by Elle Greco
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
I snapped up my beer before he kicked it over.
“Begging,” he said, giving me a wink. He motioned to the bartender to turn the music down, which was met with a few choice words shouted by a number of drunk and ornery patrons.
“Nikki Benson,” Dion bellowed.
“Oh God,” I whispered before I shrunk into the corner of the booth.
“Please come to Vegas with me,” he continued. Now the drunk patrons started wolf whistling.
Cell phones came out. In a matter of minutes, this entire exchange was going to be plastered all over the internet, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Please, girl, I’m begging you. Rogue Nation is nothing without you. I am nothing without you.”
Dion was half crooning in a bad impression of a lovesick Elvis Presley. I slumped farther down in the seat. A crowd formed around the booth. Descending into a portal of hell would be more comfortable than this.
“Please, Nikki darlin’, and you know I don’t beg. Ain’t no one in the world like you. And I’d be a fool to let you goooo.”
He drew out the last syllable, and the audience whooped.
“I am nothing without you, babe. Come on back home.” He ended that on his knees, an arm outstretched toward me. “Please, Nik. Rogue Nation needs you in Vegas.”
“Well, what’s it gonna be, Nikster?” Dom shouted from the crowd. “You goin’ back on tour or what?”
The bar crowd started chanting “Rogue” over and over, telling me where they stood.
I inhaled the stale beer and fifty years’ worth of nicotine embedded in the walls. “If I do this, we establish rules.”
Dion bowed to the audience with a flourish, a cocky grin on his face. The crowd exploded in a burst of applause and whistles.
He slipped off the table and back into the booth. “The great thing about rules, Nik,” Dion said, hitting me with a wink and a smile that nearly undid me, “is that they can be broken.”
19
I took to the Hard Rock stage in a brutal mood, and my drums took a literal beating. But I worked out my angst on my kit, and the love we got from the audience was magnetic. With Dion preening for the crowd and Rafe lost in his jams, I wondered why I ruined such a great thing by messing around with Dion. Rogue Nation was a kick-ass band. I mean, had Fleetwood Mac taught us nothing?
But as my drums kept time with Dion’s singing, as his lithe body strutted across the stage, my hormones threatened to take over. When he flashed me his wicked smile, it was all I could do to stay upright on my stool. My mind wandered to that night in the motel, the two of us twined around each other. I forced myself to remember what a mistake that was, and resolved to be pissed through the rest of the set. The audience loved it.
The set ended, and we stepped offstage to thunderous applause. I expected the roadies to work their magic and do their speedy breakdown of the gear, but instead, we were dragged back out for an encore. I looked out at the crowd, a mass of bodies, all on their feet. Screaming for Dion. Screaming for Rafe. Screaming for me.
I started to settle back behind my drums, when Dion’s voice broke through the noise.
“Oh no, you don’t, Nik,” he boomed into the microphone. “You come on up here.”
My stomach dropped when the crowd screamed even louder and he led them in a chant. “Nikki! Nikki! Nikki!”
I climbed out from behind my kit but hovered just in front of my kick drum, several feet behind him. He put the mic in the stand and picked up his acoustic guitar.
“Nik wrote this song with her other band, Satan’s Sisters. You may have heard of them,” he said, and the audience screamed their response. “She wrote this on the tour bus,” he continued, tuning the guitar while he talked. “I thought it was an awesome song. Then they started talking about selling it. And I said, ‘Hell, Rogue Nation’ll buy it if Nik will sing it.’” He twisted his torso toward me and winked. “Ready, babe?”
With the spotlight on me, my eyes went wide. I clamped my mouth shut and gave a quick shake of my head.
“I think she needs some encouragement,” he called to the crowd. Cheers erupted, and the chants started up again. He left the mic and loped over to me. “You’ve got this. And I’m right beside you. I won’t let you fall.”
“Dion,” I whispered, my head moving in a slow back-and-forth. “No.”
And that’s when he did it.
He took my hand. Wrapping his free arm around me, he pressed me into his side. Then his mouth covered mine, and before I could think, I lifted my hands to his chest and let Dion take my breath away. The roar of the crowd seemed distant as Dion’s tongue danced its way into my mouth, his hand resting in the dip of my lower back. When we finally broke apart, the sounds of the theater rushed over us, electrifying me to my toes.
“You got this, baby,” he repeated.
Struck stupid by that kiss, I swallowed my fear and took the mic. He opened with the haunting chord progression, and my voice warbled out the first few notes. The crowd went quiet, and my heart raced. I was losing them. I glanced at Dion. He pressed on with the music, building the song. I caught the beat, matched him, and found my voice. He smiled at me as we hit the first note of the chorus, and the crowd erupted. I felt them deep inside me, in my bones. Their pleasure, their excitement, their approval that bordered on worship. Their energy seeped into me, mixing with my blood and pulsing through my body. I closed my eyes, letting the audience drive me forward, giving them exactly what they wanted, exactly what they needed.
“Take us home, Nik,” Dion called out to me, then we shared the microphone on the final chorus. Once he played the end notes, he pulled me into him and kissed me again in front of the crowd.
And they all lost their shit.
And once I extracted myself from Dion’s embrace, I lost mine.
I stepped back, chest heaving, brain in a post-gig, post-kiss stupor. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was exactly why I walked away from the tour. Walked away from Satan’s Sisters. Walked away from my goddamn dream.
Dion inched toward me, hand out, reaching for mine. “Nik.”
I jerked away from him. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes, and my chin trembled. The crowd was still yelling, screaming, chanting “Rogue” over and over. Like this was all part of the show.
Before the crowd cottoned on, Dion turned to the audience and gave them a wave and a “Thank you and good night!” Then he swept me into his arms and whisked me off the stage. Rafe met us in the wings, and his face was pure fury.
“What the fuck, both of you,” he exploded at his brother. “I thought you were done with this nonsense.”
I pushed my way out of Dion’s arms, which were tight around me. “You and me both,” I snapped.
Rafe continued to rage. “What the fuck is even wrong with you? This was our shot. This was going to fix that disaster of a tour.”
“Did you hear the goddamn crowd? They loved it,” Dion fired back.
Rafe’s hands shot in the air, and for a minute, I thought he was going to punch Dion. “This is not about the crowd. This is about the fucking band. And not doing shit that will break us up!”
“It’s not like that,” Dion argued.
“No? What’s it like, then?” Rafe’s chest expanded, and he stepped up, going toe-to-toe with Dion. “You going to tell there won’t be a groupie in your bed next month? Next week? Hell, maybe even tonight? You never play the long game, Dion. And Nikki? She needs to be the long game.”
Rafe’s hard truths scored through me, burning deep into my soul. My composure cracked, and the tears I’d managed to hold back leaked out. I booked it backstage, the tears coming so fast they nearly blinded me. I thought I heard Dion yell my name, then Rafe yelling back at him to leave me be. Roadies brushed against me, jostling me, so busy setting up for Anthem that they didn’t notice I was flailing. I hit the back wall and fumbled along, my palms searching along the rough cement.
Finally, my hand hit something smooth and steel. A door. The stage door. Escape. I shoved it open and tumbled outside. Freedom. I sucked in a breath, and the dry heat of the desert filled my lungs.
I rubbed my palms against my cheeks, wiping away tears mixed with sweat. After the noise of the concert venue, the quiet in the alley felt foreign. I bent over, hands on my knees, breathing deep.
The sound of clapping punctured the silent night.
“Sounds like that was quite an encore.”
I lifted my eyes and saw a familiar figure slip out from behind a dumpster.
My heart plunged to my stomach as he took a step toward me. Jordan.
I took another breath. “What are you doing here? Devlin booted you off the tour.”
“Thanks to you,” he said, a small snarl playing at his lips. I reached behind me, reaching for the handle of the door but only touching air. “I saw you in LA. Followed you. Always with Panic Station. Dominic. One of your sisters. I probably could have grabbed you then. But I was waiting.”
I eyed him, red flags waving every-damn-place. “Waiting for what?”
“To do this in front of a very special audience of one,” he said. He brandished a cell phone and, with one hand, pressed a button and lifted it to his ear.
“Dev’s going to shit if he sees you,” I said, my hand still grasping behind me. He looked nonplussed about that.
“Dion, it’s Jordan. Remember me? I hope you check your messages because I have something of yours that you may want to collect,” he said. He held out the phone with a sneer. “Say hello, Nikki.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I spat.
“Nice mouth,” he said, bringing the phone back to his ear. “I’m not playing, Davis. This all ends. Now.”
He ended the call and shoved his phone in his back pocket.
“What ends now?” I asked.
He ignored that question. “You just had to tell them, didn’t you?”
“Tell them?” I snapped. “You gave me something a hell of a lot stronger than aspirin. I ended up in the hospital. You think they were just going to let that go?”
“Well, now they’re talking about charging me as an accessory to murder,” he said, circling around me. He was covered with a sheen of sweat, and I caught a whiff of his sharp odor every time he moved.
“For murder?” I asked. “I didn’t die.”
“Are you that fucking stupid?” he asked. “Kyle. They’re saying I provided him with the smack that killed him. Can you believe that shit?”
“Did you?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
I shivered. I was pretty certain I knew the answer.
“And you know who lined up all this shit to take me down?” he asked. My heart slammed so hard against my chest I thought it would explode. “Your boyfriend.”
I swallowed. “What boyfriend?”
“Dion,” he said, snarling the name. “That prick.”
“Jordan,” I started, my voice hesitant. “Maybe if you just talked to a lawyer…”
His eyes met mine. “I don’t need a lawyer. I just need you.”
I swallowed. “I don’t know what use I could be. But a lawyer—”
“He may be untouchable,” Jordan interrupted. “But you’re not.”
That did it. I wasn’t hanging around waiting for this guy to do something really psycho. I turned, grabbed the handle of the backstage door, and yanked. But it was locked up tight.
“Shit,” I whispered. I heard a chuckle and then the ominous click.
I turned and saw him pointing a gun at me.
Trying to keep from panicking, I looked down the empty alleyway. Anthem’s big rig was parked at the end. They were changing over the stage. There had to be a roadie coming through any minute now.
“Come on, Jordan. I thought you were a friend,” I stalled.
“We could have been friends,” he said, stepping closer. “But then you shit all over that.”
I pressed my back against the locked door and watched as the security lighting sparked off the metal of the weapon as it came closer. “Rogue Nation—Dion, Rafe—they’ll be pissed if you hurt me.”
“That’s the point, Nik,” he said, his voice like shards of ice. “If Rogue Nation didn’t hurt me, I wouldn’t have to hurt them. Don’t you see? They didn’t give me a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” I said, trying to reason with him.
The back of his hand struck my cheek with such force my head whipped back. The base of my skull knocked against the wall. The rough concrete scraped the skin on my back as I slid to the ground.
“If you had just kept your damn mouth shut, Nikki. Why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut?”
My unfocused eyes tried following him as he paced the alleyway. He was in a full-blown rant about my overdose, and in my haze, I tried to follow his logic. He’d supplied Kyle, but that didn’t mean it was his smack that killed him. He never would have been found out if it wasn’t for my body not being able to handle that dose of Oxy (yes, really). Dion had hired a hotshot legal team to get to the bottom of Kyle’s death, and Gary Grimm had left him pissing in the wind.
Grimm?
A wave of nausea slammed into me, and I tried to keep my panic level down, along with my preshow orange slices. I sucked in a breath just as the backstage door slammed open.
“Nik? You out here?” Dion called out as he stepped through the door.
“Grab the door!” I yelped, but then I heard the fast slam of the metal, and I knew it was futile. Now, both of us were stuck out here with a gun pointed in our direction.
“What the fuck?” He raised his hands and then glanced down at me. “Nik, you okay?”
“Hanging in there,” I said, my breath shallow.
“You got a nasty welt on your cheek,” he said, crouching down. He clasped my chin in his hand and studied my face, completely ignoring the guy with the gun.
“Yeah, and my head kind of hurts. It hit the wall,” I said, following Dion’s lead to ignore the guy with the gun, because I had no idea what else to do.
“What about you, Jordan?” he asked, his head tipping up to finally acknowledge the gun-toting psycho. “You doing okay?”
“Fuck you, Davis.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dion muttered.
Fury settled into Jordan’s face, and I cringed and ducked when he swung the gun between the two of us.
“Whatever this is about,” Dion continued, “Nik had nothing to do with it. Let her go. This is between you and me.”
“You know I can’t do that, man,” Jordan said. “You know I can’t touch you. I’d be dead before your body was even cold. But her? I can touch her, and you’ll have to live with the fact that she died because of untouchable you.”
“Come on, man, you know that’s not true.”
“It is, it is true,” Jordan said, his voice going up an octave, which made him sound unsure.
“You think because Vince is my dad he won’t be upset if you shoot Nikki?” Dion sounded so calm, so assured. I would have marveled at it if my head didn’t feel like it was splitting open and there wasn’t a gun pointed at me.
“You’re the golden god,” Jordan spat out.
“Jordan, think about what you’re doing here, man,” Dion said.
“I have thought about it. And if she didn’t fuck everything up, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Dion crouched beside me, partially blocking the gun trained on me with his body. “She didn’t fuck anything up. You gave her Oxy. She thought it was aspirin and mixed it with booze.”
Jordan’s voice went up another octave. “So you pinned Kyle’s OD on me?”
“
“You supplied Kyle, and we have proof.”
The gun swayed as Jordan tried to aim it so I would be the only one hit. “I didn’t put that needle in his arm.”
“You may as well have,” Dion said.
“Fucking Grimm. It’s his fault. It’s h
is goddamn fault.”
Dion twisted his body toward Jordan. “What does Grimm have to do with this?”
Jordan was back to pacing, barking out “fuck you” and “fuck Grimm” as he went.
“What does Grimm have to do with this?” Dion repeated. This time it was more of a shout.
“Dion,” I mumbled. I dropped my aching head into my hands. Jordan’s jerky movements made me nauseous, and I couldn’t focus my eyes anymore.
“Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” Dion said. His strong arms lifted me up off the ground.
I reached up and touched the back of my head. It was sticky. “Dion?” I repeated. His strong arms held me close.
“You’re okay,” he whispered before turning his attention back to Jordan. “You mind pointing that thing in another direction?”
“I can’t get to you, but I can get to her,” Jordan repeated, and even through the fog that was building in my head, I noted how amped-up he was.
“Jordan—”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Jordan said. He lifted the gun up and pressed the butt against his forehead. “I can’t think. I need to think.”
“Come on, Nik,” Dion said. He wrapped my arm around his waist. “Let’s get you inside.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” Jordan yelled.
A crack boomed through the silent alley. The smell of gunpowder hit my nose, and Dion gave me a hard shove and pushed me out of the way.
The burning pain that ripped through my abdomen was so intense that I didn’t feel the hard pavement as I dropped face-first to the ground. I curled into myself and pressed my hand against the pain. Something wet and warm seeped through my fingers.
My eyes lifted, and in my haze, I watched Dion tackle Jordan. He knocked the gun from Jordan’s hand, and it skittered in my direction. I released my hand from my side and reached for it, my sticky hand wrapping around its still-hot muzzle.
My ears trained to the sound of the heavy security door opening. I lifted my head and croaked out “Dion” to get his attention. We didn’t want the door to close again, did we?
