Chapter 18
The Majestic held twelve hundred.
By eight o'clock it held eleven hundred and forty-three paying customers, one crew spread across six positions, four of Varga's people Ghost had counted coming through the main door, and Rand.
Rand had come in through the side entrance at seven-fifty, which meant he'd been watching the building first…
which meant he was scared. Nate tracked him from his position near the sound board and watched Rand scan the room with the practiced ease of a man who'd spent two years reading venues for exits and useful strangers. His jaw tightened.
There you are.
He touched his earpiece. "Ghost. Rand's in. Stage-left bar, working toward the back."
"Copy." Ghost's voice, flat and even from the rafters. "Varga's four are split. Two at the main door, two near the merch table. They're not here for the show."
"No. They're here to collect."
"Zain's on the merch-table pair. Jack and Elijah are in position on the loading exit."
Nate looked at the stage. The lights were still up, the Hollow Bright set half-visible behind the curtain, and somewhere backstage Jude was standing in front of Rand for what Nate hoped was the last time.
He'd wanted to be back there. Marcus had looked at him for exactly the length of time it took to communicate that wanting and being useful were two different things, and Nate had taken his position at the sound board.
He watched the stage curtain and waited.
Rand looked older.
That was the first thing Jude noticed, and it surprised him.
Not that Rand had aged. That Jude noticed it as a fact, not as something that made him feel anything.
Rand stood in the backstage corridor in a jacket that cost more than the band's first van.
He'd aged and he was tired and underneath both of those things he was a man who knew he was out of moves.
"There's my singer," Rand said. The smile. Jude had believed that smile for two years.
"Don't," Jude said.
Rand's smile held a beat too long and dropped. Behind Jude, Kit was there. Sy was there. Mara was there. Jude felt them without looking, the weight of people who knew what they were standing behind.
"You're making a mistake," Rand said. His voice had shifted, the charming register gone, the private one underneath it now.
The kitchen-table voice. "Whatever they've told you, whoever these people are you've been staying with, you don't understand what you're walking into.
You don't know what Varga does to people who cost him money. "
"I know exactly what Varga does," Jude said. "I had the broken ribs and concussion to prove it."
Something moved in Rand's face. The calculation running and coming up short.
"Come on." Softer now. The last tool in the box. "Jude. We built this together. You and me. Everything you have-"
"Hollow Bright is a line from one of my lyrics," Jude said.
"The name was mine before you were in the band.
The songs are mine. The crowd out there came for me.
" He kept his voice level. "You took the money.
You hurt me. You hurt all of us." His throat tightened on the last sentence and he let it, because the tightening was true and Rand had spent two years teaching him to hide true things.
"We didn't build anything together. You borrowed what was all of ours and called it yours. "
Rand moved his gaze past Jude to Kit, to Sy, to Mara. He read their faces and found nothing.
"You're going to be a dead man," Rand said, venom and rage dripping from every poisoned word.
"No," Jude said. "I'm not."
He turned his back on Rand and walked toward the stage, and the band came with him, and behind them he heard Rand's footsteps moving toward the house and whatever exits he thought he had.
Let him look, Jude thought. Let him look.
The first song was "Hollow Bright."
He'd written it at nineteen, in his bedroom, on a guitar he'd bought secondhand from a pawn shop on Gratiot.
He'd played it for his mother first, sitting on the edge of her bed, and she'd listened with her hands in her lap and her eyes full, and when he finished she'd said: that one's true, baby. That one's all the way true.
He played it now the same as he'd played it at nineteen. Every word still true.
The crowd gave it back to him loud.
He didn't look for Rand during the first four songs.
He could feel the room. He'd always been able to do this, track where attention pooled, and right now twelve hundred people's attention was on the stage and one person's was moving through the room like a stone in still water, looking for an opening that wasn't there.
Good. Let him look.
Song five. Song six. Ten days of rehearsal and it showed. Every piece landing where Sy and Kit and Mara had learned to put it. The crowd was theirs. The room was theirs. The stage was his.
Between songs he let the silence run three seconds longer than usual. The crowd knew what was coming. He'd posted the setlist. "The Monster Beside Me" was last and everyone in the building knew it was brand new. A debut drop and they were the first to hear it.
He felt Rand stop moving.
"This one's new," Jude said into the mic. His voice came out steady, which still surprised him sometimes. "I wrote recently because life changes us, and we get to decide how. It's about someone I used to know." He paused. "He knows who he is."
He nodded to Sy.
The drums came in.
He'd played this song in rehearsal twenty times.
He'd played it alone in the safehouse kitchen at two in the morning while Nate slept and the river went by outside.
He'd played it in his head while Ghost put faces on the board, while he stood in front of the mirror with no concealer, while he sat on the cold steps with the folder in Kit's hand.
He'd never played it like this.
The first verse came out of him clean, the words landing exactly as written.
Precise, unhurried, the surface of Rand in the early days before the teeth showed through.
He could feel Rand in the room. He didn't look.
He sang to the crowd, to the twelve hundred people who'd come out on a Friday night for a show and a cause, and he let the song do what it was made to do.
The chorus hit. The full band came in under him, Sy driving the tempo, Kit thick and low, Mara's keys filling the space overhead.
The crowd sang the chorus back. They'd had the lyrics for three days and knew them.
Hearing twelve hundred people sing the monster beside me had the right smile in a room where Rand was standing was something Jude hadn't let himself imagine and now couldn't look away from.
He found Rand in the crowd during the second verse.
Stage right, near the back bar, watching with an expression that had gone very still.
Not the charming posture. Not the disappointed posture.
Something underneath both of those, something Jude had seen once before, the night in the car when Rand had thought Jude was asleep and had sat for ten minutes with his face doing nothing at all.
Jude held his gaze for exactly ten seconds. Then he looked back at the crowd and kept singing.
The bridge.
Sy dropped out. Kit dropped out. Mara dropped out. One guitar, Jude's voice, the mic turned up so the room could hear the breath between the words.
He broke three of my ribs and went to dinner. He broke three of my ribs and fixed his tie.
The room went quiet. Not silence. Held breath, twelve hundred people drawing it in at the same moment, a weight that pressed against the walls.
The body's still here.
Four beats of silence. He and Sy had drilled it. Four full beats, the whole room holding.
And it's mine.
He saw Rand move toward the exit during the bridge.
Zain stepped into his path from the left, easy, hands in his pockets, the stillness of a man who didn't need to do anything threatening to communicate that moving forward wasn't an option.
Rand recalculated, turned right. Marcus was there.
Rand turned toward the main doors. Two crew members stepped in from either side.
No scene. No raised voices. Just a narrowing room, and Rand standing in the middle of it, and onstage Jude's voice climbing through the final verse.
I have his name now. I have all of them.
Nate listened to the song and watched Rand's face and felt nothing clean about any of it. Not satisfaction, not relief. Just the weight of something finally over.
The outro built for three minutes.
He let it. He'd written it that way because the anger needed that long to say what it had to say, and the crowd gave him every second of it, surging on the THIS IS MINE line, twelve hundred voices claiming something, the sound hitting Jude in the sternum with a force he hadn't prepared for.
He sang until the instruments stripped away one by one and it was just his voice, and then silence, and the room held the silence for a long second before it came apart.
He stood at the mic while the crowd gave it back to him and thought about Junior, who didn't have a last name, who'd been at a show on this circuit and trusted a dark room.
He thought about Marisol and Theo and Pim and the two sisters.
He thought about the seven faces on Ghost's board, and the gap in the timeline that opened the night he walked out the door, and he thought: not enough. Never enough. But something.
He bowed. He walked offstage. Kit grabbed him by the back of the neck, quick and warm, the same as Nate did, and then let go.
The loading dock was a concrete ramp behind the venue, wide enough for two trucks, and Varga's people made their move forty seconds after the house lights came up.
There were six of them, not four. Two had come in through the service entrance during the show. Ghost had them flagged. Jack and Elijah had them from above before the first one reached Jude.
Nate heard the sounds and didn't look. He was already moving toward the stage door.
Behind him: Dray's voice, low and clipped, already calling.
The name he gave wasn't the crew. DPD. A detective's name, seven syllables, a number Dray had memorized and kept for exactly this kind of use.
Beside Dray, Nate had met him twice, knew him by Jaz's enormous enthusiasm and the focused calm he wore on top of it.
Jaz Vail was already talking to Marcus with the attention of a man who'd been in more rooms like this than his current life advertised.
Then the Lords of Darkness MC. Three of them. That was how the Lords showed up. Three, no more, just enough to make clear that the debt from the clubhouse booth had come due and Sovereign had sent people to watch it close.
By the time Nate reached the stage door the loading dock was contained.
The door opened.
Jude came through it with Kit one step behind, both of them intact, Jude blinking in the cold air with sweat cooling at his temples and the eyeliner smudged down his face and his chest still moving hard from the last song.
Nate crossed to him and didn't say anything. He pulled Jude in, one arm around his shoulders, and Jude's forehead dropped against his jaw and they stood in the cold with the city noise all around them and the loading dock going quiet behind them as Zain and Marcus worked the perimeter.
"Rand?" Jude said, into his neck.
"Custody. DPD's on the way. It goes to trial."
A long exhale, warm against his throat.
"The kids?" Jude asked, breathless.
"Ghost is running the Windsor lead now. Canadian authorities by morning." He tightened his arm. "They're going to be found, Jude. That's where this ends."
Jude's hand came up and fisted in the front of Nate's jacket. Not collapsing. Just holding on. Nate held back.
The cold air smelled like the river and diesel and the concrete that held Detroit's cold in after the rest of the city let it go, and somewhere above them the Majestic's marquee was lit, and the crowd was filing out the front door talking about a song that had come from someone's broken ribs and a body that was still there and still his.
Nate stood in the dark with the man he loved and didn't move until Jude was ready to.
Later. Much later, back at the safehouse, the house loud with crew and Kit and Sy and Mara and Jaz telling some story that had Dray's mouth doing the suppressed thing while Ghost watched with the expression he got when he was trying not to find something funny.
Jude sat on the kitchen counter with his coffee and looked at the room.
This room. These people. The city outside being just as much a part of his family as the people in it.
Nate came and stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and didn't say anything. One of Nate's best qualities. The ability to be present without filling all the air.
"Dray called the DPD," Jude said.
"He did."
"Not the crew's usual approach."
"No." Nate's shoulder was warm against his. "But you said you didn't want Rand's death on your conscience. So." He picked up his own coffee. "Dray made a call."
Jude looked at him. At this man. Steady, warm, who'd spent fifteen years being the one who answered and had finally, in this house, in this year, let someone answer back.
Who'd held the truth about Rand for days because the operation required it and told Jude the second he was allowed to.
Who'd stood at the sound board instead of backstage because the work needed it, even though every part of him wanted to be in that corridor.
"Nate," Jude said.
"Yeah."
"Thank you. For-" He stopped. There wasn't a version small enough to fit in a sentence. "For all of it."
Nate reached out and tucked the almost-white hair behind Jude's ear, the same gesture from the kitchen table the night Easton's verdict came back, and from every morning since, a thing Nate did without thinking, a habit that had become its own kind of language.
"You did the hard part," Nate said.
"We did it."
Nate's mouth did the thing. "We did it," he agreed.
Across the kitchen Jaz was laughing at something, genuine and surprised, bright enough that Dray's suppressed expression gave up the fight. Kit caught Jude's eye from across the room and raised his coffee mug an inch.
Jude raised his back.
Outside, the river went by. The city kept its watch. In a safehouse near the waterfront that smelled like coffee and too many people and two men who had chosen each other at the ragged end of a very bad year, Jude held his mug in both hands and felt like the room he was in was his to stand in.
He wasn't going anywhere.