Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
The snippet went up at midnight.
Twenty seconds. No artist name, no context, just a rose over the Dangerous Records logo and a caption that said coming soon.
By morning, it had forty thousand plays.
By the end of the second day, it was trending.
People were pulling the audio and recording it, talking about the relationships that had buried them.
By the third day, the comments were a wall of people demanding the full song and tagging everyone they knew.
Zena saw it for the first time while scrolling through her phone with her morning coffee and sat still for a long moment.
They really like this.
She had made that song for herself. Written on the floor of a house she no longer owned, it felt like the most personal thing she’d done in years. Now it was attached to forty thousand people’s stories, and it felt insane.
Sitting with that, Danger’s text came through.
Danger
Work lunch today. Need to go over some things on the legal side. Meet me at that café on Broad.
What time?
Danger
Noon.
He was already at the table, on the back patio, when she arrived, a glass of water in front of him and his phone face down on the table. He looked up when she came through the door and smiled.
“Miss Popular,” he said.
“Stop.” She sat down across from him and picked up the menu even though she already knew what she was ordering.
“You haven’t seen the comments?”
“I’ve seen the comments.”
“And?”
She looked at him over the top of the menu. “And it’s a lot to process.”
He pulled out his phone and slid it across the table. She picked it up and scrolled. She looked at the specific things people were saying.
Tears arrived, but she blinked them back.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping her face with a napkin at the table.
“Don’t apologize for that.” His voice was quiet. “You made something real, and people felt it. That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.”
She looked at him. “You’re not just saying that to get me to sign.”
His gaze sharpened. “Why would I need to lie? Do you know how many people come into my building every week looking for a shot? My staff filters out hundreds. The ones who make it through, maybe a handful a year. Still, only have a one percent chance of me actually signing them.” He leaned forward slightly.
“In seven years, I’ve signed nine artists.
Nine. You’re not sitting here because I needed a body on a stage. ”
She held his gaze. She believed him. That was the problem. She believed him in a way she hadn’t been able to trust herself to believe anyone connected to the industry in a very long time, and she wasn’t sure what to do with that.
“I want a lawyer to review the contract before I sign anything,” she said.
He nodded without hesitation. “I’d expect nothing less.”
The server came. They ordered some buffalo wings, spinach dip, and two lemonades. While they waited, the conversation turned to music, the label, the industry, and the things they were both passionate about.
He was passionate about it in a way that wasn’t performative.
She’d been in enough rooms with industry people to know the difference between someone who loved music and someone who loved what music could get them.
Danger loved the thing itself; she could hear it in how he talked about it, the specific references he made, the artists he cited, and why.
“So,” she said, after the food arrived and they’d been quiet for a moment while they ate, "Let's say I sign. Do I get a chain?”
He laughed loudly enough that the table next to them looked over. “We don’t do chains.”
“So I get nothing.” She poked her lip out.
“You get an advance, full creative control, distribution across every major platform, and free travel.” He picked up a wing. “And we do tattoos.”
She stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“I want Danger in big bold letters right across—”
“Absolutely not.”
He was grinning now, and she was trying not to grin back, but failed.
“On a serious note,” he said, still grinning. “No chains, no initiations, no weird label shit”. I pride myself on transparency. The contract says what it means. Your lawyer will confirm that.”
“You still didn’t say no to the tattoos,” she said.
“If you ever tattoo anything,” he said, while looking directly at her as his voice dropped slightly, “it would be Dmitri. Right across your heart.”
She took a long sip of her lemonade and looked at the table. She told herself she was not affected by that.
She was extremely affected by that.
An hour later, they walked out of the café into the afternoon.
“Where’d you park?” He asked.
“Ubered.”
“Come on.” He gently pulled her by the hand toward the parking lot across the street.
They got into his truck, and after a few minutes she realized he hadn’t asked for her address.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Just sit back.”
She sat back.
The building was on West Main Street.
He parked and got out. She followed.
He unlocked the front door with a key he pulled from his jacket pocket and pushed it open.
She stepped inside and stopped.
Rows of vinyl records filled custom shelving that ran from floor to ceiling on both sides of the space.
Thousands of them. A collection that had probably taken years to build.
A small section of books in the back corner.
A listening station near the window with a vintage turntable and two chairs.
A register kiosk near the entrance. The floors were original hardwood that looked restored rather than replaced.
“What is this?” She said.
“Passion project.” He moved through the space comfortably. “I wanted a space, somewhere local artists could come, hear something that moves them, find something they didn’t know they needed.”
She walked slowly down one of the vinyl aisles, running her fingers along the edges of the records. Soul. R&B. Jazz. A whole section of classic hip hop. She pulled out a Sade album and looked at it.
“What are you going to call it?”
“Belle’s”
She looked at him.
“My mother’s name,” he said.
She put the Sade album back carefully.
She watched him move to the listening station.
He was in his element in a way she’d never seen him in the studio or the office.
He picked up an album from a small stack beside the turntable.
Voodoo by D’Angelo. He set the needle, put on the headphones, and closed his eyes.
She stood in the aisle and watched him, present inside the music, the way she was when she was writing, the way she’d been before the industry got hold of her and turned her into a mockery.
She crossed over to him and touched his shoulder.
“What are you listening to?”
He stared at her for a moment before lifting the headphones off his own ears and setting them gently over hers.
D’Angelo’s voice wove through the room.
She closed her eyes, savoring the lyrics.
When she opened her eyes, he was watching her.
She took the headphones off slowly.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“Belle’s,” she said. “She would have liked that.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She would have.”
They stayed in the record store the rest of the afternoon
Things shifted between them when they left.
And Zena knew for sure she wasn’t fighting the attraction anymore.