Page 37 of Rust of Control

The chorus hit. The full band came in under him, Sy driving the tempo, Kit thick and low, Mara's keys filling the space overhead. The crowd sang the chorus back. They'd had the lyrics for three days and knew them. Hearing twelve hundred people sing the monster beside me had the right smile in a room where Rand was standing was something Jude hadn't let himself imagine and now couldn't look away from.

He found Rand in the crowd during the second verse.

Stage right, near the back bar, watching with an expression that had gone very still. Not the charming posture. Not the disappointed posture. Something underneath both of those, something Jude had seen once before, the night in the car when Rand had thought Jude was asleep and had sat for ten minutes with his face doing nothing at all.

Jude held his gaze for exactly ten seconds. Then he looked back at the crowd and kept singing.

The bridge.

Sy dropped out. Kit dropped out. Mara dropped out. One guitar, Jude's voice, the mic turned up so the room could hear the breath between the words.

He broke three of my ribs and went to dinner. He broke three of my ribs and fixed his tie.

The room went quiet. Not silence. Held breath, twelve hundred people drawing it in at the same moment, a weight that pressed against the walls.

The body's still here.

Four beats of silence. He and Sy had drilled it. Four full beats, the whole room holding.

And it's mine.

He saw Rand move toward the exit during the bridge.

Zain stepped into his path from the left, easy, hands in his pockets, the stillness of a man who didn't need to do anything threatening to communicate that moving forward wasn't an option. Rand recalculated, turned right. Marcus was there. Rand turned toward the main doors. Two crew members stepped in from either side.

No scene. No raised voices. Just a narrowing room, and Rand standing in the middle of it, and onstage Jude's voice climbing through the final verse.

I have his name now. I have all of them.

Nate listened to the song and watched Rand's face and felt nothing clean about any of it. Not satisfaction, not relief. Just the weight of something finally over.

The outro built for three minutes.

He let it. He'd written it that way because the anger needed that long to say what it had to say, and the crowd gave him every second of it, surging on the THIS IS MINE line, twelve hundred voices claiming something, the sound hitting Jude in the sternum with a force he hadn't prepared for.

He sang until the instruments stripped away one by one and it was just his voice, and then silence, and the room held the silence for a long second before it came apart.

He stood at the mic while the crowd gave it back to him and thought about Junior, who didn't have a last name, who'd been at a show on this circuit and trusted a dark room. He thought about Marisol and Theo and Pim and the two sisters. He thought about the seven faces on Ghost's board, and the gap in the timeline that opened the night he walked out the door, and he thought: not enough. Never enough. But something.

He bowed. He walked offstage. Kit grabbed him by the back of the neck, quick and warm, the same as Nate did, and then let go.

The loading dock was a concrete ramp behind the venue, wide enough for two trucks, and Varga's people made their move forty seconds after the house lights came up.

There were six of them, not four. Two had come in through the service entrance during the show. Ghost had them flagged. Jack and Elijah had them from above before the first one reached Jude.

Nate heard the sounds and didn't look. He was already moving toward the stage door.

Behind him: Dray's voice, low and clipped, already calling. The name he gave wasn't the crew. DPD. A detective's name, seven syllables, a number Dray had memorized and kept for exactly this kind of use. Beside Dray, Nate had met him twice, knew him by Jaz's enormous enthusiasm and the focused calm he wore on top of it. Jaz Vail was already talking to Marcus with the attention of a man who'd been in more rooms like this than his current life advertised.

Then the Lords of Darkness MC. Three of them. That was how the Lords showed up. Three, no more, just enough to make clear that the debt from the clubhouse booth had come due and Sovereign had sent people to watch it close.

By the time Nate reached the stage door the loading dock was contained.

The door opened.

Jude came through it with Kit one step behind, both of them intact, Jude blinking in the cold air with sweat cooling at his temples and the eyeliner smudged down his face and his chest still moving hard from the last song.

Nate crossed to him and didn't say anything. He pulled Jude in, one arm around his shoulders, and Jude's forehead dropped against his jaw and they stood in the cold with the city noise all around them and the loading dock going quiet behind them as Zain and Marcus worked the perimeter.