Chapter One
Cody
The spotlight felt like something physical—heat and weight and expectation pressing down on him from above.
Cody Brennan's fingers moved across the guitar strings with practiced ease, muscle memory carrying him through the bridge of his bestselling song, “Honest Hearts” while twenty thousand voices sang the chorus back at him.
The Arena in Nashville was packed, a sea of glowing phone screens and cowboy hats undulating in the darkness beyond the stage lights.
He should have felt alive. This was what he'd dreamed of since he was sixteen, while playing dive bars in Austin for beer money and scattered applause.
Instead, he felt hollow. His limbs moved with mechanical precision, and the silence inside him roared louder than the crowd.
Someone was watching him.
He felt ridiculous to even think it. Of course someone was watching him.
Everyone was watching him. But this was different because it wasn’t in the way that people usually watched him—the way they would watch anyone who'd had three number one albums before turning twenty-eight. This was heavier with an intensity that made Cody’s skin crawl.
He scanned the front rows during the instrumental break, and there in the third row, slightly left of center, was a familiar face.
Pale and thin framed with dark, greasy hair.
The same person who'd been in the crowd in Denver, Houston, and Phoenix, and quite possibly a dozen other venues without Cody even realizing. He wouldn’t have even noticed the man if he hadn’t been purposefully looking for someone suspicious.
He forced himself not to stare at the man and shifted his gaze through the countless other fans who were swaying in time to the music.
Cody steadied himself through the chord change.
His backup guitarist, Tyler, shot him a concerned glance, but Cody forced a smile and leaned into the final chorus.
The crowd roared. He waved, blew kisses, then left, letting the stage manager guide him off into the wings.
He breathed out a sigh of relief. That was his last show for a while.
In the past, the end of a tour would have made him feel a sense of loss, but now it lifted a weight off his shoulders that had become too heavy to carry.
"Great show!" Diane Martinez, his manager, was already at his elbow with a bottle of water and her phone glowing with notifications. "Radio wants you for a morning interview, and we've got three more venue offers for the fall—"
"Diane." Cody's voice came out flat. "He was here again."
Her expression shifted from business to concern in half a second. "The same one?"
"Third row. I'm sure of it."
Diane's jaw tightened. She turned to Marcus, Cody's assistant, who was hovering nearby with a towel. "Get hotel security on alert. And call Detective Morrison. Again."
Two hours later, Cody sat in his hotel suite while he listened to a bored-sounding detective—Morrison had instructed his partner to call instead of doing so himself—go through everything Cody had just told him.
"So, you saw someone in the audience who… looked familiar?" Detective Chen's tone suggested this was the least concerning thing he'd deal with all week.
"The same person has been at four consecutive shows in different cities." Cody kept his voice level and professional. He'd learned that sounding emotional made people take him less seriously.
"I've received forty-three letters in the past few months. Graphic letters with descriptions of what this person wants to do to me."
"Do the letters contain explicit threats of violence?"
"They contain explicit descriptions of everything."
"But threats? 'I'm going to hurt you,' that kind of thing?"
Cody exhaled slowly. "Not exactly, no."
“Then what, exactly?”
Cody scrubbed a hand over his face. He was tired of this. Tired of explaining this over and over with nothing being done about it. Tired of people treating him like this was normal, or that he was imagining everything—that the letters were from some overzealous fan who wasn’t really a threat.
“He didn’t threaten me,” Cody said wearily.
"Then I'm afraid there's not much we can do. If you’re worried, perhaps you should increase security at your shows."
“I’ll get right on that,” Cody bit out, unable to hide the sarcasm in his tone.
"If you receive a direct threat, contact us immediately. Until then, you might consider hiring private security. You can certainly afford it."
After Chen hung up, Cody went into the hotel’s bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror.
Diane was in the suite’s living room, making calls.
The silence pressed in on Cody. His shoulders felt heavy with two years of accumulated weight.
He would have liked nothing more than to go out to a bar and drink the night away, but he couldn’t do that.
He would run the risk of getting mobbed.
Plus, with that crazy man out there somewhere, Cody wouldn’t have felt safe.
Fame had promised Cody everything but delivered isolation instead—a life hidden away in hotel suites in a string of cities he’d never truly experienced despite having visited some of them more than once.
He’d often wondered why he’d had such a burning desire to be famous.
He loved writing music and he loved performing, but it was more than that.
He figured it might have been because he’d grown up in group homes, and going from one foster family to the next, but never staying anywhere for very long.
That childhood had given him a burning desire to be known, and maybe even to be loved and adored, everything he didn’t get growing up.
When he'd come out publicly, two years ago, the response had been split.
Some fans had embraced him fully. Others had vanished.
Half his radio play had evaporated within weeks.
Three sponsorship deals had quietly dried up.
The intellectual part of him had anticipated it.
His heart hadn't been as prepared for the actual cost.
Still, he'd do it again. Every word of that interview had been true. Every moment of vulnerability had mattered. He couldn’t go back into the closet even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to.
He had been tired of living a lie and pretending to be something he wasn’t.
He might be making slightly less money now than he’d been making before, but at least he was his authentic self.
Besides, he had accumulated enough wealth to last several lifetimes, and he’d never been in it for the money, he simply loved performing. Or he had.
However, his personal relationships had been harder to navigate than the career fallout.
A few men he knew in the industry had expressed interest, but only if the relationship could be hidden.
They weren’t out and had no intention of ever coming out.
Cody didn’t want to live like that so eventually, he had stopped trying to date altogether.
Cody was rarely alone and yet he was always lonely—it had become constant. A stalking presence that followed him through every arena, every green room, and every silent hotel suite. And now someone was actually stalking him. Someone real. Someone potentially dangerous.
What terrified Cody most, in the small hours of sleepless nights, was how much he'd stopped trusting people. Every kind gesture felt transactional. Every offer of support felt conditional. It felt as if everyone wanted something from him, and no one seemed to care about what he wanted. He’d built walls so high that anyone who tried to climb them eventually gave up.
The sound of Diane’s voice coming from the living room, talking on the phone, cut through Cody’s spiral. He gathered himself, smoothed his expression, and went to meet whatever came next.
Diane ended her call then paced the length of the suite's living room, unable to hide her frustration. "He's not wrong about private security. Not the rent-a-cop kind—real protection"
"I already have security at the shows," Cody pointed out.
"Event security, yes, not personal protection.
" Diane stopped pacing, and distractedly checked something on her phone.
"You need a bodyguard. It’s time. I know someone.
His firm handles high-risk clients—politicians, witnesses, celebrities with serious threats.
He's expensive and he can be a little intense, but he's good at his job—the best there is. "
Cody looked at the floor-to-ceiling windows, the glittering Nashville skyline beyond. Somewhere out there, someone was thinking about him right now. Obsessing, maybe writing another one of those sick letters, or possibly planning something worse.
"Okay," he said. "I’ll think about it."
If he was being honest with himself, Cody didn’t want someone he didn’t know hanging around him every second of every day. It seemed like too much of his life already belonged to other people. But if the threats continued…
“Good,” Diane replied. “Get some sleep. You look like you need it. We’ll talk tomorrow about some of the offers I’ve received for you.”
Cody nodded. “Thanks, Diane.”
“Sleep tight,” she said, then she was gone, leaving Cody alone with his thoughts.
He crossed to the mini bar, grabbed himself a beer then took it to the couch and settled back mindlessly flicking through television channels, but not finding anything interesting enough to watch. A couple of hours had passed before he had wound down enough to go to bed.
That night, Cody woke to the sound of his hotel room door closing. Not a soft snick, it had been deliberately loud enough to wake him.
“Diane?” he said, voice groggy from sleep.
No answer.
Cody went from sleep to adrenaline-soaked alertness in a heartbeat, reaching for his phone on the nightstand. The screen lit up: three forty-seven in the morning. He switched on the bedside lamp.
The door was closed and the room was empty. But on the pillow next to him was a small handful of photographs. Printed photographs. Glossy and sharp, like someone had taken the time to get them developed properly not just printed them at home.
Cody’s hands shook as he picked them up.
They were photographs of him. Asleep. Taken from beside his bed by someone who had been close enough to touch him.
Cody was a heavy sleeper—always had been—but the thought that someone had stood over him, close enough to photograph his face, and he hadn’t woken up made his stomach turn.
It made him feel sick to think that someone had been in his room, standing over him while he slept, and worse, they’d done it more than once.
Cody grabbed his phone and called Diane.
She picked up after just a couple of rings.
“He’s been in my room,” he said in place of a greeting. “He left photographs, photographs he took of me sleeping.”
"We're leaving," she said before he could say anything further. "Pack now. We're getting you out of here."
"Where?"
"Somewhere safe. And I'm calling Reid Colter about personal security. No arguments."
Cody looked at the photographs spread across his bed—evidence of how badly he'd underestimated the danger—and didn't argue at all.