7. Willow #3
I glare at him. “Don’t get smug with me in your villain mansion.”
“It’s not a villain mansion.”
“It has gates.”
“That’s security.”
“That’s villain adjacent.”
Julian opens a door to one of the rooms and steps aside like a host revealing a magic trick.
“This,” he says, “is Studio B.”
The room beyond is quiet for the moment, the overhead lights warm. There’s a mixing desk spread out under computer screens, guitars on stands against one wall, a drum kit in the adjoining live room visible through the glass. Microphones hang suspended like questions waiting to be answered.
It smells faintly of wood, electronics, and metal.
The kind of room where things happen.
The kind of room people build entire lives around.
A weird buzz moves through me. I wonder what it would feel like to have a place where ideas turned into things. Where creativity wasn’t just squeezed into the edges of your life between shifts and bills and trying to keep everyone afloat.
I go very still.
Julian notices. “Still not curious?”
I tear my gaze away from the glass and focus on being annoyed. “I’m capable of recognizing when something is expensive.”
Gabe folds his arms. “That isn’t what you were looking at.”
My head turns toward him.
His expression hasn’t changed much, but there’s a flicker in his eyes that says he’s been watching me closely enough to know the difference.
Being read like this is too much. Partly because he’s right.
I shrug one shoulder. “It’s a lot.”
Julian leans against the doorframe, one ankle crossing over the other. “Good a lot or bad a lot?”
“Yes.”
He laughs softly.
I glance into the room again.
There’s a notebook on one side of the console. Headphones draped over a chair. A half-empty coffee cup sitting beside a stack of printed pages covered in scribbled notes and highlighted sections.
I turn back toward them. “This is going to change the town.”
Julian lifts a shoulder. “In a good way.”
I nod. “I hope you’re right.”
Gabe’s gaze narrows. “How do you mean?”
I shouldn’t answer that.
I know I shouldn’t.
Every instinct I have says don’t get drawn in, don’t start talking like their plans are your business, don’t stand in the middle of their music fortress and offer thoughts no one asked for.
Unfortunately, my mouth was apparently not invited to that meeting.
“People in Redemption Falls don’t care about the music industry,” I say.
“Not really. They care whether the diner gets overrun by tourists. Whether rent goes up. Whether somebody decides to turn Main Street into a boutique apocalypse. Whether all this…” I gesture around us, “means the town stops feeling like theirs.”
Julian glances at Gabe. Gabe is still looking at me.
“Well,” Julian says eventually, “that got unexpectedly hot.”
I blink. “What?”
He nods toward me. “The righteous indignation. Very compelling.”
I stare at him. “You need hobbies.”
“I have hobbies. You’re standing in several of them.”
Gabe’s mouth twitches again. “She’s not wrong.”
That catches me off guard.
“The town’s reaction matters,” he says. “More than people think.”
Hearing that from him, hearing that they’ve at least considered it, takes a little of the fight out of me.
I resent that.
“Well,” I say, adjusting my order board against my hip, “good. Because if you ruin the Sunday market, Bill Smith will probably die of spite and take half the town with him.”
Julian laughs. “Who’s Bill Smith?”
We start walking down the long hallway, past open rooms filled with instruments and conversation, Julian leading the way with that same lazy confidence.
I try to keep my focus on him, on the ridiculousness of the situation, but it’s hard to ignore how the house seems to stretch on forever.
The walls, the windows, the endless space.
“The mercantile.”
“The grumpy guy with the hat?”
“Yes.”
“He hates us already?”
“I’m sure you’ll recover.”
“Barely.”
Before I can shoot back another sarcastic remark, a voice interrupts us. It cuts through the space like an ice pick, and I freeze.
“Julian?”
My chest tightens, my feet halting mid-step as I hear the sound of approaching footsteps.
I should’ve gone. Why didn’t I just leave? This was a mistake.
And there he is.
Xander.
He steps into view as we enter the grand dining room, his presence shifting the energy in the space almost imperceptibly, like the room is adjusting to make room for him. I can feel his gaze even before I see his blue eyes lock onto mine.
He looks like he’s walked right out of my worst, and most confusing, thoughts. His gaze is intense, unblinking, as if he’s cataloging every tiny detail about me. For a split second, I wonder if I’m imagining the way the room seems to hold its breath when he appears.
Dark jeans. Black henley. Sleeves pushed up just enough to show the ink along his forearms. His hair is messy, like he’s been running a hand through it. There’s a phone in his hand that he tucks away as he walks, his attention angled toward Julian.
Until it lands on me. And everything stops.
Because the last time we made eye contact, I was running out on our date.
Shit.