Page 19 of Unleashed By Eden

He can try. I know exactly how that will go. Liam might manage his career, but he’s still my brother, and there are some lines he would happily light on fire before crossing.

“Not if Liam wants to see me again.” It’s a bitchy thing to throw at him, but whatever. I’m not backing down.

“We can’t leave it like this, Vi,” he pleads.

“Yes, we can. Just go, Carter. I don’t care.” I roll my eyes for good measure. It’s a lie so big I’m surprised it fits in my mouth. “You haven’t crossed my mind once,” I add, twisting the knife.

He holds my gaze, and I can’t tell whether my hit landed or missed completely.

“Okay, Vi.” He nods. “Have a nice life. Take care.”

He gives me a small chin-lift, then stretches those long legs and stands. I shift back on my knees to make space. He steps around me, hands sliding into the pockets of his ripped jeans.

I watch him walk across the club, watched by other people for entirely different reasons, then he disappears through Eden’s heavy doors.

I close my eyes and puff my cheeks out.

The nerve of this guy. He gets to stroll in here and ask for what, exactly? Forgiveness, reconciliation, friendship? A redo. Some fucked-up version of closure. A chance to feel like a decent human being before he gets back on his private jet.

And I’m the one left unraveling on the carpet.

This is my home now. Eden scooped me up when I didn’t even know I needed saving. It gave me money, but more than that, it gave me control. A body that finally felt like it belonged to me. A room where people looked at me on purpose, not with pity or that thin, pinched gaze of disgust.

Before, I was invisible.

Here, I’m seen, admired, and desired. And paid. I have worked too hard to build this version of myself to let a blast from my past walk in and knock everything sideways.

I open my eyes, push my palms against my thighs, and rise to my feet. My knees ache a little. But my heart aches more.

I’ll be seeing him soon enough. Butterflies beat wildly in my stomach at the thought. Still, the old Vi is dead and buried. She’s not coming back—not if I have anything to say about it.

Chapter seven

Carter

Drip. Drip.

My hand trembles as the drops hit my left eyeball. I blink rapidly, swipe the excess away with the side of my knuckle, then lift my chin and do the same to the right. The world goes blurry, the mirror smearing into color and light. I pull my lower eyelid down, and there it is again.

The yellow.

It’s faint, but it’s there, clinging to the white of my eyes like a nicotine stain.

“Fuck,” I mutter, scrunching my eyes shut and opening them a few times, trying to blink the fog away.

The bathroom door rattles in its frame as someone thumps it. “Carter, everyone’s ready,” Liam calls.

“Give me five.”

I shove the little bottle of drops into my bag and rake a hand through my hair, trying to tame it but failing. Wild works anyway, it’s what people expect.

It’s officially showtime. The start of ten months of airports and back-to-back concerts bleeding into each other, of sleeping on planes and waking up in time zones my body ignores, of being watched and wanted and never left alone. On top of that, we have a documentary crew glued to our asses, because apparently, it wasn’t invasive enough being surrounded by fans and media in public, we had to let them into the quiet parts, too.

We agreed to it. Sat in a nice office in New York with Liam and our lawyers, thinking it was an awesome idea. It felt like a smart move at the time. Now that the cameras are actually here, it feels less smart and more like signing up to be dissected in HD.

I kill the bathroom light and step out. Liam falls into step on one side as we leave my dressing room, and Chris, our tour manager, slots in on the other. We head down the concrete hallway toward backstage. The vibration from the hyped-up crowd is already seeping through the walls, a low, restless rumble that crawls over my skin.

There’s a group of forty road crew waiting in the loading bay, huddled in clusters around flight cases and cables. These people are the spine of the whole machine. Without them, the lights don’t turn on, the microphones stay dead, and the world never hears a fucking note. The band’s gathered with them, scrolling through their phones, wasting time before the stage call.