Tour Madness
VEGAS TOUR MADNESS
RUBY
Zane is glued to me backstage.
We arrived in Vegas last night and it feels like someone has turned the manic levels up to a million.
Fans scream like they’re being exorcised when he steps out.
SAINT SIN!
SAINT SIN!
The noise is deafening, electric, terrifying, everything all at once. But his forehead is pressed urgently to mine and I’m humming for him.
“You’ll stay where I can see you?”
“Of course.”
“Good girl.” He kisses me hard and brutal, pain etched with exquisite pleasure. It’s growing hella addictive and I’m terrified I’ll never break this habit. When it’s over, he steps back, winks. Drifts his thumb over my swollen, tingling mouth. “Be right back.”
With a wink, he’s gone. Vaulting up the steps like a demon vampire.
And I stay right there backstage and in his eye line, painfully aware that everyone’s giving me a wide berth because they don’t want Saint Sin to lose his shit.
And as I watch him perform, I finally get it.
He’s fire. Hell, he’s phenomenal in a way that defies description.
He performs like a man possessed—sweat-slicked, wild-eyed, ripping the stage apart with his voice and his body until the crowd is inches from feral themselves.
And every time he glances side-stage and sees me?
He brightens.
Burns hotter.
I’m singing along in my head before it dawns on me that I’ve memorized his song lyrics.
Me.
The girl who thought Riot Saints was a brand of ethical deodorant.
Fantastic.
Which is also why I notice the new words he’s growling out immediately.
The line is supposed to be: “Your name’s a prayer, but my mouth makes it blasphemy.”
But tonight…tonight he sings: “Ruby in the wreckage…my priceless flame, my precious alchemy.”
My stomach drops straight through the stage floor.
Because that? That wasn’t in the original.
That wasn’t in any version I listened to while binge-studying him like he was a final exam.
And the way he looks at me when he sings it, like he forged the words in blood and heat and obsession…I know.
He changed it for me.
Oh God oh God oh God.
After the show, he drags me into a dark hallway behind the VIP lounge.
His voice is shredded from singing. His pupils blown and his body buzzing like he’s still mid-reverb. “Come here.”
I step back. “Zane, you need—”
“You. Nothing but you.” He pins me with a look that strips me bare. “Closer.”
I get one step out before his arm snakes around my waist, pulling me flush against him, his breath hot on my neck.
“You have any idea what you do to me?” he whispers. “How crazy you make me? How hard it is to watch the world look at you?”
My heartbeat pulses everywhere. “Zane…”
He tilts my head back with his fingers in my hair. “You make me a fucking monster, Ruby.”
His mouth drags along my throat and I gasp.
Not explicit. But filthy.
“You want me to stop?” he murmurs.
I swallow hard. “No.”
He presses me against the wall, his lips brushing my ear, voice rough enough to bruise. “Thought so.”
His kiss is claiming and messy as his hand slides under my shirt, not touching anything obscene, just stroking the side of my ribs like he’s mapping out his future home.
“Say my name,” he growls. “Like you mean it.”
“Zane…”
His whole body reacts, shuddering, tightening, groaning into my neck.
“Fuck, baby,” he hisses, pushing me harder into the wall, “I could take you right here… but I want you begging for it.”
My knees almost buckle.
Then Freddie walks by and mutters, “For the love of God, get a room—or a church, you animals.”
Ruby
Hotel Room — After the Show
The hotel suite is too big, too white, too polished to contain someone like Zane Draven.
He paces the length of the room like a caged storm, shirt half undone, hair damp from the stage, hands twitching like they don’t know where to land unless it’s on me.
He hasn’t stopped watching me since we walked in.
He locks the door, turns and breathes out like he’s been starved for oxygen and I’m air. “Come here.”
I don’t, mostly because I can’t move. My knees are unreliable and my heart is caffeine and chaos. Has been since he looked at me and belted out those lyrics.
And the truth is, this raw obsession is starting to get to me.
It’s too big.
Too soon.
Too… Zane.
But honestly, is any one woman ready for this kind of biblical-level rockstar fixation?
I mean, I’m still figuring out my 401k and this man is out here rewriting hit songs like he’s proposing marriage at Coachella.
He stalks to me instead when I don’t move fast enough, or at all. Presses me against the wall gently—for Zane— then cups my jaw.
“You look good with my lipstick on you,” he whispers.
“I’m not wearing lipstick.”
He smirks. “Exactly.”
Heat detonates low in my belly but I force a breath. Force a sliver of logic into the room. “Zane… we need to talk.” How to start? I have no fucking clue.
His entire body recoils like I slapped him. “About what?” he mutters, then he shakes his head. “Actually hold that thought. We could skip the talking part. Go straight to the part where you climb me like a tree.”
“Zane,” I insist, touching his wrist. “We need to talk about…the humming.”
His jaw locks and he looks… almost scared. Or like talking about this might make him unravel. “I don’t want to fucking talk about it.”
“We have to.”
“No,” he snaps, then softens instantly. “Baby, no. Talking ruins things. Talking makes things real.”
I hold his gaze. “Tell me what triggers your episodes.”
He goes still.
“Do you know?” I ask softly.
“No,” he says.
Too fast and too sharp. And I know he’s lying.
“Zane.” I inject enough steel into my voice to cut glass.
Probably not enough to dent his titanium will, but hey, maybe I get points for trying before he steamrolls me with a guitar and feelings.
His jaw clenches. His shoulders rise and fall like he’s gearing up for a sprint.
“You don’t want to know,” he mutters. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Does that mean you haven’t ever talked to anyone—”
“I don’t need anyone.” His eyes flick to mine, burning. “Not now I have you.”
My stomach flips in seven directions at once and my voice lowers. “Zane, I’m not a doctor.”
He goes quiet. A whole beat of silence thick enough to choke on.
Then he blurts it out—fast, raw, like the words tear out of him.
“I’ve got a thing,” he mutters. “Some brain-wiring bullshit. Sensory-emotive dysregulation. Too much noise, too much light, too much emotion, and it hits me wrong. Hard. There’s nothing to fix. Nothing to cure. It’s just… how I came built.” He laughs once, dark and humorless. “Lucky me.”
My breath catches.
He nods at my expression. “Yeah. Exactly. It fucked up my childhood. Fucks up my life sometimes. Doctors said it’s chronic. Management-only. Whatever the hell that means.” His gaze falls away, voice scraping thin. “I hate talking about it, Ruby. It makes me feel… broken.”
“No! Don’t say that about yourself.”
The air changes, sharp and soft all at once.
He swallows, eyes finally lifting back to mine. “My mom helped,” he mutters. “When it was bad. She could tune me. Reset me.” His gaze drags over me slowly, hungrily, like I’m a drug he didn’t know existed. “But I don’t need that anymore. I’ve got you.”
“Oh,” I breathe as pressure slams into my chest, sharp, bright and terrifying, because of course he drops something this huge, this jagged, this heartbreakingly human right into my lap.
Part of me wants to wrap him up, shove him under a blanket, and repeat that he’s not broken, just wired differently.
Another part wants to run screaming into the nearest cornfield, because this is big. Bigger than the contract. Bigger than the sex. Bigger than the tour, the fame, the insanity. This is real. And real is terrifying.
And then there’s the third part of me—the unhinged, hormonal, traitor part—standing there fanning herself because the vulnerability?
Combined with the feral rockstar energy?
Combined with the fact that he trusts me with this?
Yeah. That part is ready to climb him like he’s a tree in need of pruning.
I suck in a breath, swallowing the cocktail of panic, pity, desire, and “wow, I’m catastrophically unequipped for this” swirling inside me.
He’s looking at me like I’m the answer to all his storm-episodes and childhood nightmares. And I’m… I’m just me.
Oregon-born, Coldplay-loving, thick-thighed barista me.
I shouldn’t matter this much. I shouldn’t crack him open like this.
But God help me, the weight of being the calm in his chaos, it does something to me I don’t have a name for yet.
He strokes my cheek with the back of his fingers. “Don’t worry,” he says softly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Which…is not what I said. At all.
Feeling.
Pressure.
Fear.
Sex.
Zane seems to sense the direction my thoughts are spiraling, because he leans in, lips brushing mine, voice a husky wreck.
“You know something? I’m kinda glad it’s out in the open.
We’re gonna fuck now. I need inside that wet tight cunt more than I want my next breath, baby.
But we can talk after if you want.” He kisses me once, slow.
“Or during.” A second kiss, deeper. “Or…never.”
I melt.
“Zane,” I whisper. “Sex isn’t going to solve—”
He cuts me off by kissing me like he’s swallowing the words out of my mouth. “Let’s find out,” he murmurs against my lips. “Come ride me.”
I freeze and his eyes go black around the edges.
“Ride. Me.”
I should refuse. I should. But my bones liquefy and my body answers before my brain catches up. He’s still sweaty from the show but that turns me on even harder.
I climb onto his lap in the chair by the window, straddling him, my hands braced on his shoulders, his grip bruising my hips in the most perfect, relentless way. He groans into my neck, low and wrecked, muttering filth that makes my entire soul throb.
I move, slow at first, taking his thick cock inch by sublime inch. The glide of hot skin to skin is intense and beautiful and I moan long and deep. Take him deeper. Then harder. Rocking my figure eights faster.
Zane goes completely silent. Except for his breath hitching, catching, breaking. Except for his fevered eyes devouring my bouncing tits.
And then it hits me.
I’m humming.
I don’t even know when it started…just a soft, unconscious sound from my chest, rising with every movement.
Zane’s head falls back. “Oh—oh fuck, Ruby—”
His hands clasp the backs of my thighs, dragging me closer, guiding me on and off his cock in an urgency, like he’s losing the ability to breathe without it.
My humming deepens. Thrumming. Pulsing.
Zane trembles.
Actually trembles.
“Don’t stop,” he begs, voice cracking. “Baby, don’t…don’t you fucking stop—”
Then, in one fluid motion, he stands, lifting me with him, still holding me like I weigh nothing, carrying me across the suite blindly—
And I realize where he’s taking me.
The piano.
The white baby grand near the window.
He sets me on the edge, never breaking our connection, and his hands fly to the keys.
“Keep going, baby,” he rasps. “Hum for me. Hum while you—fuck—while you dance on my cock. Yes! Just like that.”
My sound vibrates through me, through him, into the air, into the strings of the piano. He plays under me, the chords deep and warm and broken, syncing perfectly with the sound in my throat.
It’s music.
It’s sex.
It’s insanity.
It’s worship.
It’s a man and a woman and a piano and a hum that feels like it’s ripping open the sky.
He reaches blindly for his phone on the piano lid, hits a button, and sets it down.
He’s recording it.
All of it.
When we finally collapse together, shaking and breathless, he fumbles for the phone and plays it back.
My hum and his voice and the piano fills the room, the rhythm of our bodies in every note.
It’s filthy and beautiful.
It’s art.
It’s us.
It’s…oh God…too much. I burst into tears.
Zane stills instantly. “Baby?” he whispers, cupping my face. “Hey, hey, look at me. Baby what’s wrong?”
I laugh through the tears, shaking my head. “I think I’m getting addicted to you,” I choke out. “God help me, I think I already am.”
His expression fractures, morphs with awe, possession, hunger, fear…all crashing into one impossible look.
“Good,” he whispers roughly. “Because I’m already gone.”