The cracked speaker in Jude’s garage rattled every time the bass kicked in.

We were sitting on the hood of his matte-black 1978 Chevy Nova, parked beside the rehearsal room’s open bay door. A half-empty box of takeout pizza sat between us, but neither of us had touched it. The dashboard radio was tuned to 91.7 The Current, the university station with a broadcast tower so massive its signal covered three neighboring counties.

Right now, it was hosting the exclusive post-showcase live stream for Glass Echo.

"Tyler, your new arrangement on 'Hollow Crown' has climbed straight to number one on the indie charts," the student host said, his tone bordering on worship. "A lot of fans are calling the bridge a generational shift. Where did that vulnerability come from?"

Tyler’s voice came through smooth and golden, dripping with practiced humility.

"Honestly, Mike, it came from survival," Tyler said. "When you're carrying the weight of a whole band, you need a muse who actually understands the cost of art. Lacey was there every second."

A soft, breathy chuckle drifted through the speakers.

"Tyler is too modest," Lacey chimed in. She sounded like she was leaning close to the condenser mic, her voice sweet enough to rot teeth. "We were up until four in the morning in the living room. Tyler had hit a creative wall with the melody, and I just kept humming notes over his shoulder, making peppermint tea, giving him that emotional anchor. That soaring transition in the bridge? That was born right there on the rug between us. We bled for that song."

My fingers curled into my palms.

My fingernails bit into the calluses on my skin, pressing so hard the flesh went numb.

*Peppermint tea.*

I had written that bridge in a freezing utility closet behind a bowling alley where I was working a double shift. My hands had been shaking so hard from caffeine and exhaustion that I’d dropped my pencil three times trying to tab out the modulation. Tyler had been asleep at a hotel, hungover on sponsor champagne.

Beside me, Jude didn't look at the radio. He looked down at my hands.

He watched my knuckles turn bone-white, the muscle in my jaw ticking as Lacey's soft, lilting giggle echoed against the concrete garage floor.

Without a single word, Jude slid off the hood.

He didn't ask questions. He pulled the driver's side door open, hit the ignition, and the Nova's V8 engine roared to life with a concussive blast of exhaust that shook the garage rafters.

He shoved the passenger door wide open.

"Get in," he said.

I didn't hesitate. I threw myself into the cracked vinyl seat and slammed the heavy door shut.

Jude dumped the clutch, and the tires screamed against the damp asphalt as we rocketed out into the rainy evening streets.

***

Ten minutes later, the Nova jumped the curb outside the campus communications tower.

Jude cut the engine, killed the headlights, and threw his door open before the car even stopped rocking on its shocks. He strode toward the glass double doors of the broadcasting wing like a wrecking ball in a leather jacket.

I kept pace right at his hip, the cold rain stinging my face and washing away the last lingering trace of hesitation.

The lobby was empty except for a terrified student intern sitting behind a circular desk. She barely had time to look up from her iPad before Jude pushed through the turnstile and hit the heavy fire doors leading into Studio A.

The red *ON AIR* light glowed like an open wound above the acoustic glass.

Inside the booth, Tyler was leaning back in a leather swivel chair, wearing his tailored blazer, laughing with the host. Lacey sat opposite him, clutching a pair of oversized headphones against her ears, fluttering her eyelashes while the wide-angle livestream camera fed their feed to fifty thousand viewers online.

Jude didn't knock.

He grabbed the lever-handle and wrenched the heavy studio door open.

The pneumatic seal hissed, and the cold draft from the hallway rushed into the soundproofed room.

The student host froze mid-sentence, his eyes going wide behind his glasses. "Wait, what the—we're live—"

Tyler turned his head, irritation instantly hardening across his features. "What the hell are you doing here, Mercer? Security!"

Jude didn't shout. He didn't even look at the host.

He crossed the room in two massive strides, reached over the sound desk, and wrapped his hand around the braided XLR cable feeding directly into Tyler’s broadcast microphone.

With one violent, upward jerk of his forearm, Jude ripped the connection out.

*POP!*

The sudden spike in line voltage sent a deafening crack through the studio monitors, peaking the red digital meters instantly.

Tyler shoved his chair back, his face flushing dark red. "Are you insane?!"

Jude ignored him completely. He grabbed my shoulder with a firm, steady hand and pulled me directly into the center of the booth. He shoved me square into the frame of the primary high-definition livestream camera, right in front of the host's central boom mic.

Jude leaned down, his voice cutting through the ringing static with lethal clarity.

"Tell them who really wrote the bridge to that track, Willa."

The red light on top of the camera pulsed. On the secondary screen, chat messages were scrolling past so fast they were a blur of green and white text.

Tyler lunged across the desk, his voice cracking with sheer desperation. "Cut the feed! Mike, kill the broadcast right now!"

"Don't touch that board," Jude said, stepping between Tyler and the sound engineer, his broad frame casting a heavy shadow over the entire console. His dark eyes dared the terrified kid to breathe wrong.

Lacey sat paralyzed in her chair, her glossy smile completely frozen in place, her mouth slightly parted.

I stepped up to the silver mesh of the microphone.

I didn't shake. I didn't stammer.

"You said you hummed the modulation at four in the morning, Lacey," I said, my voice dead level, cutting through the monitors with absolute clarity. "So tell the listeners what key it transitions into."

Lacey blinked rapidly, her eyes darting frantically toward Tyler. "I... it's an artistic feeling, Willa. I don't need technical jargon to—"

"It drops from D-minor into an augmented B-flat major seventh," I interrupted, leaning closer to the lens. "Tyler doesn't even know how to play that chord because his hands are too small to stretch across the fifth fret without muting the G-string. That’s why I had to track the acoustic rhythm myself at two in the morning."

Tyler gripped the edge of the desk, his knuckles turning white. "She's lying! She’s a bitter ex-member looking for clout!"

"Am I?" I looked straight into the camera. "If you're streaming the master file right now, turn up the high-pass filter on the vocal stem at three minutes and twelve seconds. Right on the downbeat of the bridge."

The host, completely wide-eyed, reflexively hovered his mouse over the digital playback fader.

"Don't you dare touch it!" Tyler snarled, his voice pitching high and ragged.

"Do it," Jude ordered, not moving an inch.

The host clicked the solo button on the vocal channel.

The studio monitors filled with the raw audio of the bridge.

Right at the three-minute mark, just beneath the soaring belt Lacey claimed she had inspired, a faint, rhythmic sound tapped twice in the background.

*Clack. Clack.*

"That's not a drum stick," I told the broadcast. "That's the second-hand click of the wall clock in the laundry closet behind the bowling alley on 4th Street. Tyler had me using an unshielded dynamic mic because he forgot to bring his road gear. And if you isolate track four, you can hear my fingers squeak against the nickel frets, because I was playing with a broken thumbnail."

Silence flooded the booth.

The student host stared at the waveform on his screen, then looked up at Tyler with total, unmasked disgust.

Tyler opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. His face was entirely drained of color, his jaw trembling as he stared at the red tally light blinking above the lens.

Beside him, Lacey slowly sank back into her seat.

Her perfectly curated expression shattered. The delicate, effortless pop-star facade crumbled, replaced by the naked, terrified panic of someone who realized fifty thousand people had just watched her get exposed as a fraud.

The red recording light on the soundboard pulsed like an erratic heartbeat.

It was past two in the morning, and the rehearsal room felt like an oven. The air smelled of burnt dust and sweat, thick and stale enough to stick to the back of my throat. We had run the chorus of the new track six times in a row, pushing the tempo until my fingertips were raw and my ribs ached.

"Again," Jude said from across the rug, his fingers hovering over the fretboard of his Les Paul. "From the downbeat of the second verse. Don't pull back on the transition, Willa. Hit it like you mean to break something."

I gripped the cold steel neck of the mic stand. "I'm ready."

I wasn't.

Felix counted off with four sharp clicks of his drumsticks.

Sam dug into a low, rumbling bassline that vibrated through the floorboards straight into the soles of my boots. Jude struck a discordant, ringing chord, dark and driving.

I opened my mouth to sing.

Nothing came out.

It hit me without warning—a sudden, suffocating wall of ice that slammed into my chest.

The room didn't blur; it narrowed to a pinprick. The air vanished from my lungs as if someone had wrenched a vacuum seal over my mouth and nose. My throat seized, tight and dry, clamping shut like a rusted iron gate.

*Not here,* I thought desperately. *Not now.*

My knees buckled.

The microphone stand clattered against the monitor wedge with a sharp, ugly squeal of feedback. I barely caught myself on hands and knees against the frayed carpet, gasping for breath that simply wouldn't go down.

My vision began to fray at the edges, dark static creeping in.

*You're pathetic, Willa.* Tyler's voice hissed through the ringing in my ears, smooth and condescending. *Your throat always closes when the pressure gets real. You need me to carry you.*

I braced for the sound of someone throwing their pick down in disgust. I waited for the sigh, the cutting remark, the familiar sound of Tyler telling the room to take ten because the broken girl was having another episode.

Footsteps crossed the rug, heavy and purposeful.

They didn't sound annoyed. They were fast.

A shadow fell over me, blocking the glare of the overhead track lights.

Jude dropped to one knee directly in front of me. He didn't hover, and he didn't call out to Felix or Sam to give us space. With a flick of his hand behind him, he signaled the others to kill the sound, and the sudden silence in the room was absolute.

"Look at me," Jude commanded.

His voice wasn't harsh, but it held a low, unshakeable weight that cut right through the panic clawing at my windpipe.

I tried to shake my head, squeezing my eyes shut as a cold sweat broke across my forehead. My hands were shaking so violently I couldn't flatten my palms against the floor.

"Willa. Look at me."

His fingers hooked under my jaw, firm and warm, tilting my face up.

I forced my eyes open.

His dark eyes were locked onto mine, completely devoid of pity. There was no disgust in his face. No disappointment. Just a steady, immovable focus that felt like an anchor dropped into a storm.

With his other hand, Jude reached down, grabbed my trembling right wrist, and pulled my hand up.

He didn't just hold it. He pressed my flat palm hard against his chest, right over the center of his ribcage, directly above his heart.

Beneath the worn, thin cotton of his faded black T-shirt, his skin was scorching hot.

And beneath that heat was a slow, heavy, relentless rhythm.

*Thump. Thump. Thump.*

"Stop listening to your head," Jude said, his voice dropping into a rough, quiet gravel. "Follow my rhythm."

I gasped, my shoulders hitching, my lungs burning for oxygen.

"Feel that?" he murmured, leaning closer. His hand remained pressed firmly over the back of mine, keeping my fingers pinned against the steady rise and fall of his chest. "That's four-four time at sixty beats a minute. Count it. Don't fight it."

*One. Two. Three. Four.*

The beat didn't rush. It didn't waver. It was steady as an iron piston.

"Breathe in," Jude ordered softly.

I drew in a jagged, trembling breath through my teeth. The cold, suffocating clamp around my lungs loosened by a fraction of an inch.

"Hold it."

His thumb brushed gently across the back of my knuckles, keeping me grounded.

"Now let it out."

I exhaled. The ragged shudder that tore through my shoulders was deep, but this time, the air actually left my body.

"Again," he said.

I kept my hand pressed against him, focusing on the dull, solid vibration in his chest until the white noise in my ears began to recede. My pulse, which had been hammering like a bird trapped in a cage, slowly began to decelerate, matching the tempo under my palm.

The room came back into focus.

The smell of dust. The low hum of the tube amps cooling down. The silence between us.

It was only then that I realized how close we were.

Jude was still kneeling inches from me. His grip on my jaw had loosened, but his fingers hadn't left my skin; his thumb rested just below my cheekbone, warm and calloused from steel strings.

His face was shadowed by the dim amber work lights hanging from the rafters. His dark hair was damp at the temples, falling forward over his brow.

Every breath he took ghosted across my mouth.

He was looking down at my lips, his dark eyes clouded with something thick and heavy, completely stripped of his usual defensive bite. The silence stretched between us, electric and precarious, so fragile that the slightest movement would have brought our mouths together.

My breath hitched again—not from fear this time, but from the sudden, dizzying heat that rushed into my blood.

Jude’s jaw tightened. He seemed to realize the shift at the exact same second I did.

He cleared his throat, slowly dropping his hand from my face. He released my wrist, though his chest rose with a sudden, uneven intake of air.

"You're back," he said, his voice returning to its normal, low rasp.

"I'm back," I managed to say, my voice raspy.

Jude stood up, towering over me once more, though he kept his movements deliberate so as not to startle me. He rolled his shoulders, glancing toward the empty control booth. Felix and Sam had slipped out into the alley for a smoke break while we were on the floor.

"You need water," Jude said, running a hand through his hair. "Ice water. I'll get some from the cooler in the lobby."

"Jude, I'm fine—"

"You're not fine. Sit there for two minutes." He didn't wait for an argument. He turned on his heel and pushed through the heavy acoustic door, his boots thudding softly down the corridor.

I sat on the edge of the monitor wedge, rubbing my throat.

The panic had broken, leaving behind a hollow, tired ache in my muscles, but my mind was remarkably clear. That transition in the chorus—the reason my breath had seized in the first place—was too fast. The modulation from the pre-chorus was choking the melody.

I needed to fix the chord chart before Jude came back. If we dropped the transition down a half-step, the vocal line would have room to breathe.

I stood up, my legs still slightly unsteady, and walked over to the small wooden table in the corner where we tossed our lyric sheets.

I found my notebook, but my pen was gone.

I glanced around the dim corner. Sitting on an overturned milk crate beside the mixer rack was Jude's battered canvas backpack, unzipped just enough to show a tangle of patch cables and sheet music spilling out.

"He's got to have a Sharpie in here," I muttered to myself.

I crouched down and pulled the zipper open wider.

I pushed aside a couple of spare nine-volt batteries, a roll of black gaffer tape, and a handful of crumpled draft papers covered in Jude’s jagged handwriting.

Beneath the discarded lyrics, my fingers brushed against a thick, stiff folder.

It was heavy, professional bond paper—not the cheap spiral-bound stuff we used for rehearsal notes.

Curious, I pulled it out to reach the bottom pocket for a pen.

A stark, glossy logo was embossed in silver foil at the top of the crisp white cardstock:

*MERCER ENTERTAINMENT GROUP / MERCER RECORDS.*

Jude's father's label. The corporate machine Jude swore he hated. The machine he claimed he had cut ties with three years ago to play dirty basement gigs.

My eyes drifted down to the bold, capitalized header beneath the corporate seal.

*MASTER CATALOGUE ACQUISITION & PUBLISHING RIGHTS ASSIGNMENT.*

A cold trickle of unease crept into my stomach.

I flipped the cover page open.

There, stamped across the top of the schedule of assets, were the titles.

*"Hollow Crown."*

*"Bleed Through the Static."*

*"Cold Glass."*

*"Paper Armor."*

Every single one. All twelve tracks.

The entire catalogue I had spent two years writing while working graveyard shifts, bleeding into voice memos at three in the morning. Every lyric, every bridge, every modulation Tyler had taken credit for.

Down at the bottom of the execution page was Tyler Vance's sharp, arrogant signature, dated two weeks ago.

And directly opposite it, under the buyer's authorization line, was the signature of the vice president of Mercer Records.

The purchase price was listed in bold ink: *Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.*

Beneath the signatures was a short, typed addendum on Mercer letterhead:

*All master recordings, publishing rights, and associated intellectual property of the aforementioned twelve compositions have been transferred exclusively to the Mercer Records vault. Unreleased stems and original demos to be surrendered to Dead Reckoning's rehearsal facility for executive review.*

The paper trembled in my hands.

My breath, which had only just returned, stopped entirely.

Jude hadn't saved me in that hallway because he believed in my talent.

He hadn't brought me into this studio to get revenge on Tyler.

He had brought me here because his family already bought everything I ever wrote before I even walked out the door.