16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
Phoenix
I’m sitting behind a long black table, microphones lined up in front of me, while the room buzzes with reporters pretending they give a shit about music instead of headlines.
They sit there with their little recorders, their sharpened smiles, and their hungry eyes, all waiting for one of us to fuck up.
Lucky for them, I’ve always been good at making a mess.
I sit in the middle of the table with a bottle of water in front of me and sunglasses on because my eyes are bloodshot enough to file a police report.
There is not enough caffeine, or divine intervention, in this fucking city to make me look alive, so I go with expensive black lenses and the kind of arrogance people mistake for intention.
Jax sits on my right, his knee bouncing under the table, fingers tapping restlessly against the wood.
Jett is next to him, quiet as always, watching the room with that calm, unreadable shit that makes people think he has his life together.
Cruz is on my left, slouched back in his chair, looking bored.
Last night still sits in my blood. Whiskey, weed, and the ugly little black hole I kept trying to smoke out of my chest. I drank the whole bottle, then I smoked until the city outside my windows blurred into a single long smear of light and my thoughts finally shut the fuck up for five merciful seconds.
It didn’t last because nothing good ever fucking lasts.
Damon stands in front of me, glaring since I walked in.
“You need to take those off,” he mutters, pointing at my sunglasses.
“No. You need to take that stick out of your ass.”
His mouth tightens. “I said take them off.”
“And I said fuck off.”
He moves to the side wall and I push my sunglasses up on my nose with my middle finger.
I admit it’s childish but Damon brings out the worst in me. And I have never been a man who hides his talents.
The prick watches me as if he could force professionalism into my body by sheer fucking will. He can get in line.
The auditorium falls quiet as the press begins asking questions.
The first journalist leans toward her recorder. “Phoenix, the new album has already sparked a lot of conversation because of the shift in sound on some of the later tracks. Was that intentional going into this era?”
Fucking hell.
Era.
They slap a pretty word on anything now. Grief becomes growth. Damage becomes direction. A slow bleed becomes marketing if the font is expensive enough.
I lean toward the mic and give her that smile. The one that has sold records, ruined better judgment, and made more women trust me than I ever deserved.
“Everything we do is intentional,” I say, the lie coming out so polished it almost shines. “The album’s got teeth. Some songs bite harder and some sit lower in the gut. We wanted it to feel alive, not safe.”
Damon’s shoulders relax half an inch. Fucking puppet master thinks he pulled the strings.
Jax glances at me and I can tell he knows I hate every word that just came out of my mouth. Because half of that album has no pulse. Half of that album is dead because Willow is not on it.
Another journalist lifts a hand. A man in a navy blazer, his smile too wide for his face.
“The world tour kicks off after tonight’s show. Phoenix, how do you prepare physically and mentally for that level of pressure?”
I almost laugh.
Physically, I poison myself just enough to keep functioning.
Mentally, I think about a girl who will not answer my calls and I want to peel my own fucking skin off.
Instead of saying any of that shit, I tip my head and let the arrogance settle easily on my face. It knows where to sit. It has paid rent there for years.
“I wake up looking this good, so I save a lot of preparation.”
A few people laugh.
I keep going because the room prefers a frontman who behaves like a product with a pulse and a cocky mouth.
“Pressure’s part of it. You want the stage, you take everything that comes with it. The noise. The lights. The expectations. The ninety thousand people waiting for you to prove you deserve the spot. We don’t walk out there hoping to survive. We walk out there to own it.”
My stomach turns as the cameras flash.
Cruz’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t appear amused. Jett stares at the table, and Jax stops tapping.
Maybe they hear it too. The bullshit. The hollow shape of Willow’s absence in every answer.
Damon nods slightly from the wall, satisfied for about three seconds.
Then a journalist near the back raises a hand. “Phoenix, how is Willow Hart doing after the drug overdose?”
The shock doesn’t hit clean. It stumbles in ugly. It leaves the cameras buzzing, the chairs shifting, and the air moving around a sentence nobody knows how to touch.
Drug overdose.
Willow Hart.
Two sentences that do not belong anywhere near each other, let alone in some asshole’s mouth in front of a room full of microphones.
Jax pulls his phone out so fast that it knocks against the table. Cruz straightens as Jett goes still beside him.
My face stays blank for one stupid second because I can’t comprehend what the bastard is asking. I stare at him through my sunglasses, waiting for the words to take shape into something that makes sense.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
Damon pushes off the wall. I catch it out of the corner of my eye, a sharp step forward.
The journalist keeps pressing. “There are reports that Willow Hart was hospitalized after a suspected overdose last night. Do you have any comment on her condition?”
My lungs stop working.
“Fuck,” Jax mutters.
I turn my head toward him, but the room is already breathing wrong. The lights are too bright. The microphones stretch too far across the table. Every camera lens becomes a little black mouth, waiting to swallow this and spit it back out with ads running beside it.
Jax, who never shuts the fuck up, has gone completely still.
I look at him and see it on his face before he turns the phone toward me. That awful, bloodless shock. The kind that doesn’t ask questions because it already knows the answer might fuck you up.
I glance down anyway.
Willow Hart, songwriter of Static Hearts, hospitalized after suspected overdose.
There are words beneath it. A photo of her from an old event.
My chest locks up. It’s as if someone has reached inside me, wrapped a fist around my ribs, and squeezed until every ugly thing I have ever refused to feel claws up my throat.
The room pulls away from me. The table. The mics. The cameras. The hungry faces. All of it drains away until only Jax’s phone, Willow’s name, and the word hospitalized remain, sitting there like a loaded gun on the table.
Suspected overdose.
No.
No.
No.
My chair scrapes back hard enough to tip over and I am on my feet.
“Phoenix,” Damon snaps, moving quickly.
I don’t acknowledge him as I turn away from the table.
Jax stands too, his face white. Jett rises without a word. Cruz is up a second later, the bored mask gone so completely that it’s as if he never wore it.
The reporters start talking over each other.
“Phoenix, were you aware?”
“Is Willow still connected to the band?”
“Will the tour still go ahead?”
“Can you comment on the overdose?”
Overdose.
The word follows me as I walk away from the table. It sticks to my back. Gets under my skin. Crawls into my blood with the whiskey, the weed, and all the other shit I used last night to pretend there was not a Willow-shaped hole chewing through my chest.
Jax catches up at my side.
“She’s at St. Vincent’s,” he says, his voice tight. “The article says she was taken in overnight.”
Overnight.
She was in the fucking hospital overnight and I was a drunk fuckhead on my couch, smoking myself stupid because my mother had called for money.
The world found out before I did.
The fucking internet had the information before I did.
That lands so hard I nearly stumble over.
“Move,” I say to no one and everyone, even though no one is in my fucking way.
We hit the hallway, leaving the cameras and voices spilling behind us.
Damon cuts in front of me near the exit, one hand raised as if he can stop me with a palm and a fucking death wish.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
I stop so suddenly that Jax almost runs into my back.
“Were you aware?” I ask.
Damon’s jaw tightens. “This is not the time or the place.”
My blood goes cold.
Cruz mutters, “Oh, you have got to be fucking shitting me.”
Jett steps closer. “Answer him.”
I take a step toward Damon, close enough to smell his aftershave and all the expensive bullshit he thinks makes him untouchable.
“Did you fucking know about this this morning?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. It’s there in the quick flick of his eyes and in the way his mouth hardens as he looks past me toward the press room.
The fucker knew. He was aware while I sat there, sunglasses on, poison still in my bloodstream, serving up pretty little quotes about pressure, touring, and owning the stage.
He knew and he let me keep talking.
Something in me snaps so hard that my fist hits him across the mouth, carrying everything ugly that comes up my throat and has nowhere else to go. The crack echoes through the hallway. Pain bursts across my knuckles.
Damon staggers sideways before his feet give out. He hits the floor hard—one hand catching too late, his polished manager bullshit finally where it belongs.
Fucking under me.
Jax grabs my shoulder, not to stop me, but to keep me from finishing it in a hallway where anyone could come out with a phone and turn my worst moment into tonight’s entertainment.
Damon touches his mouth before looking at the blood on his fingers. “You stupid fucking son of a bitch.”
Cruz steps in front of me. “Back the fuck off, Damon.”
Damon glares up at him.
Cruz’s voice drops. “You were aware of that shit and never told any of us that Willow was in trouble.”
Damon points at us from the floor. “She is no longer with this band. If you walk out right now, you’re fucking the whole tour. Do you understand that? You just walked out of a press conference. Are you aware of how fucking foolish that is?”