AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
My name echoed aroundthe stadium...the auditorium...the concert hall. It didn’t really matter which. One building was the same as any other. It’d been this way for the last five years since I was sixteen–every concert sold out to a faceless crowd and the black lights that hid them from me.
I'd long since stopped the stage crew from putting up the lights, unwilling to turn the monstrous mass thrumming my name into recognisable people, unwilling to see those faces and to put names together on rare occasion.
The same way I stopped asking names of the girls my manager sent to my dressing room after every show.
Energy roared through me as the crowd fluctuated, bouncing with me from song to song, their cacophony almost overtaking the music, but not quite.
I sank into the last bars of the lyrics as the lights blacked out, my mouth forming words I no longer heard or listened to.
Numbed.
A beer pressed into my hand as I walked offstage, the masses screaming for an encore I wouldn't give.
I never did. No encores for the crowds, no encores for the girls. One night events only. My life brought down to two hours of darkness, and the anonymity that came after I learned to hate myself for.
No encores. Not once. Not for anyone.
Not ever.
CHAPTER ONE
XOAN
The crowd cheered as I fell into the familiar rhythm of one of my favourite covers,Black Hole Sunby Soundgarden. Apparently I picked well, as the hyped crowd in Rippton U’s overly expensive Bennett Stadium sang along. The thing had been built thanks to the lacrosse’s captain’s filthy rich tithe, but that was the state of us all at Rippton U.
I was no exception.
But I could shutter it all out, pretend I was nothing but the starving artist I suspected I’d be without my family’s backing, and justplayed.
And the crowd sang.
My brain might be releasing all the happy endorphins and chemicals, but right now, the only thing that was responsible for my peace wasthem. The people singing back to me at the other side of the stage, their voices rising around the stadium.
They were why I sang, and for me.
