Chapter 16 Celeste #2
The sentence lands, and the room tightens again. Rowan straightens, the tour manager’s posture snapping into place, the anger that made him punch the wall cools into a different, harder emotion.
Korbyn frowns. “Why not?”
Because it would destroy you, I think. Seeing my rig carved up with words like that would feel like the weight of responsibility she isn’t ready for.
Rowan answers instead. “If this is James, he did this because he wanted a reaction. There’s no reason for Korbyn to take that hit.”
Korbyn opens her mouth to argue and then closes it. Her shoulders drop a fraction, the fight leaking out of her like air from a punctured tire. “Okay,” she says. “But I want to see it at some point. I need to know what he did.”
Lucian nods once, eyes locked on mine as if to say he’s doing me a favor and I should not argue. “You and I will go with Rowan; we’ll just do a quick assessment of the extent of the damage.”
“Fine,” I answer.
The door opens before we can move, and a tide of black fills the room, earpieces tucked, movements practiced, and quiet. The afterglow of the show sours; the air that had been warm with adrenaline feels thin and borrowed. When these people step in, they take the last of the light with them.
Rowan straightens, and the room tightens around him. He calls for attention, and the chatter dies.
“Effective immediately,” he says, “you’re all being assigned individual security details. These teams have been vetted, cleared, and locked down under extensive NDAs. Your identities, locations, movements, none of it will leave this group.”
One by one, the new security personnel step forward and take positions, arranging themselves near each of us without crowding us, and taking their place as our shadows.
Lucian’s presence at my back does not change, but I feel it sharpen into something more precise.
“This isn’t optional,” Rowan continues. “You do not move without your assigned detail.”
As the room breaks into motion with security coordinating in low voices, Rowan issuing instructions with the clipped authority of someone who keeps the tour moving, the band is shepherded toward separate exits.
I watch Korbyn being gently boxed in by people she did not ask for but clearly needs.
Her shoulders are small under the weight of it.
A question nags at the edge of my mind: how did Rowan pull this in so quickly?
These teams are not the usual road crew; they move in a way that smells of favors he called in.
It’s the kind of reach Rowan doesn’t use unless he has to.
Our eyes meet across the room, and the look he gives me is complicated, almost like he wants to tell me no, but he knows better than to try.
We change quickly. Street clothes replacing stage costumes, paint washed from our skin until the mirror gives me back a version of myself that feels strangely exposed. When I step away from the sink, my hands are steady, but my chest feels tight in a way that has nothing to do with adrenaline.
Lucian is waiting.
He doesn’t rush me. Just falls into step beside me as we head for the door, his presence solid and unyielding, like he’s already decided where my balance lives tonight.
When the hallway narrows, I find myself leaning into him without thinking, my shoulder brushing his arm, my weight shifting just enough to feel supported.
“We’ll make it quick,” he says, as the words slide under my skin, intimate in a way he doesn’t intend. I shiver anyway, not from fear but from the steady assurance threaded through his voice, at the unspoken promise that whatever waits for me out there, he’ll be between it and me.
I nod, leaning almost imperceptibly into the quiet strength of him, into the way his presence steadies me without demanding anything in return, as if he’s offering a place to breathe in a night that suddenly feels too thin.
When we get back to the campground, it’s lit far too brightly for this late hour, the LED beams slicing the darkness into hard white and bottomless black, like the night has lost faith in itself and is trying to overcompensate.
Security fans out ahead of us, efficient and silent. Lucian stays close enough that the heat of him at my back feels like a promise that I’m not walking into this alone. Rowan steps past the caution tape, and we follow.
The chemical smell of spray paint hits first, still fresh enough to sting the back of my throat.
For a moment, I just stand there, suspended between the world I walked out of and the one waiting inside.
Then I step over the threshold.
It looks like someone grabbed my life by the ankles, turned it upside down, and shook it until everything they wanted fell loose.
The couch cushions are slashed open, foam spilling out like exposed bone.
Cabinets hang crooked on their hinges, doors yawning wide, their contents dumped carelessly across the floor.
A lamp lies shattered near the kitchenette, glass glittering under the harsh lights like a field of tiny, mocking stars.
Lucian goes still behind me, between Rowan and us; the tension is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
I move farther in, my boots crunching softly over debris. My chest feels tight, but there’s a strange, eerie calm settling over me, as if my body has already decided that panic won’t change anything, won’t undo whatever this is.
Catching sight of my bookshelf, my stomach drops so fast it feels like the floor shakes beneath me.
Empty shelves stare back at me where spines should be. There are bare spaces where color and paper and stories once lived. Every shelf is hollow, every book is gone.
I pull in a shaky breath, the air stuttering on the way down as the realization settles in my bones that someone didn’t just break into my rig—they violated the one place that was mine, and they took the part of it I loved most.
“They took my books,” I whisper, the words tasting wrong in my mouth, too small for the enormity of what’s missing.
The bedroom is worse.
My mattress is ripped open, long, violent slashes carving through fabric and foam as if someone wanted to gut the room itself, to make sure nothing soft or safe remained. Sheets hang half off the bed, torn and tangled, stripped of any sense of rest.
I press my lips together until my jaw aches, trying to hold myself together in a space that’s been taken apart piece by piece.
Stepping backwards out of my room, I slowly push open the bathroom door, scared to see the desolation on the other side.
Makeup is smeared across the counter, crushed into the sink, powdered eye shadows ground into the tile like bruises blooming under harsh light.
The mirror is cracked, my reflection fractured into sharp, uneven pieces that refuse to align.
It feels deliberate, like he wanted Korbyn to see herself broken, wanted her to understand that they could reach even the most intimate corners of her life.
This part feels personal in a way the rest doesn’t. This part feels like a message meant for Korbyn.
I step back out, heart beating harder now, and move down the short hall.
Lucian’s door waits at the end.
I hesitate, just for a moment, bracing myself for more destruction, for another violation, for proof that nowhere is safe.
Then I reach for the handle.
It opens easily, and I try to process how pristine the room is compared to the rest of my rig.
The bed is made in the precise, almost military way he always leaves it. His bag sits where he left it, and his shoes are still lined up. Nothing disturbed, and not a single thing out of place.
I stand there, staring, the contrast hitting me like a blow. My space is completely torn apart, nothing salvageable, almost everything is shredded or gone, while his was left untouched. The line between them is so stark it feels intentional.
“He didn’t come in here,” I murmur, the words barely more than breath.
I turn back toward the wreckage of my space and face the spray paint, the missing books, the violence carved into soft things. The destruction feels different now, sharper, and more pointed after seeing Lucian’s room.
“He knew where she was sleeping last night,” I say, gesturing toward the bookshelf, toward the empty gaps where familiar spines should be. “Those books, he probably thought they were ones she brought with her. Things she cared about.”
My chest tightens as the logic builds, brick by brick, ugly and undeniable.
“He didn’t touch your room because he didn’t need to,” I say, the truth settling in like a weight. “This wasn’t about you. It was about getting close enough to scare her without going straight for her.”
Lucian’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t interrupt. He lets me keep going, lets me follow the thread because it’s leading somewhere that makes sense, somewhere that hurts less than believing I was the target.
The slashed mattress flashes in my mind again. The makeup destroyed, the word ‘mine’ sprayed across the side of the rig. All of it was violent and deliberate.
“He wanted her to know he could reach her,” I continue.
“And he wanted her to feel guilty that it landed on me instead. He must’ve realized we were onto him, and she was slipping out of his hands, how he’s losing everything.
He’s spiraling, and he came here to send a message.
” The certainty settles deep in my chest, cold and solid.
Lucian exhales slowly beside me, the sound careful, measured, as if he’s trying not to add anything that might tip me further off balance.
“We’ll document everything,” he says at last. “Then we’ll get you out of here.”
I nod, still staring at the untouched doorway to his room, at the invisible line the destruction never crossed. The line drawn around him, but not around me.
In my head, the story is already written.
An angry man. A bruised ego. A threat delivered sideways because going straight for her would’ve crossed a line he wasn’t ready to cross yet.