6. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
Phoenix
The party is already dirty and feral by the time I walk in. The hotel suite is loud enough to drown out a conscience. Exactly how I fucking like it.
Damon booked the suite because he knows how to put a bow on things and call it morale.
Top floor. Private elevator. Black marble everywhere.
The windows stretch from floor to ceiling, showing off a city that looks better from forty floors above, with glittering streets and distant headlights.
Up here, nobody has to see the rubbish in the gutters.
Up here, everything ugly shines.
After seven straight days locked in a recording studio, we have earned a little bad behavior.
Or a lot of it.
The label sent champagne. Damon ordered enough food to feed a small country. Cruz invited women who look as though they were assembled from tits, lip gloss and questionable judgment.
He has turned the marble coffee table into his own private pharmacy. White powder lies in clean lines beside pills in three different colors, surrounded by half-empty glasses and the room service menu Jax used to crush something a few minutes ago.
Music pumps through speakers hidden somewhere in the room—the bass thick enough to sit in my ribs. Champagne sweats in ice buckets. Whiskey burns the air.
Cruz leans over the coffee table, his long dark hair falling across his cheek as his tattooed fingers arrange the drugs with the same concentration he usually reserves for guitar solos and complicated bra straps.
A blonde watches from the floor. Another woman presses against his thigh while a red-lipped brunette traces the ink around his wrist as though deciding which part of him she wants first. Cruz grins at all three, because restraint is just another word he has never bothered to learn.
Jax stands across the room, his shirt hanging open, a bottle of tequila raised above his head, as women crowd around him, all tits, hungry smiles, and terrible instincts.
He announces that he can drink any asshole in the room under the table, despite nobody challenging him or giving a fuck.
Jax has never needed an audience’s permission to become the main event.
Jett stays near the window, a beer in one hand, watching his brother perform for women who keep glancing in Jett’s direction.
He might be quieter, but his silent act pulls women in faster than Jax’s open shirt and a bottle of tequila ever could.
Jett never chases them. He holds their gaze, offers a half smile, and lets them imagine what else he can do with his mouth.
The rest of us make noise to convince women to fuck us. Jett stands still and lets them come to him.
Jett lifts his beer toward his brother. “Careful. Last time you drank tequila, you spent twenty minutes arguing with your reflection.”
“Fuck you,” Jax replies before taking a sip.
“Stone,” Cruz calls out as I step farther into the room. “You taking the edge off or are you pretending you found Jesus somewhere between your reflection and your ego?”
“I found Jesus,” I say. “Poor bastard asked for a selfie.”
Cruz laughs. “Only you could turn the Second Coming into a fucking meet-and-greet.”
Damon is near the bar, phone in hand, suit jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled. He checks his phone. The album has a deadline. The tour will make millions. We can behave as badly as we want as long as the songs keep selling, and Damon’s silence is the closest thing we have to permission.
My attention moves past him and settles on the couch.
Willow is tucked into the corner where the shadows are softer and the music doesn’t hit quite as hard. She has one boot planted on the floor, the other leg folded beneath her, leaving the black fabric of her dress high enough on her thigh to become a fucking problem.
It’s the kind of dress that doesn’t beg for attention because it already knows it has every fucking eye in the room. Black, with thin straps resting against her bare shoulders and soft fabric clinging to her chest, waist, and the curve of her hips before stopping high on her thighs above her boots.
Willow never dresses for men. She dresses for herself, then walks into a room and becomes every asshole’s dirtiest fantasy without even trying. Mine included.
My body reacts before my brain can remind my cock that it has known her since she wore grass-stained knees instead of black silk. Heat drops low and filthy, thickening me behind my zipper with enough force to make me want to punch some sense into myself.
This is Willow. Wills. The girl who used to sit cross-legged beneath a tree, chewing the end of a pen as her hair fell across her eyes. She knew me before the screaming crowds and the money, before strangers started moaning my name as though it belonged between their lips.
She still watches me sing as if she knows every part of me the world worships written in words I stole from her.
I could have any woman in this room. A redhead already slipped her number into my palm with a smile that promised bad choices and no morning-after expectations.
The brunette near the minibar has been staring at me for the past few minutes as though she is mentally undressing me in front of everyone.
One crooked finger and she would be on her knees. Instead, I’m standing here with a hard cock, staring at Willow’s fucking thigh.
That should piss me off more than it does. What really gets under my skin is how exhausted she looks.
Exhaustion sits beneath her eyes, even though her makeup hides most of it. Her shoulders are relaxed, but not because she is comfortable. She looks drained, as though the studio has taken everything she had this week and the rest of us stood around demanding more.
I hate that I notice. Her body is right there, wrapped in black silk and enough bare skin to keep my cock painfully hard, but the first thing I notice is the exhaustion beneath her eyes.
I fucking hate it.
Noticing leads to caring, and caring is a door I keep locked unless a naked woman or a sold-out stadium is waiting on the other side.
Before the thought gets any more honest, I grab my drink and head to the couch.
A woman catches my wrist as I pass. Dark hair, red nails, and tits shoved high enough to be a public safety issue.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Somewhere else.”
Her fingers slide away. By tomorrow, I won’t remember her face.
Fuck, Mickey started fading before I’d even pulled the condom off my cock.
She was a willing body in a studio bathroom stall with a broken lock.
Somewhere easy to bury my cock and forget everything Willow’s song made me feel.
Once I was done, I sent her home and went back to work.
Mickey was simple. They all are.
But Willow has never been simple.
I drop onto the couch beside her, close enough that the cushion dips beneath my weight and draws her body an inch closer to mine.
Willow turns her head and her dark-brown eyes sweep across my face before lingering on my mouth.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m Phoenix Stone. People usually pay for the privilege of it.”
She looks past me toward Cruz’s table, her gaze snagging on the drugs for half a second before she looks away.
Willow has spent too many years around us to pretend innocence.
She knows exactly what happens after midnight in hotel suites full of musicians with blown-out egos, black credit cards, and women who throw themselves at rockstars as if bad decisions come with backstage passes.
“You know you’re a miserable pain in my ass that I tolerate,” I say.
“I’m not miserable.”
“Wills, you’re sitting alone at a party full of free drugs, expensive alcohol, and people with extremely flexible morals.”
“That’s because I have standards.”
“Those sound exhausting.”
“They are when I’m around you.”
I stretch one arm across the back of the couch, letting my fingers settle close to her hair without touching it. “You need to get out of your head for one night, Wills.”
Her gaze drops to the drink in my hand. “I’m not in my head.”
“You’ve been living there all fucking week.”
“I’ve been working.”
“So have I.”
“Please, you sang into a microphone and complained about the temperature.”
“I suffered for my art.”
Across the room, Cruz catches my eye and raises a brow, silently asking whether I want something from the buffet laid out on the table.
I should leave it alone. That would be the decent thing, but that has never been a particularly convincing argument with me.
Cruz tosses me the bag of pills anyway. It lands in my lap with a soft thud.
There are a hundred reasons to open it. The week has been shit.
My head will not shut the fuck up. The song we recorded still carries Willow’s ache bleeding through every note and I have spent two whole days trying not to think about why singing her words got under my skin more than anything else I have done this week.
Drugs are easier than answers. They always will be.
I tap the bag against her knee.
“Come on,” I say. “You need to get out of your head for one night.”
Her gaze drops to the bag before returning to me. “Is that your professional medical opinion?”
“My professional rockstar opinion. More expensive and considerably less ethical.”
“You don’t have ethics.”
“Exactly. I didn’t waste years studying for them.”
A breath slips from her, almost becoming a laugh. “I don’t know, Phoenix.”
That hesitation should be enough. I hear it, and some dull, inconvenient part of me knows I should toss the bag back to Cruz, take her onto the balcony, and tell her to breathe air that has not already passed through cigarette smoke and bad decisions.
Instead, I lean closer and lower my voice. “It’s not a blood oath, Wills. It’s one night without your brain trying to kill you.”
Her gaze holds mine.
Willow can make silence feel louder than Jax, even with a microphone and an audience. She studies me for a beat too long, searching for the catch, the trap, and the ugly truth hiding beneath my grin.