Tour Crasher (Crasher #2)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

Lila

Have you ever really stopped and thought about irony?

I mean the real kind. The kind that hangs around like a mosquito bite you can’t stop scratching.

The kind that grins at your carefully laid plans, then shoves them off a cliff to see what happens.

The kind that feels cosmic and weirdly personal, as if the universe decided you were the joke and forgot to let you in on it.

People love to dissect irony into neat little categories, as if it’s a science project. Spoiler: none of those categories involve a black fly in your Chardonnay, no matter what Alanis says.

Irony is the Titanic, dubbed “unsinkable,” resting at the bottom of the Atlantic, its grand rooms sealed in saltwater silence.

It’s Charlie Chaplin entering a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and coming in twentieth. Not even bronze.

It’s Romeo ending his life because he couldn’t bear to live without Juliet, while she was still warm, still breathing, seconds away from waking up.

Irony is America’s most stolen book being the Bible.

And then there’s the kind of irony that feels like it has your name on it in neon lights. The kind so perfectly targeted, you almost want to applaud the universe for committing to the bit.

Like, say, becoming the opening act for Arcadia Drive, the indie-alt-rock band fronted by none other than my ex-boyfriend.

Because of course. The very famous, very emotionally unavailable, very much off-limits ex who once swore he wrote his best songs because of me.

Spoiler alert: he did.

But hey, “The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.” Thanks for the dose of existential sass, Robert A. Heinlein.

So how did I end up here, half-drunk on adrenaline and nostalgia, guitar in hand, standing side-stage while he croons the song he wrote about our last kiss? How did I end up pretending I’m totally fine, while my pulse is basically screaming liar, liar, pants on fire?

It’s a story knotted up in more irony than even Shakespeare could script.

A Few Months Before-

I didn’t exactly grow up normal.

From the outside, my parents are the dictionary definition of wholesome: two people so in love it’s almost embarrassing, the kind who still make out in the kitchen and forget anyone else exists.

They’re both famous in their own right, which sounds glamorous until you’re the one living in the fishbowl.

Try being the daughter of Molly Russell, celebrity baker, owner of a smile that could sell a million cupcakes, and founder of a charity that bakes birthday cakes for kids who’ve never had one. It’s hard to rebel when your mom is basically a frosting-covered saint.

And then there’s my dad, Oliver Russell, bestselling author and the reason half the book clubs in America believe in soulmates.

On paper, it’s adorable. In practice, it’s suffocating.

It’s living in the shadow of a fairytale that strangers feel entitled to. People don’t just know their story. They obsess over it; they set out to find a love like theirs. They put just a Molly looking for her Oliver on their dating profiles.

And just when you think you’ve hit peak weird, your dad shows up at your high school assembly to give a talk on toxic relationships and casually mentions that his ex tried to kill your mom and still thinks they’re engaged.

Paula is a nightmare you warn your kids about.

She's still locked up in some mental hospital, and my parents have an extra security system just in case.

We're trying to stay away from a boiled bunny here.

So yeah, I never really got to have my own story. I was a footnote in theirs. A background character in a love story that wasn’t even about me.

I love them. I really do. I love my mom’s messy laugh, my dad’s soft heart, and the way they can’t touch each other without turning into teenagers. I love the home they built. I love that, despite everything that tried to break them, they stayed.

I just want something else. Something that’s mine.

I want to be Lila Russell.

No famous parents, no legacy hanging over my head like a chandelier that could drop at any second.

Which, naturally, brings us back to irony, because that drama queen never misses her cue.

Because somehow I ended up as Evan Walker’s secret girlfriend.

You know, the kind of guy people write fanfiction about.

And not the sweet, hand-holding-in-the-rain kind.

I mean the “he’s my surprise stepdad who’s secretly in love with me” kind.

The guy with a whole TikTok conspiracy theory about being a vampire because he wears sunglasses indoors and is way too pretty to be real.

He’s shipped with every actress, model, and singer under fifty. He’s the fantasy. The rock god.

And no one knows he’s mine.

Not in a “he’s hiding me” kind of way, either. He wanted to go public from the start, back when his band was still lugging amps into half-empty bars and bribing bartenders for five minutes of mic time.

He’s perfect, almost annoyingly so, in that brooding-poet-meets-backstage-chaos kind of way.

Honestly, a lot like my parents. A little too perfect, if you ask me.

Well, except for the minor details like stalkers, wedding crashers, and the occasional attempted murder. Every fairy tale needs a villain, right?

The irony is that I was the one who said no.

He wanted us out in the open. He wanted my hand in his at shows, my face in his posts, my name said with his in interviews. He wanted all of it.

I shut it down. I didn’t want to be Lila Russell: Evan Walker’s girlfriend.

Not when I’d spent my whole life trying to claw my way out of being Molly and Oliver Russell’s daughter.

So we stayed a secret.

And maybe that should have felt lonely. Maybe it did, sometimes, in the quiet moments between shows and sunrise, when he was asleep beside me, and my phone glowed with another article calling him music’s next beautiful disaster.

But for a while, it felt like magic, like we’d found a hidden room in the world where only we existed.

Every glance was ours. Every cheap motel room. Every missed call. Every lyric scribbled on a napkin. Every drunken voicemail at 2 a.m. when he’d swear he missed me, then forget to hang up and keep humming into the phone until I fell asleep.

Until, of course, it wasn’t.

Tonight’s the night everything changes.

That’s what I told myself, out loud, into the mirror. One hand gripping a graduation cap, the other still clutching a tube of eyeliner, because apparently I need a dramatic prop to tell the truth.

I’d already downed a bottle of Pepto Bismol for my nervous stomach. The family size bottle, obviously.

Judge me if you want, but my stomach was staging a protest.

No more hiding. No more slipping through stage doors as if I were allergic to the spotlight. I’d spent too long letting someone else’s name define me, whether it was my dad’s books or Evan’s lyrics.

I needed a name of my own. A career of my own.

And yeah, okay, I wasn’t above using a little nepotism to get there. Honestly, who in this business isn’t?

My dad’s book had just been greenlit for a huge studio adaptation.

River Hale was attached to star. Yes, that River Hale.

The man, the meme, the walking “Before” picture.

He’s a PR disaster wrapped in a package so pretty you almost forget he once sang “Baby Shark” on a red carpet and blamed it on method acting.

For what role? No one knows. No role ever has had the main actor busting into “Baby Shark”.

I pulled every string I could. Dad, Mom, Grant, the whole family tree. I pitched one of my songs for the soundtrack.

I know. The irony isn’t lost on me. Breaking up with Evan to find myself, then immediately nepo-baby my way onto a Hollywood soundtrack. Gold star for self-actualization.

But this was my shot. The one I needed. The one I earned, because I fought for every chord and lyric that got me here.

So I made a choice.

I was going to break up with Evan Walker.

I was going to get the soundtrack.

And I was going to become iconic in my own right.

He was waiting for me behind the amphitheater.

Of course he was. He always knew when something was coming, had that weird, almost psychic sense for when I was about to pull away. A weather vane for emotional turbulence.

Same leather jacket. Same dark hair falling into his face because he refused to let anyone style it unless a camera was involved, damp-looking and chaotic, like he’d just dragged his hands through it after a fight with himself.

Same silver hoops in his ears, same little ring glinting at his nose, same chain necklaces stacked at his throat.

Tattoos crawled out of his shirt and up his neck, ink blooming across his collarbones and down both arms in dark, restless fragments: saints, knives, words, monsters, promises.

He looked half-devotional, half-damnation.

His white tank clung to him under an open black leather jacket, the tired arrogance of his mouth, the blue stare that always made me feel pinned and seen and hunted. And of course he was tall, 6’5, which was more than my 5’3 self needed, but I didn’t fall for his height.

He had that same look that made me want to tell him everything and nothing.

Crew noise drifted out from the venue. A shuffle, a clank, the soundtrack of show days.

A couple of stagehands lugged something heavy past the back gate, arguing over whether a cable had been packed in the wrong case.

It was twilight, that golden hour where everything looks like it's auditioning for a music video.

The whole scene felt staged, as if the universe wanted my goodbye to look pretty enough to hurt worse.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said back.

So much for my powerful entrance.

He stepped closer, hands hovering for a beat as if asking permission without words. When I didn't pull away, he closed the distance and hugged me.

And I let him. God, I let him.