Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Roderick
“Kit, as in . . .”
I can’t find a single fucking word that sounds remotely intelligent, let alone composed.
My throat constricts, dry as sandpaper, and every cell in my brain starts to throb, like I’ve stepped into a room that once felt like home and now feels haunted.
A ghost town filled with my mistakes and everything I’ve ruined.
I try again. “Kit—as in your daughter?”
He nods, unbothered. Like it’s no big deal. Like he didn’t just drop a bomb at my feet and ask me to walk barefoot across the shrapnel. Good luck surviving this, Wilder.
Kit.
Of all the people he could name-drop, he picks her.
Her.
My Kit.
The one person I broke and never apologized to.
The one I never reached for—not even once—not because I didn’t care, but because I was too much of a coward.
She’s the girl whose silence didn’t just hurt—it lived in me.
Took up residence in my chest and stretched out in every breath, turning everything else into static.
I’ve carried her absence like a song I couldn’t stop hearing, even when the rest of the world cranked up the noise.
No matter how much I drank or shot, she was still there, reminding me that I’ve lost everything. My everything.
Kit Dempsey isn’t just another musician on a roster. She’s not a footnote in my career. She’s not some studio prop I can just plug into a track and call it synergy.
She was my best friend, my inspiration, and the first person I ever loved—the only one. And now, Connor wants me to sit across from her? Breathe the same air? Pretend the implosion between us didn’t exist and ask her to help me claw back from the hell I fell into after what I did to her?
He wants me to ask her to help me find whatever scraps of soul I still have left?
I nearly laugh. It’s a bitter thing, caught somewhere between disbelief and self-loathing.
Help. Right. As if I even know what that means anymore.
But if anything of me still survives and beats, she has it.
I handed it to her years ago, without grace, without apology, and then had the audacity to fuck everything up.
There’s a storm brewing inside me. It’s panic with nowhere to escape. I don’t know what scares me more: that she’ll still see me for who I was, or that she won’t recognize me at all. That I’ve decayed so much she won’t even care about me.
I force a breath, trying to calm myself the way people say at the center—count backwards, picture the ocean, whatever trick is supposed to quiet a mind clawing at itself. My hands won’t stop trembling.
There’s a burn just beneath the surface like I’m wearing skin that doesn’t fit.
And that ache—that bone-deep, restless ache—makes me want to crawl out of myself.
The need to make it stop is right there.
The craving and the want to numb the feelings.
It’s almost like it was the first time I realized I’d lost her.
I can almost taste the alcohol I used to take to keep the world from getting in, for forgetting she wasn’t mine anymore.
Once I’m somehow calm and able to gather a few coherent thoughts, I have to ask, “Does she know?”
“Know what?” he asks as if I’m not making sense.
“Has Kit agreed to help me?”
He shrugs as if the answer doesn’t matter. “She’ll do what I say.” A smirk touches his lips. “Will she put up a fight? Probably. That’s Kit for you. But in the end, she’ll do what Daddy wants. She always does.”
My chest breaks open when I hear him say that. What the fuck?
Connor is still using Kit, still pulling her strings. Still riding on her brilliance like he did from the moment Ethel died. Connor buried his wife and decided that Kit would be the one helping him with his talents—or those with barely any talent.
He never let Kit grieve the loss of her mom, nope. She had to play in her place, help his clients for her, everything was in the name of Ethel. “Your mom would’ve loved you to do this for Daddy.” I heard that so many times and I tried so fucking hard to protect her, but I could only do so much.
And now he wants her to . . . he’s using Kit as a pawn on the board, moving her into position to save his own crumbling legacy.
It makes me want to throw the fucking table across the room. I don’t—the last thing I need is for someone to mention that I lost my shit. In fact, it’s best if no one knows where I’m at these days.
Also, why burn this bridge?
If things with my agent implode—and they might, because I’m a walking liability these days—I might agree to work with Connor.
Not because I trust him. Fuck, no. But because I need someone who won’t lie to my face.
Someone who will look at me and say, “Yeah, you’re drowning—but I’ll throw you a goddamn rope if you’re ready to pull. ”
Maybe that’s what I’m waiting for: for someone to stare me down and say I’m not done yet. Tell me to stop fading. Tell me to scream again, to fucking feel something— to set the world on fire just to prove I still can.
Because buried under the apathy and noise, there’s still a version of me kicking against the surface.
There’s a version of me who believes that I still matter. The same part of me that wants to bleed onto the strings and feel the music vibrate through the marrow. The one who isn’t finished setting the room ablaze and dancing in the goddamn flames.
But I have limits.
I won’t drag Kit into this.
Not because I don’t want to see her.
Fuck, I’d give anything just to see her once more. Hear her voice wrap around a melody we created from scratch. Feel that pulse between us that used to feel like gravity. Creating with her? It’d bring me back to life.
I fucking know it, but I don’t want to be alive if it means I’ll hurt her. I did it once and swore I would never do it again.
She doesn’t deserve to be used.
Not by Connor. Not by me. Not by anyone.
“I’ll think about it, Connor.” I drum my fingers against the table as I finish calming myself.
Then I stand. My limbs feel too long, too disconnected, like I’ve just slipped back into a body I’ve spent years trying to escape.
“You get a plan together,” I say. “We’ll see.”
With my last shred of dignity, I leave wondering if I’ll be agreeing to whatever he proposes or just letting myself die.
The real question isn’t whether I’ll agree to Connor’s plan.
It’s whether I’ll let myself disappear completely or whether I’m still foolish enough to believe there’s something in me worth saving.