Chapter 26
JUDE
After Sofia walked out of the restaurant in Rome, I sat frozen in my chair at the restaurant, seething.
Choosing silence, I ignored my bandmates’ questions and concerns.
After an hour of brooding, I lit out and headed to our suite.
Seeing her ring on the console in the living area ripped through me.
Her passport was missing, and with it, her clothes.
She left behind everything she bought on my credit card, and I cursed under my breath at the brutal message she was sending me: she was done with me.
A storm churned inside me as the question pounded in me: was I done with her?
We’d made love; we locked our souls together deeper than I ever had before with any woman in my life.
Was this really it?
My logical mind growled that I could never trust her after her lies, but then I wrestled with my own hypocrisy.
Why was I slamming the hammer down on her when I, too, was a fallen ex-con and a former addict?
Had I placed her on a pedestal, holding her to a higher, impossible standard?
Again, I was overthinking it.
When it came down to it, I was livid that she omitted her history and furious that she lied to my face about the photos.
Or had she?
The look of utter, unscripted horror and dismay in her eyes at the images gave me a niggling warning flare.
What if she had been speaking the truth?
The thought twisted me up.
The morning after Sofia walked out, my heart was still torn apart.
Our suite at the Soho was redolent with her lingering vanilla perfume, driving me out of my head.
I called my lawyer, Brian, and gave him the lowdown.
‘I have Ignazio’s number,’ I growled into the receiver. ‘I want to set up a meet, but I need you to get Interpol to pick him up for blackmail.’
On Brian’s advice, I reached out to my former cellmate.
I recorded a call with him, promising to meet him at Caffè Sant’Eustachio at eleven in the morning with the fifty thousand deposit in cash.
I turned the recording over to Brian, and his team alerted the authorities.
A day later, I stood on a cobblestone corner in Rome across from an open-air cafe.
High-end espresso machines hissed while tourists dodged Vespas in the heat.
Ignazio sat at a corner table in a linen suit, sipping a cappuccino, waiting for me and my money.
The bastard actually thought he played me.
I had no intention of paying a single cent in blackmail.
Nobody threatened my wife or me and got a payday.
Four plainclothes agents closed the distance from two angles.
They pinned his arms behind his back.
Ignazio thrashed, screaming profanities into the afternoon air as they forced his wrists into steel cuffs.
I made my presence visible, standing across the street, hands crossed over my chest, leaning with casual ease on the hood of a car.
He caught my eye and cursed loud and long.
I gave him a slow chin raise and a two-fingered sarcastic salute as they shoved him into an unmarked sedan.
Brian filed international extortion charges with Interpol, backed by my audio files and proof found on Ignazio’s phone and email.
Brian also dropped a massive racketeering dossier onto the desks of prosecutors in New York and Vermont, target-locking the Compagni syndicate.
Dario and his crew faced mounting charges, proving I wasn’t some helpless mark.
Yet, tracking the car as it disappeared around the corner offered zero comfort.
The legal win felt hollow and useless.
My bed was still cold, and the only woman who once mattered was gone.
The high-octane grind of the European arena circuit was chewing through my mental reserves.
After Sofia’s departure, the run became a pure, unadulterated hellscape, making all tours before it seem like a cakewalk.
Food sucked, drinking was a non-option, and my bone-deep depression was unprecedented.
I spent every free moment picking apart each life choice that brought me here.
I was running on absolute fumes, finding no glory nor thrill from the jaunt.
It was just a brutal, bloody grind.
As was my relentless, toxic obsession over my fallout with Sofia.
The silence from her was deafening.
Not a syllable from her since she walked out of our hotel’s rooftop restaurant in Rome.
I had no clue where she was on the map.
The stubborn, fractured pride in my chest kept me from swallowing my anger and dialing her number myself.
A few days later, when my temper had simmered down, I checked the Find My iPhone feature on my device.
She’d disconnected it.
Damn.
However, she was a grown woman with money in her bank account, and my gut told me she was long gone on a plane crossing the Atlantic.
I hoped she was heading for Nashville, to our home, staying put and safe till I could get back and iron out things with her.
Despite my aching heart, her security niggled at me.
The last thing I wanted was a retaliatory hit from Compagni on her, who had their fingers everywhere.
So I called Brian again and asked him to assign one of his firm’s private investigators to track her down.
He came back to me forty-eight hours later.
‘She’s back in Nashville, son, but no activity registers at your house. We don’t have a firm bead on her location.’
‘At least she’s back on my turf,’ I growled, my grip crushing the phone. ‘Continue hunting. Let me know the second you locate her.’
‘Will do.’
After that call, I wanted to wallow in what I knew best: brooding.
However, I had little downtime to dwell on my troubles; the band was contractually required to keep the show on the road.
We bounced from city to stadium on the chartered Boeing, landing on pitch-black runways at two in the morning, hauling forty tons of sound gear into and out of arenas.
Then repeating the entire brutal cycle every few days.
Berlin was a whirlwind of sold-out arenas and blinding stadium lights, but I scarcely took note, so lost in ruminating over the fragments of my marriage.
The roar of the crowds at the Uber Arena did nothing to dull the persistent, thumping ache behind my eyes and the scalding in my soul.
My bandmates, sick of my foul temper and her obvious absence, decided to grill me.
They hustled me into the lounge bar in our hotel in Berlin late one night after we bused back from a show.
With beer in our hands, my five brothers surrounded me in a corner lounge, as the rest of our crew celebrated.
‘Man, you need to address the Sofia issue. We’re worried about her. We liked her, brother,’ Bishop led. ‘Where is she?’
I dragged a heavy hand through my hair, my jaw set.
‘To be honest? I don’t know.’
‘How can you not know where your wife is?’ Levi hissed, crowding closer. ‘She’s your wife!’
‘She’s the woman who lied to my face,’ I growled.
I gave them a short version of the drama between Sofia and me.
Deacon pursed his lips. ‘Sounds like you jumped to conclusions.’
I shrugged. ‘I’m ready to take an L if she didn’t lie to me, but as it stands she’s guilty as fuck.’
Levi shook his head at me. ‘Damn man, no matter how angry you are with her, you should still find out where she is.’
Deacon then tried to call her phone three times.
She never picked up.
‘You’re being a fuckin’ blockhead, Judah,’ Reign rasped. ‘You let your wife walk based on the word of a convicted felon. You accused her without a single shred of actual, objective verification.’
‘The photos don’t lie!’ I snapped back. ‘The facial alignment, the features, the skin tones, it’s all right there. It tracks.’
Another wave of emotion surged in me along with the realization I yearned for her, cutting straight to the bone.
‘I think I’ve fallen for her,’ I admitted, the confession rough in my throat like jagged glass. ‘Which is why this cuts so bad.’
‘Give the images to me,’ Bishop growled. ‘I’ve got a discreet mate in the security sector who handles digital forensics. Saint can run the files through a deep-pixel analysis and detect if they’re legit or not.’
The thought of another man laying eyes on Sofia in those trippy photos made my stomach churn with a fierce, possessive revulsion.
Still, I needed to know the truth, so I gave him a chin jerk.
‘Fine, brother. Let’s find out the freakin’ facts. Until then, brothers, not a word.’
My companions fell into an uneasy silence till Reign nodded.
‘Sweet, but if you’re wrong, my friend, you’ll have a mountain of work ahead of you to make up for jumping the gun.’
I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘Thanks, Captain Obvious. Bishop, with me.’
Slamming my beer bottle down, I prowled out of the lounge, with Bishop tracking right behind my heels.
We took the elevator, and I marched down the carpeted hallway of the hotel to my quarters to retrieve the manila envelope from my safe.
Swiveling to face him, I pushed the pouch hard into his chest.
‘I’m trusting you, brother, to do what’s best here,’ I muttered as I surrendered the packet. ‘Keep this locked down.’
‘Of course, but you’re hurting, my friend. I see that,’ Bishop murmured. ‘Let’s get some air.’
I crossed my arms over my torso, still fighting the storm inside me, then, with an exhale, I led him across the suite to the sliding doors.
We walked out onto the stone terrace of the hotel, where the historic architecture of Bebelplatz stretched out beneath a canopy of midnight stars.
‘You said you had a professional arrangement, brother, but I can see you care for her,’ Bishop rasped as we settled into outdoor armchairs. ‘At least acknowledge that.’
In the silence of the night, away from the screaming fans and the backstage hustle, an intense, agonizing longing for Sofia hit me hard, bypassing my anger.
‘I gave her the keys to a heart I thought I locked away forever.’
‘Then don’t make any radical decisions yet, Jude,’ Bishop countered. ‘Wait for the truth to clear the fog before you either torch what you both shared or go after her. Rage makes a terrible advisor, and she deserves a sober investigation, not a knee-jerk execution.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ I muttered. ‘You aren’t the one swallowing a throat full of glass right now.’
Bishop’s words brimmed with irritating logic, and my mood darkened even more.
As I mulled beside him, he ordered room service, and a server showed up with a silver tray bearing two steaming mugs of black espresso.
We shared a long, quiet coffee, staring at the illuminated beauty of Berlin’s classical domes.
My inner thoughts swirled, bounding between anger and terrifying vulnerability, a brutal internal warfare that threatened to rip my spirit to pieces.
I hated the uncertainty, yet the thought of erasing Sofia from my future was like stepping off a cliff into total oblivion.
‘I’ll wait for the analysis,’ I conceded, as I stared up at the stars. ‘However, if she lied, Bishop, there won’t be shit left to save.’
After Berlin, we hit Spain.
Because of a tour we canceled a year ago, management and our lawyers pushed us to embark on a makeup junket across Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia.
Which meant two more weeks of dragging my miserable carcass through a relentless schedule of stadium dates.
Backstage, amid the dressing rooms and the endless corridors of roaring fans, I became a ghost.
I filled the hours between soundcheck and showtime pacing the floorboards and checking emails from the lawyers.
I also missed Sofia, craving her soft skin, the sweet heat of her passion, and the warmth of her presence.
Yet guilt ate at me; how the fuck could I sing to millions about grace and radical love? When my first primal instinct was to crush the heart of the woman I swore to protect?
I spent nights awake in bed, my mind, rage, and grief tearing through my chest, driving me to the ragged edge of sanity.
Wanting, desperate for more and too impatient to wait on Bishop’s analysis, I made a rash decision.
During a three-day break preceding our first stadium show in Valencia, I booked a covert flight to Italy.
Landing in the oppressive humidity of Milan, I hired a local driver.
I tracked the exact street coordinates of the club displayed in Ignazio’s photos, a notorious venue once infamous as Disco Velluto.
I ended up standing in front of a rusted, padlocked iron gate covered in layers of faded graffiti on the industrial outskirts of Sesto San Giovanni.
‘The venue is long gone, signore,’ an elderly shopkeeper next door told me in raspy Italian, flicking a cigarette butt onto the cracked pavement. ‘The Carabinieri shuttered that place five years ago during the syndicate sweeps. It never reopened.’
So the photos were more than likely now a blackmail setup.
I returned to our tour base in Valencia with a growing, sickening suspicion that I had probably ruined the only good thing in my life.
Why had I let a pathetic, spineless snake like Ignazio whisper venom into my ear?
I’d scorched my own earth, ready to destroy everything because my fragile, arrogant ego couldn’t handle the thought of being played.
I was staring at the green room floor in Valencia when Bishop approached me.
He sat on the couch beside me and shoved his tablet into my hands.
Dread coiled in my gut as I stared at the incriminating images onscreen, marked up in red at various points.
‘Saint finished the forensic analysis on the prints, brother,’ Bishop rasped.
‘He ran the graphics through a deep-pixel detector. The code identifies the structural layers where Sofia’s head was superimposed onto synthetic, computer-generated video stills.
The background, the runway, the lighting elements, even the anatomy below her collarbone; it’s all fake, a perfect extortion trap. ’
My head fell back onto the wall behind my bench, rocked by the confirmation.
‘Fuck, I suspected as much.’
Relief flooded me at first.
It wasn’t her.
Yet I’d let my ruthless paranoia and lethal pride blind me, tearing Sofia apart without a single piece of real evidence.
I weaponized her past against her, refused to believe her, and got her on the run once more. Making me just as monstrous as the syndicate brutes she spent years escaping.
In my reckless, unhinged fury, I drove my innocent wife away, and the shame of it cut deep now, a jagged blade twisting in my heart.
I destroyed our trust.
How the hell was I going to hunt her down and fix this?