The rehearsal was Otis's idea. Full team presentation — label reps, producers, A&R people from LA with expensive shoes and expressions that said they were already calculating costs. The venue was empty except for sixty folding chairs on the arena floor, and the band set up on a stripped-down stage. No lights, no pyro. Just instruments and the new material laid bare for the people who would decide whether it had a future.
Aiden played three of his own songs first. The ones he'd written on hotel notepads with shaking hands and crossed-out words. They were rougher than anything Hollow Saints had released — less polished, less produced, more alive.
I stood in the wings with my arms crossed and watched the label reps' faces and tried to read the verdict in the angle of their eyebrows. A woman in the second row leaned over to the man beside her and said something. He nodded. I couldn't tell if the nod was good or bad and my stomach was doing things that had nothing to do with breakfast.
Then the duet. Aiden looked offstage, found me in the wings, and tilted his head — the smallest gesture, an invitation disguised as a question. I walked out. The folding chairs shifted as sixty people recalibrated their understanding of what this presentation was.
I took the mic he'd set up beside the piano and we played the song we'd written together in his suite the morning after — the one about silence and fake lakes and two voices finding each other across a divide neither of them had built.
My voice came out steady. His melody underneath, my harmony above, and the song did what it always did — became a thing larger than either of us could make alone. I forgot the folding chairs and the label reps and the deal.
For three minutes and forty seconds there was only the music and the man at the piano and the fact that our voices fit together like they'd been designed for the same architecture.
The last chord faded. Silence. Then applause — real, not polite, the sound of people who'd come expecting a pitch and gotten something they hadn't prepared for. Aiden's eyes found mine from the piano bench and his face did the thing I'd started cataloging — the unguarded flash, quick and devastating, the face underneath the face.
We came offstage into a green room filled with handshakes and conversations I half-heard, and then a man I didn't recognize was standing too close. Session musician — tall, dark-haired, easy confidence. He put his hand on my arm like he'd been invited.
"That voice." He was leaning in, the way men lean when they want you to know they're leaning. "Where has Otis been hiding you? That kind of talent doesn't just appear."
I opened my mouth to respond — something professional, something deflecting — but the temperature in the room dropped three degrees before I could speak. Aiden materialized beside me. Not walked over. Materialized — the way a storm arrives, sudden and atmospheric, changing the pressure in the room without making a sound.
His hand found the small of my back. Not possessive. Territorial. The distinction was thin enough to cut yourself on.
"Marcus." Aiden's voice was pleasant in the way a blade is pleasant when it's still in the sheath. "Thanks for sitting in on the session. I think we're good here."
Marcus looked at Aiden's hand on my back. Looked at Aiden's face. Made a calculation that took two seconds. "Great session, man. Incredible material." He nodded at me. "Seriously — that voice." Then he was gone.
Aiden's hand stayed on my back for three seconds after Marcus left. Then he removed it and walked toward the corridor without looking at me.
I followed. Because I was his keeper and because I was furious and because the hand on my back had sent heat through my spine that I was absolutely not going to examine while I was this angry.
"What was that?" I caught him in the corridor — narrow, concrete, the backstage artery that connected the green room to the dressing rooms. He was walking fast, jaw set, hands in his pockets.
"Nothing." He didn't turn around, didn't slow down. The word hit the concrete walls and bounced back hollow.
"It wasn't nothing." I grabbed his arm. He stopped. Turned. The corridor was barely wide enough for two people to stand facing each other and his breathing was ragged and his eyes had the flat, dangerous quality they got when something had cracked the surface and the real thing underneath was showing through. "What am I to you?"
His jaw worked. The question hung between us in the narrow space, bumping against the concrete walls, too big for the corridor.
"You want to know what you are to me?" His voice was low and rough and the words came out like they'd been torn from somewhere deep. "You're the girl Otis hired to be my battery. You told me that yourself. You wrote songs for me because a man in a suit told you to, and you kept it secret for weeks while I was —" his voice cracked, a fracture running through the sentence like a faultline "— while I was falling in love with you thinking every word you gave me was a gift."
The corridor went silent. My heart was hammering against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat. Falling in love with you. He'd said it like a wound, not a confession.
"I told you the truth." My voice was barely steady but my eyes didn't leave his. "I didn't have to."
"No. You didn't have to." He stepped closer. The corridor shrank. "But you did it after. After the songs. After the door. After —" He stopped himself. His hands were shaking at his sides and when he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, rawer, the anger peeling back to show something worse underneath.
"How do I know any of it was real, Allison? How do I know you're standing in that corridor because you want to be and not because a man is paying you to be? How do I know the duet wasn't part of the deal? How do I know —" His jaw locked. He looked away.
When he looked back his eyes were wet and furious and the fury was aimed inward, not at me. "I've spent my whole life sitting in rooms that don't belong to me. Eating food that wasn't for me. Singing words that weren't mine. And then you showed up and I thought — finally. Something real. Someone who's here because they choose to be."
His voice broke on choose. Not cracked — broke, the way a bone breaks, clean and complete.
"And you were. And you weren't. Both. At the same time." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "So don't ask me what you are to me. Because I know exactly what you are and I can't say it out loud because the second I do, I have to ask myself whether you'd still be here if Otis hadn't put you here. And I can't survive that answer."
"You are mine," he said finally. The word landed like a stone in still water. A pause stretched between us — his throat moved, his eyes dropped to the floor, and when he spoke again his voice had retreated behind something I recognized. The armor. "...my sitter. First of all."
First of all. The phrase hung — an admission disguised as a dismissal, a door opened and immediately slammed shut. I heard what he almost said and what he chose instead, and the gap between those two things was the exact shape of his fear.
"Fine." My voice was ice. "If I'm just your sitter, don't call me. Don't ask me for anything. Don't come to my room. Don't touch me." I stepped back. Let the inch of space between us become a foot, then a yard. "Don't put your hand on my back like you own something you're too afraid to claim."
I turned. Walked away. He didn't follow. My footsteps echoed in the corridor and his silence echoed louder and I didn't look back because looking back would mean seeing his face and seeing his face would mean forgiving him before he'd earned it.
But you know. The thought arrived halfway to my dressing room, unwanted and precise. From the crack in "mine." From his voice breaking on "choose." He's not angry about the deal. He's angry because you were the first real thing he ever had and real things aren't supposed to come with contracts. I stopped walking. Pressed my hand against the corridor wall. You were both. That's what he can't forgive yet.