Chapter Thirty-Two
KILLIAN
“ K illian,” she whispered. “That was beautiful. I … ” Her words trailed off as she moved towards me.
My heart wanted to burst in my chest. She understood. Every word, every note I’d poured into this song—she felt it all.
She grabbed my hands, crushing them in between her tight grip. “I loved it.”
“I was so stupid to walk away from you. I thought I’d never?—”
The studio door crashed open.
Peter stood in the doorway, his face twisted into an expression that made him almost unrecognizable. His eyes darted between us, landing on our intertwined hands. “So it’s true?” he spat, each word dripping with accusation and disdain.
Tris’s fingers tensed in mine. I squeezed back, a silent promise to stand by her side.
“Peter—” Tris started, already taking on that placating tone she always used with him. The one that made my blood boil.
“Three days,” he cut her off. “Three fucking days you’ve been avoiding me.”
Tris flinched.
I positioned myself in front of her. “Don’t be a dick. She doesn’t owe you an explanation.” It was only Monday. Peter the asshole didn’t have a monopoly on her free time.
Peter laughed, the sound hollow. “Of course you’d say that. Getting what you want finally, aren’t you Killian?”
Tris stiffened behind me.
“Don’t,” I warned.
“Peter, stop it,” Tris said, moving to stand beside me.
“Why, Tris?” Peter asked. For a moment, I glimpsed the scared kid beneath the superstar facade. The same kid who’d always been able to charm people to get what he wanted, including Tris’s unwavering devotion. “After everything we’ve been through. Don’t forget how he’s the one who left us.”
“I love how you’re throwing that in my face.” My words escaped before I could stop them, the years of resentment bubbling over. “You mean after you took that contract with Umbria, knowing they were screwing me over? After you let them pit us against each other and didn’t say a word?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Peter snapped.
“It was exactly like that,” I countered. “You knew what they offered me. You knew it was insulting.”
“So what? Is this revenge?” Peter gestured between Tris and me. “Taking away the one person who’s always been there for me?”
“She’s not yours to take,” I said, my voice dangerously low. “She never was.”
Tris placed a hand on my arm. “Both of you, stop.”
Peter’s eyes fixed on that simple touch, and something dark passed over his face. “He’s using you, Tris. To get to me. Why else do you think he’s here? He’s trying to drive a wedge between us. He’s always been jealous?—”
“That’s enough!” Tris’s sharp voice rang through the studio. “Peter, you’ve got it all wrong. God, I’ve loved you since we were kids. You know that. Everyone seems to know that. I followed you to every meeting, every gig, every party. I became your assistant so I could be near you. And you never once saw me.”
Every word she spoke was a physical blow to my heart. Hearing the depth of what she’d felt for him—what part of her might still feel—opened the old, familiar wound.
“So, this is a punishment?” Peter asked.
“No,” Tris shook her head. “This is me finally finding someone who sees me. Who’s always seen me.”
Peter turned to me, his eyes filled with hatred I recognized from years ago—the day I walked away from them. Even if Tris didn’t realize what I was doing that day, he had.
“You’ll ruin her,” he said. “Just like you ruin everything. You couldn’t handle that I was better, that they wanted me more than they wanted you. And when you couldn’t compete, or get your way, you ran.”
The accusation hit a little too close to the fears that still haunted me. Had I run because I couldn’t bear to lose?
Or because I knew deep down he was better?
“I left because I couldn’t watch her love you anymore,” I admitted, the truth tearing from somewhere deep inside. “Because every time she took your side, it broke something in me. So yeah, I ran. I’m not proud of it. I regretted my decision every day.”
I turned to Tris, whose eyes were wide with surprise. We’d reconnected, fallen in love properly this time, but I’d never told her exactly why I’d disappeared from their lives.
“See?” Peter interjected, turning back to Tris. “He left you once. He’ll do it again.”
Fear froze me in its icy grip. The same fear that had prompted me to leave them. What if he was right? What if, when it came down to it, she would always choose Peter in the end?
“That’s not fair,” Tris said, but I could see the doubt flicker across her face.
“Isn’t it?” Peter pushed. “He walked away when things got hard. What happens next time? When the next contract comes through—or it doesn’t—or when you need someone to be there for you?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, but the words felt hollow even to me. Because he was voicing my deepest fear—that I wasn’t enough, that I’d never be enough against the golden boy who’d always had everything I wanted.
Tris looked between us, tears streaming down her face. “I can’t do this. I can’t let your feud tear me apart.”
“Tris—” We both said simultaneously.
The tears filling her eyes stabbed at my gut, forcing me to think about all the years wasted. “Tink, don’t listen to him. He has nothing to do with what we have.”
She bit her lip, indecision warring within her eyes. “It’s not that simple, Killian.”
Frustration and fury ate at me while bitterness lodged itself in my throat and made it hard to swallow. Old feelings of being discarded and not regarded as important enough to be chosen raced through me, making me want to walk away again. “It shouldn’t be that hard either,” I ground out, realizing how unfair that statement was even as the words passed my lips.
“You want me to choose,” she said. “You’ve both always wanted me to choose, haven’t you? I’m finally seeing that now. But did either of you ever think about what I wanted? What I needed?”
The question hung in the air.
“Don’t you get it, Tris?” Peter threw his arm out in my direction. Hostility burned in his gaze. “He only wants to get back at me. He’ll fuck you and then walk away. You don’t mean anything to him.”
Red sheeted my vision as Peter turned what we had into something disgusting and crass.
She grabbed her things. “I need some air.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said, reaching for her hand, trying to clear the rage that burned inside me.
“No.” The finality in her voice stopped me cold. “I need to be alone. Both of you … Just stay away from each other. Please.”
Tris pushed the door open, not noticing when it caught on a nearby chair and didn’t close. She walked out, leaving Peter and me in a silence filled with almost two decades of rivalry, jealousy, and misunderstanding.
The tension in the room thickened.
Peter’s eyes never left mine. “If you fucking hurt her … ”
“I could say the same thing to you,” I cut him off. “You’ve been hurting her for years without even noticing—and if you have, you’re crueler than I thought.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him. “You don’t know anything about us.”
“I know she deserves better than being caught between us like this.” I picked up my guitar, needing something to hold onto. “She deserves better than both of us.”
“On that,” Peter said, his voice bitter, “we might finally agree.”
We stood there, two men who’d known each other since childhood, who’d once been best friends before ambition and love turned us into strangers.
Both terrified of losing the one person who had always believed in us.
“You never deserved her,” Peter said, breaking the silence. “You walked out on her, just like you walked out on your career. Just like you walk out on everything when it gets too hard.”
I set my guitar down carefully, my hands shaking with rage. “At least I fucking saw her. You had her love for years and you never once acknowledged it.”
“What would you know about it?” Peter took a step closer. “You weren’t there. You ran away like a coward.”
The word coward ignited something in me. My past and present collided as I heard the same word echo in my mind, but in my father’s voice. Years of suppressed anger and jealousy burst to the surface. “I watched her for eighteen years wasting her love on someone who didn’t deserve it. On someone who used her and her unconditional devotion like it was nothing.”
“Used her?” Peter’s face flushed a mottled red. “Tris is my best friend. She’s my family!”
“She was in love with you,” I shouted. “And you knew it. You fucking knew it and you kept her close because you wanted the attention.”
Peter’s jaw clenched. “That’s not true.”
“No? Then why are you here now? Because you suddenly realize you love her? Or because you can’t stand the thought of her not worshipping you anymore? Or—because you can’t stand the thought of her with me, your biggest rival?”
Something in his eyes changed. The darkness I glimpsed earlier returned. “You think you know me so well? The truth is, you’ve always been jealous. Jealous that I had the talent. Jealous the label wanted me. Jealous that Tris?—”
“Don’t go there,” my voice hardened.
“—loved me and not you. She’s settling for you because I never wanted her that way.”
There it was. He’d finally admitted it.
I didn’t consciously decide to move. One moment I was standing there by my guitar, the next my fist was connecting with Peter’s jaw. The impact sent a shock wave up my arm, but the pain felt distant, secondary to the white-hot rage consuming me.
Peter staggered back, touching his lip where blood had started to bead. For a split second, shock registered on his face. Then he launched himself at me.
His shoulder caught me in the stomach, driving me backward until I slammed against the soundboard. Dials and sliders dug into my spine as Peter’s fist caught me on the cheek.
“You never could handle the truth,” he spat, drawing back for another punch.
I ducked. His fist grazed my ear, and I pushed him off me with enough force to send him stumbling back. “The truth? You want the truth?” I followed him, grabbing the front of his designer shirt. “The truth is that you’ve had everything handed to you your entire life. Including her love. And you never once earned it.”
He broke my grip and swung again, catching me in the ribs. Pain flared, but my adrenaline dulled it almost immediately. I caught his arm on the next punch and used his momentum to spin him around and push him through the open door.
We spilled out into the hallway. “Fuck you, Killian,” he spat, a spray of blood from his lip getting on my shirt. “I had just as shitty of a life as you did. Just because I tried to make mine better and you didn’t have the strength to stay?—”
I grabbed his shoulder, spun him, and pushed him face-first against the wall. “I walked away because it was killing me to watch her love you,” I growled into his ear. “It was killing me to see you take her for granted. To see you string her along.”
He twisted, breaking free, and his elbow caught me on my cheek. I staggered back. Peter didn’t waste the opportunity. His fist connected with my jaw, snapping my head back.
The metallic taste of my own blood filled my mouth. Through the ringing in my ears, I registered the sound of heavy footsteps rushing towards us. I blinked and found the source, Security guards drew near with Jareth close behind.
“What the hell is going on here?” Jareth’s authoritative demand cut through the haze of my rage.
But Peter and I were beyond listening. We grappled, and fell to the ground, rolling over each other on the floor.
Strong hands grabbed me from behind, pulling me away from Peter. Two security guards I recognized had me by the arms, while Jareth himself stood between us, his tall frame blocking my view of Peter.
“Enough!” Jareth’s voice boomed. “Have you both lost your everfucking minds?”
I struggled against the security guards’ grip, still trying to get at Peter, who was being restrained by the third guard. Blood dripped from his split lip, and a bruise was already forming under his left eye.
“He started it,” Peter said, sounding like the twelve-year-old boy I’d once known.
“I don’t care who started it,” Jareth said. “This ends now.” He looked between us, disgust evident on his face. “This is a professional recording studio, not a boxing ring. I want the two of you and Trissa in my office. Now.”
The mention of her name was like cold water dousing the flames of my anger. My gaze met Peter’s, and I saw the same realization dawn in his eyes.
A gasp echoed in the suddenly quiet space. I jerked my head up to lock eyes with Tris. She stood, frozen at the end of the hallway, her trembling hand clasped over her mouth.
“Let them go,” he told the security guards, who released us but stayed close. “In my fucking office. All three of you!” Jareth barked out, his voice tight with anger.
I straightened my shirt, wincing at the pain in my ribs. Peter dabbed at his bleeding lip with the back of his hand, looking anywhere but at me.
Tris stalked past the two of us, shaking her head, her disappointment evident in the slump of her shoulders. This time I wasn’t leaving her to deal with the emotional fallout of a situation alone. I wasn’t forcing her to make a choice between me and Peter. If I wanted to earn her trust and prove my love for her was real and not payback, it was time to show her I meant it.
Only now, I realized with a sinking feeling, we both might have driven her away for good.