Chapter Forty-Eight
Cooper
I push back the heavy hotel curtain, staring down at the city glittering below.
It’s alive, electric, buzzing with the kind of promise that used to thrill me.
Rock star in a penthouse suite, floor-to-ceiling windows, plush furniture, a minibar that costs more than what I used to make a month. And yet I feel… nothing.
How fucking woe-is-me.
The silence stretches, vast and unyielding, letting my thoughts travel to places they shouldn’t go, creating scenarios in my head and making everything worse. The decision I made today replays in my mind, looping like a broken record.
Letting the curtain fall, I rake shaky fingers through my curls.
My gaze lands on the guitar case in the corner, untouched.
My escape. My whole damn reason. But even looking at it turns my stomach.
I don’t recognize the man I’ve become. The one I see in backstage mirrors, on posters, in Liam’s schedule…
The boy who wrote because he loved it, not because he had to.
Now that boy feels so far away that I can barely reach him.
The notebook inside—the one I used to pour my soul into—hasn’t been touched in months. Maybe longer. The words that once flowed so easily now feel foreign, like a language I no longer speak.
With a sigh, I collapse onto the crumpled bed, elbows digging into my knees, head in my hands, trying to steady the mounting anxiousness scraping beneath my skin. Walking out today was supposed to be liberating. Instead, uncertainty twists in my gut.
What the fuck have I done?
Liam’s voice circles my head, his thinly veiled threats circling like vultures picking at bone.
The label will not tolerate this.
Do you even understand how much money you wasted today?
This isn’t a game, Reign.
I snatch my phone from the bed, even though I shouldn’t. But morbid curiosity is a terrible thing, and I’ve never been good at ignoring it. The second I unlock the screen, the ignored messages hit in succession.
Liam
You walking out made us look completely unprofessional
Do you have any idea how much cleanup I’m doing because of your little stunt?
The label is livid. Fix this. Now.
Answer your fucking phone.
Who do you even think you are? I’ve managed bigger stars with less ego than you.
Don’t forget who made you. You better have your ass on that plane to Prague tomorrow…
My jaw locks, pulse hammering the more I read. But the last message lands like ice water down my back.
Reign. I can’t help you reach your potential if you won’t meet me halfway. This isn’t like you. I got you a songwriter for support, hired the best backing vocalists. All I do is try to help, but you keep acting like this.
A songwriter.
Not me. Someone else.
Reign Cooper doesn’t even write his own songs anymore.
I’m the only one fighting for you, Reign. Don’t make me look like a fool for believing in you.
The phone slips from my hand, bouncing off the bed before hitting the carpet. My fingers curl into the sheets, nails biting the fabric as a hot, prickling sensation crawls up my spine. Then I’m up, pacing the length of the room, because sitting down feels like drowning.
Fuck.
Fuck.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I used to handle this, used to thrive under pressure, the expectations, used to push harder, faster, more. But now my chest tightens, my throat closes, thoughts racing so fast they blur. The room tilts, the walls warping like they’re caving in.
Pressing my hands to my head, I thrust my fingers through my hair and tug at the roots.
My heartbeat hammers against my ribs, hard enough that it feels like that’s all I am—one frantic pulse and no control.
Breathe, goddamn it. Just breathe. My knees give out, and I drop to the floor, my back slamming into the bed frame.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I rasp, dizziness clouding my head, my upper lip tingling as I suck in shallow, rushed breaths. Rocking slightly, I squeeze my eyes shut, my hands trembling. My nail scrapes my thumb raw, again and again, until a sharp sting cuts through the panic.
“Cooper.”
The voice is steady, solid. Familiar.
“Cooper, look at me.”
A strong, warm hand clamps down on my knee. I force my eyes open, finding Lockie’s feet crouched in front of me, and then I look up into his dark gaze. My arms go limp, hands falling open on the plush carpet.
“I can’t,” I whisper, voice cracking. “I can’t do this.”
“Breathe, Cooper,” he says calmly. “You’ve done harder things than this, lad. Focus on my voice.”
I try. I try to copy him, to follow the rise and fall of his chest. My breaths shred up my throat, useless and thin, panic still crawling up my spine, desperate to get out.
He shouldn’t be the one holding me together like this, but he is.
He always is. Lockie doesn’t just protect me from the world…
Half the time, he’s protecting me from myself.
“That’s it,” Lockie murmurs, brow furrowed. “Match me, not the panic. In for two, out for two. Nice and slow. You’ve done this before.”
One breath at a time. One count at a time. Slowly, agonizingly so, the shadows at the edges of my vision recede. The buzzing inside my head dulls, the floor steadying beneath me.
Watching me carefully for a moment, Lockie eases back. “Better?”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, whispering, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” His eyebrows knit together, lips pressing into a frown.
I gesture to myself. “For…this. Me.”
Lockie shakes his head and sinks down, all ex-military with silent control, this giant Scottish tank lowering beside me, both of us leaning against the bed.
“Don’t apologize for being human,” he says. “I’ve seen men break with less shit than you’ve had shoved at you.”
A humorless laugh escapes me as I scrub my hair from my face. “Yeah, well, breaking isn’t great for my image.”
“Fuck your image. You’re not a machine,” he says, matter of fact, a silence settling between us. I hang onto it, wanting him to continue. Needing him to continue, like someone is finally giving me permission to slow down. “And you’re allowed to stop.”
Like it’s so easy.
I don’t know when it all started, the slipping, but one missed meal turned into ten, one sleepless night into months, one compromise into a thousand. But this is what I wanted—what’s normal. Every artist burns out sometimes, right?
Looking down at my hands, I swallow hard.
Only today was more than burning out. It was breaking.
“I can’t,” I murmur, throat tight. “There’s a show tomorrow. Another after that. Everyone’s counting on me. The fans, the label, Liam...” His name catches, guilt and fatigue weighted together, too heavy to keep carrying. “I just—”
“You don’t owe them a damn thing,” he growls, tone hard enough to shut down the rest of my sentence. “They’d replace you tomorrow if it made them a dollar quicker. You keep going like this, bleeding yourself dry, and they’ll just watch you crumble and call it the cost of doing business.”
His words land like a sucker punch to my ribs. My thumb stings as I pick at my cuticles again, a thin line of blood pooling along the side.
“It’s not even that,” I whisper. “They’ve chipped away at me for years, and I just…let it happen.”
Lockie watches me, waiting for me to continue, but the pressure isn’t in what I just said. It’s in the words caught in my throat, the ones I’ve never said.
I haven’t written in years.
My lyric book hasn’t been opened, my guitar is a prop, every song I sing now has someone else’s fingerprints on it.
Manufactured until it barely resembles anything I ever dreamed of making.
Sure, loads of artists have songwriters.
But I wasn’t supposed to be “loads of artists.” I was supposed to be the singer who wrote his own shit.
The one who got signed because of something he wrote, raw and real, for all to hear at The Monarch.
I can still see it if I close my eyes—the sticky floors, bright lights, air thick with nerves and hope.
It’s been a decade since that night, years since I’ve been home at all.
Would The Monarch version of me even recognize the one standing here now?
This polished, packaged thing the industry kept carving down until I don’t look like me anymore?
Instead, I became their Reign Cooper. And Cooper Riddick, the boy who wrote at three a.m., who believed in his lyrics, got buried somewhere along the way.
I inhale, my breath catching on everything I’m too scared to admit. “Nothing’s mine anymore.”
Lockie doesn’t react. Just a long silence surrounding us, so heavy it’s almost overpowering. And some pathetic part of me wonders if he’s disappointed.
God knows I am.
But then he exhales, resting a hand just above my knee, his touch meant to steady, not comfort.
“Then it’s time to take it back,” he says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “Before they take the rest of you, too.”
I look at him, at the man who keeps my necklace safe, who shields me from the world, who sees Cooper, not Reign.
“I need… I need to get out of here.”
“Then you go home.”
Releasing a shaky breath, I swallow hard. “I don’t know if I can face LA just yet.”
Just saying it makes a hot sensation prickle the back of my neck.
“I didn’t mean LA.” Lockie’s gaze drops briefly to the necklace against my chest. “Taunton Falls.”
The last place I remember feeling like myself.
No entourage, no stages, no Reign. A face flashes in my mind, uninvited.
Brown eyes, quiet steadiness, someone who used to know me without all the noise.
Funny, in a fucked-up way, how I spent my whole life wanting to escape that place, desperate to be anyone but the boy who lived there.
I wanted the stages, the lights, the fame, everything that comes with being Reign.
Now, all I want is to feel like Cooper again.
Lockie doesn’t question my lack of response, just nods and pulls out his phone, scrolling without hesitation. “Let me make some calls.”
He steps to the far side of the room, speaking quietly. As I watch him work, every muscle in my body sags with exhaustion against the bed. Drained. Empty. But somehow, a bit lighter.
“There’s a flight tonight.”
“Tonight?” Surprise scrapes up my throat.
He nods and I swallow, the weight on my chest loosening a fraction. I’m really doing this. I’m going home. The last time I was in Taunton Falls, I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I knew who I wanted to be. Now? I’m not sure who’s going back.
“Thank you,” I whisper, pushing to my feet.
Before I can think, I step forward and wrap my arms around him.
It’s clumsy, desperate, but I need this.
My forehead hits somewhere near his collarbone, because he’s massive, and I’m well…
not. For a heartbeat, he goes stiff, then one of his hands comes up and lands between my shoulder blades.
Not a pat or a squeeze, just a grounding weight.
I smile against him, holding him for as long as I can, until he clears his throat and shifts back, disengaging with all the grace of a man disarming a bomb.
“That’s enough of that,” he says with zero bite to it, then jerks his thumb toward the adjoining room. “I’ll be right there if you need me. Try to rest.”
He starts to go, but pauses in the doorway, looking back for long enough for me to catch the flicker in his expression.
“You’re more than Reign, Cooper,” he says quietly. “Don’t let them make you forget that.”
Then the door clicks shut, and I flop onto the bed, arms held wide, a thin, trembling thread of something trickling through my veins.
It’s hope, I think.