38. Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Kian
The hill is a little bit steeper than I expect once we start to head out. It’s a soft incline to begin with, but it veers sharply upward after several feet, making me wonder if our landing might have been slightly more terrifying to Sapphire, Trick and Riley than I’d initially thought.
“Maybe we don’t need to go right up to the peak,” I suggest, as we come to a sun trap out of the shade of the trees. It’s kind of secluded here. I can see a far corner of the beach if I stretch onto my toes, but that’s it. “This seems like a good spot.”
Sapphire looks up at the peak before she looks back at me with a smile.
“Yeah, I don’t think these shoes were really made for an uphill trek. This’ll do just fine.”
It takes a few seconds of careful juggling of drinks and sandwiches before I’m able to get the towel down onto the grass.
Sapphire picks it up and spreads it out like a blanket before she sits down.
I watch as she slips her feet out of her heels, giving me another peek at her red-painted toenails before she curls her legs up under her.
She turns her face upward like she did in the water, eyes closed.
The smile on her lips is serene.
I stare for a moment before I sit down beside her.
She’s so beautiful, I can hardly believe she’s real.
I place our wrapped sandwiches down between us, though I seriously doubt we’ll get around to finishing them. Food is the last thing on my mind now that we’re alone together.
She takes a notepad and a pen out of her purse, while I hold our beers.
I sip at mine, as I consider how to tell her that fate brought us together for a reason.
It’s probably way too soon to make that kind of announcement.
Without sounding like some kind of creep, I mean.
I’m pretty sure she likes me, but she also barely knows me.
We’re about to fix that. So, I need to be a bit more chill, or whatever.
At least until I know she’s feeling our connection like I am.
She flips the notebook open to a blank page and clicks her pen.
She glances up at me. “Are you ready?”
“I was born ready,” I scoff.
That earns me another smile.
Oh, she definitely likes me.
“So, what do you usually do in your time off? I mean, besides accidentally getting stranded on a desert island on the way to a luxury resort?”
“Time off?” I laugh. “I’m not complaining, but we don’t exactly get a lot of down time.
This is our first vacation in over a year.
The so-called day off we get every week or so is either spent travelling from one town to the next, or if we’re not moving on yet, then we try to spend the day in a recording studio. ”
She writes my answer down quickly, her script messy and hard to read.
“That sounds kind of rough,” she admits as she looks up at me.
Shit. It does, doesn’t it?
“We love what we do,” I tell her, not really feeling it even as the words are coming out.
That’s because it’s not how you really feel, Ki.
It’s not, and it stings to notice that.
Have I really been spouting that line for so long on press tours that I can’t even be honest now, with the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with?
Holy shit. You should have been more honest with Xane, a long damn time ago.
She doesn’t even write it down, as if she knows it’s a lie.
“I thought … I mean, I know you guys manage yourselves …” she starts.
“Oh, we do,” I admit. “Xane covers everything our manager used to.”
“So, your pack leader makes your schedule.”
She’s frowning now, and I’m a little afraid of what she might be thinking.
I’ve probably made it sound way worse than it is.
Though now that we’re talking about it, I can see it’s not nothing.
“Xane likes to deal with things without asking for help. Typical lead Alpha behavior, I know.”
This sounds so fucking bad. I should probably stop talking before I make it any worse.
I bite my tongue, even though it wants to run on.
“Huh,” she murmurs, tapping her pen on the page.
I take a sip of my beer while I think things through.
I’ve already told her some of what’s going on with us, and it’s not like Trick or Riley have a vastly different experience. We’re not perfect. No one is.
She might as well know everything.
Soon enough, she’ll be part of our pack.
Our problems are gonna be her problems, too.
She should know what she’s getting into.
So, I take a deep breath, and I continue. “What can you do, right? He was talking about selling the jet after this vacation. He’s barely been clocking in enough hours to hold onto his licence. I don’t think he even realizes how much he’s been missing out on since he took over.”
“So, you don’t think he should be managing the band?”
“I don’t know. At the start, it didn’t seem so bad.
We were cool with more shows, more money, bigger venues.
Basically, he streamlined everything and he kept doing that until there were less opportunities for anything that wasn’t in the schedule.
It’s not that he’s bad at managing us. I think he just needs to take a step back sometimes.
I don’t think he’ll ever step down as manager, though. ”
“You don’t? Why not?”
Now there’s a loaded question.
“Alphas are protectors. At least, that’s what they’re supposed to be. I know that’s not always how it works out, but Xane is the most protective guy I know. Riley’s a close second. That’s why Xane won’t trust someone else to be our manager. He got rid of our old manager to keep everyone else safe.”
She writes something down and then looks back up at me. “Your old manager is Larry Levinson. He had a solid track record, but after he left you guys, he left entertainment management completely. I couldn’t find a reason for that.”
I manage a wry smile. “Yeah, you won’t. He’s one of those Alphas who give the rest of us a bad name. It wasn’t enough for Xane to fire him. He had to make sure the guy left the industry.”
“So, he did something awful?”
“Trick and I weren’t there the night it happened,” I admit. “And Xane and Riley were too pissed off to tell us anything. But we heard things, and we saw things, and it wasn’t too hard to piece it together.”
“What kind of things did you hear?” she asks, clearly intrigued.
It feels a bit like gossip, I guess, but I can’t leave her hanging when I’ve already told her this much. It’s only the craziest thing that’s happened since Chaos Burning was formed.
“I heard Xane yelling at Larry’s lawyer over the phone, for one thing, but I should start from the start.
Xane and Riley used to party after the shows, going way back to the start of our first tour.
It could be fun, sometimes, but I was never that into drinking, and Trick …
Well, he was never into that kind of fun.
It was basically a drinking session with the start-up bands and a bunch of groupies.
It would finish up at like eight or nine the following morning, and they’d send the women home in cabs and it would be different faces the next night, and the next. Typical rockstar stuff, you know?”
“Sure,” she answers, smiling wryly.
“Anyway, they’d been partying the night before, and I’d asked where Larry was because he was usually hanging around backstage before the gig, and that’s when Xane told us he was fired.”
When I think back to that night, I can still hear the venom in Xane’s voice, and I can still feel my stomach churn at the sound. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him. His eyes turned so dark in that moment that they looked completely black.
Sapphire is still watching me expectantly, and I realize there’s more to tell. A lot more.
“Uh, so, I asked what happened. And all he would tell us is the guy was an asshole. Trick and I accepted that, because we trust Xane, and we knew from how angry he was that Larry had to have done something pretty bad. I half expected Xane would eventually tell us. That maybe he was just too mad to explain everything right after it happened.”
I pause for a few seconds, trying to process it all again, like I had to back then.
It still feels crazy that Xane never brought it up once everything calmed down.
Something about it made it impossible for him to talk about.
“But he never explained it?” she asks gently.
“Never, and that was … four years ago now. I think.”
Time can feel a little hazy when every day is so similar.
It doesn’t feel like it happened years ago. It’s like we’re talking about last week or something.
She frowns, and I’m about to ask what she’s thinking when she says, “It’s got to be a little over five years ago. That’s how long Xane has been managing the band by himself.”
Five years. Wow. That’s kind of crazy.
“You did your research.”
She shrugs. “It wasn’t exactly hard to find out. It’s not the kind of thing most bands do.”
“Yeah. We don’t do things like most bands.”
“I’m starting to see that,” she admits. “So, you don’t know why Larry Levinson was fired exactly, but something happened at a party after one of your shows?”
“Yeah,” I start, pausing to consider how Xane might feel about this whole conversation.
He wouldn’t like it, because he’s not ready to admit she’s ours, and he shut down emotionally after it happened. Which was five fucking years ago. I can hardly believe it’s been that long.
Five whole years of this closed-down, workaholic, money-is-everything mindset on our lead Alpha. How the hell did we survive?
I honestly don’t know the answer to that.
But I know this woman sitting here beside me deserves better.
Our pack is so fractured.
We need to fix that.
It’s on all four of us to find the way to do that.
Giving her the truth of why we’re so broken is the least I can do in this moment.
“Trick and I heard enough pieces of conversations to work out Larry drugged a groupie at that party. I don’t know what he intended, but whatever it was, it sounded like Xane and Riley stopped him in time, and he got his ass handed to him on his way out the door.”
“Oh no,” she murmurs. “That’s awful.”
“Larry threatened to go to the newspapers and tell them Xane drugs minors at after parties, but no one was ever gonna buy that story. Especially since …”