Page 27 of Ravaged For You

The band’s manager, Lucas, spots me and heads straight on over.

Oh, shit. They really want me to present this half-assed report to them, don’t they?

I hastily step away from my desk to greet the band. They all look very grim, and I know that the next hour is going to be difficult.

“Hello, Maddie,” Lucas says.

“Hello. Bad day, isn’t it?”

The manager sighs. “Bad day.”

I face each member of Ravaged in turn, eventually settling on Axel himself. His green eyes shine back at mine.

And then I speak, mustering up all my courage to address these incredibly famous men.

“Let’s do this meeting then, shall we?”

13

AXEL

The tea girl – what was her name again – throws me shade from the minute I step into the office. Oh, I know that look of disgust on her face. She’s not very good at being subtle. But despite her scornful shots aimed in my direction, I have to admit she’s pretty cute. In a nerdy sort of fashion.

I sense her eyes trawling my body up and down in resigned revulsion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have sex. Whoop-de-do.

She’s probably too highly strung to have even touched a member of the opposite sex, let alone have the level of fun I had last night.

I sigh at the girl and turn to my bandmates for support. I want them to see how obvious the girl is being before we’ve even started this stupid meeting. They ignore me.

Okay, so the rest of Ravaged didn’t take too kindly to the sex tape this morning. Things got quite… heated between me and my bandmates. But despite their condemnations, there’s no doubt that they won’t stick by me. We’re brothers, not by blood but by equally deep bonds, and we weather whatever storms get thrown our way. Together.

Lucas, meanwhile, is taking this all as some sort of managerial crisis. He doesn’t give a shit about the contents of the footage – no judgment at all – he’s simply purely focused on what we can do to recover from this scandal.

A scandal of my own making.

Why was I so stupid as to trust that emo girl?

Now my bare ass is on every fucking screen on the fucking planet. It’s a good ass, sure, but I still don’t want every fucker in the world to admire it.

I knew my playboy antics would turn around and bite me on the ass one day. Turns out it did, in quite a literal way.

The paparazzi were waiting ravenously for us outside my hotel. I didn’t breathe a word to them as I strolled to be chauffeured limousine. They followed us here to the stupid marketing agency, trying to catch me out with their stupid gotcha questions.

Facing my fellow bandmates outside this building was one of the worst things this morning. The looks on their faces… I know I fucked up.

And Drake gave me hell for it. He pulled me aside from the rest of Ravaged outside the office and gave me a real talk-down.

“The band is the most important thing, Axel,” he told me. Deadly seriously. “The band is everything.”

“I know.”

Fuck. He’s right. Ravaged is our heart and soul. Our fucking baby.

I’d do anything for my boys. I’d do anything to save our band.

But I’m not going to admit publicly that any of this was my fault. Especially not with this fucking tea girl and her boss.