Chapter 23
Ethan
I don’t go home.
I can’t.
I stand in my garage—my supposed sanctuary, the heart of my security business—and for the first time since I built the place, it feels useless. The concrete floor, the steel cabinets, the rows of tools all meticulously aligned… none of it helps.
She asked me to leave.
And I did.
But every instinct in my body is clawing to go back and break her bloody door down.
I drag a hand over my face, still hearing the sound of her locks sliding shut after me. One by one.
Like she was sealing herself inside a bunker.
Or sealing me out.
My jaw clenches so hard it aches. She doesn’t trust me.
Or maybe she can’t.
Trauma does that. It teaches you to doubt the ground under your feet, to expect the knife before the touch.
It rewires instinct until every shadow looks like a threat, every kindness feels like bait.
I’ve seen what fear does to a mind, and how it builds walls so thick even the good intentions can’t break through.
And yet the part of me that wants to protect her—the part carved out by old failures I’ll never forgive myself for—tightens like a fist.
I sit at the workbench, open my laptop, and… stare at the blank screen.
Metal tools, coiled wires, open cases—all the equipment I use to fix other people’s security problems. Funny how none of it means a damn thing right now. Not when the one person I want to help slammed the door in my face because she’s drowning in something I don’t understand.
I drag a hand over my jaw, inhale once, twice, steadying. Logic first. Always logic. Emotion later—when no one is around to see.
Then everything starts replaying.
Her jumpiness.
The way she flinches when someone walks in too quietly.
How she sleeps with noise, like silence is the real danger.
The oversized hoodies in summer.
The disguises. Caps pulled low, sunglasses at dusk, sleeves to her wrists, even when the heat is brutal.
The sudden arrival in Cedar Lake with nothing but a rental and a single suitcase.
The sealed-up house this morning, curtains drawn, locks double-checked like ritual.
And the hair.
Bloody hell—the hair.
Bright pink when she stumbled into town, like she forgot to hide it in her panic.
Dyed dark the very next day.
Why hide something unless it’s recognizable?
Unless it belongs to someone the world already knows?
My pulse kicks up. A slow, heavy beat. An instinct that feels too damn familiar.
I type her name into the search bar.
Lucky Vale. I doubt it’s even her real name.
The results load—
And my stomach drops like I’ve been shoved off a cliff.
Because the internet knows a different Lucky.
Lucky Pink — lead guitarist of Rebel June.
World tours. Arena lights. Pink hair turned into an icon. Tabloids are tearing into her with their rotten teeth.
And the tattoos I’ve already seen, already traced with my own hands—bare skin, warm, trusting—
Jesus.
I touched history and didn’t even know it.
I scroll.
Pictures. Headlines. Footage.
The infamous meltdown. The “vanished celebrity.” The media frenzy.
I click the top video before I can think.
Her—stumbling, drunk, swinging her guitar like she’s trying to kill the noise in her head. The crowd is roaring as if they’re feeding off her collapse. Security rushing. Cameras flashing. Her mascara smeared like war paint, her terror naked under the lights.
It twists something low in my gut.
It hurts to watch.
And I don’t even know her.
Not really.
“Christ, Lucky…”
I close the video, jaw tight, chest too full with something sharp—anger, pity, regret, all tangled.
Of course, she didn’t tell me.
Of course, she acted as if she’d rather chew glass than talk about her past.
She’s lived in a world where privacy is a myth and vulnerability is ammunition.
Everyone wanted something from her.
Everyone took.
But that doesn’t explain the fear.
Not all of it.
Not the way she shakes. Not the way she scans rooms. Not the look in her eyes today—pure, primal dread.
Years of chaos.
And not the kind she wears now—the small, quiet kind born of fear.
This was a spectacle. A circus built around a girl who was barely out of her teens.
Photo after photo.
Clip after clip.
Article after bloody article.
Lucky Pink in airport lounges at 3 a.m., sunglasses on, two bodyguards flanking her, fans screaming behind barricades.
Lucky stumbling out of a club in Los Angeles, mascara smudged, paparazzi bulbs firing like machine-gun blasts.
Lucky photographed on someone’s yacht one week and in rehab the next.
Boyfriends—plural.
Actors, models, and a drummer from another band.
Breakups splashed across headlines as if they were global news.
One article calls her the heartbreak girl of rock.
Another says she “burns too bright to belong to anyone.”
Christ.
Magazine covers.
Tabloids tearing apart her outfits, her body, her mental state.
A single candid photo of her crying as she leaves a studio becomes a five-page spread titled Pink Meltdown Continues.
Brand deals worth millions—perfume, headphones, and some fashion line I’ve seen plastered in malls.
Ad campaigns with her face ten feet tall, pink hair glowing like a warning flare.
Interviews where she’s smiling but her eyes look exhausted, hunted.
And the awards—
Jesus, the awards.
Three Grammys at twenty-two.
Two more nominations the following year.
One video shows her on stage accepting a trophy, voice shaking, thanking people who probably haven’t thought about her in years.
She lived under surveillance.
Not metaphorically—literally.
Cameras everywhere.
Phones shoved in her face.
Every mistake documented, every breath analyzed, every stumble turned into a meme.
No wonder she hides.
No wonder she doesn’t trust a soul.
Her entire life has been picked clean by strangers with telephoto lenses.
It wasn’t chaos she created.
It was chaos done to her.
A girl eaten alive by the machine that made her.
Then an old headline from a smaller California paper stops me cold.
brEAK-IN AT ROCKSTAR’S HOME — INTRUDER ARRESTED. ASSAULT SUSPECTED.
My blood goes ice-cold.
A slow, crawling freeze that starts in my chest and spreads outward, numbing everything it touches.
I click the article.
I read the first lines.
And it feels like the whole world narrows to a single point of horrific clarity—no sound, no movement, just the words burning themselves into my mind.
He found her unconscious in her own bed.
In her own home.
A place meant to be safe.
The intruder had been watching her for months.
Let himself into her room while she slept.
Stood over her.
Touched her.
Violated the boundary of safety so completely that I can barely process it.
Lucky… Jesus.
I force myself to read further, even though every sentence feels like a blade dragging across my ribs.
I push back from the desk, shutting the laptop with more force than I intend, because the details—every vile, intimate line—are turning my stomach.
It’s not just anger; it’s something darker, something that coils tight and cold in my spine. The words feel venomous on my tongue, poisoning every breath.
What he did to her isn’t just a crime.
It’s a trespass so profound it reeks of evil.
And she went through all of it alone.
I pick up my phone.
I don’t think—I act. Training slots into place, clean and mechanical, because when a pattern forms, instinct takes over. And my instinct is screaming.
I call Adam Perkins, a mate from service days, now at the Bureau.
He answers on the third ring. “Ethan? Christ, haven’t heard from you in months.”
“I need intel,” I say. My voice is a blade—cold edge, no room for argument. “New client. Private job.”
Lucky isn’t my client.
But I can’t say what she is. Not out loud. Not yet.
“Name?” Adam asks.
I hesitate.
Then force it out. “Lucky Vale. Seven years ago. Intruder case.”
A low whistle hisses through the line. “That one. Thought she vanished off the map.”
“Details.”
He doesn’t argue. He knows my tone too well.
“Give me twenty minutes.”
The call ends.
I pace the garage like a caged thing, breath tight, mind ricocheting through everything I’ve witnessed—the trembling, the frozen moments, the way she sealed the house like she was preparing for a siege. The way she recoiled when I stepped too close.
And under it all: the desperate strength she uses to hold herself together.
Then the phone rings.
“Maddox,” Adam says, voice heavier. “That stalker—Michael Sheifer—he wasn’t just obsessed. He was violent. Broke into her home. Assaulted her. She was unconscious for most of it.”
My vision tunnels, the world sharpening to a single lethal point.
Adam keeps talking, clinical, detached, unaware of the storm tearing open inside my chest.
“He wrote to her from prison. Fixated. Tried contacting her repeatedly. Threats, declarations, delusions. Every parole hearing was blocked—until the last one. He was released on parole this week.”
Week.
Not a month.
Not a year.
This week.
A cold, controlled fury unfurls inside me—measured, deadly, absolute.
Now it all makes sense.
The phone call she got yesterday morning.
The way her face drained of all color.
The panic she couldn’t hide, no matter how hard she tried.
He found her number.
He might’ve found more.
“Adam,” I say, my voice low, dark, dangerous, “I need everything you can legally—or illegally—send. Parole notes. Last known location. Behavioral reports. Anything you have.”
A beat.
Then Adam exhales. “I’ll send what I have access to. But Ethan… be careful. Guys like Sheifer don’t let go. Their brains don’t allow it.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly, a bitter promise forming behind my teeth. “Neither do I.” A cold, lethal calm slips into my bones.
Parole.
I repeat it in my head as if it’s an unbelievable phenomenon.
This fucking week.
Bloody hell.
“Adam,” I say quietly, “if he violated parole, would anyone know where he is?”
“Doubt it. He’s clever. Manipulative. Delusional. The kind who’d talk his way out of anything. Look—why? You think he’s after her again?”
I don’t answer.