A Wicked Song - Lisa Renee Jones Page 0,84
push me away. She told me I’d have to fight for him. And she was right. As if I’ve willed her presence, she opens the door and catches my hand. “We need to take our seats. You need to be there for him. He’ll know. It will matter. Come.”
I nod and hurry forward and out into the dark room where an usher with a flashlight helps us to our seats in the front row. Dramatic lights start flickering and my heart starts to race. The audience's excitement expands in the room. The sound of a violin touches everyone’s ears, teasing us all, before the lights come on. Kace is center stage. He commands that stage. He begins to play dark, heavy music, Black Sabbath at one point, AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” The more classical but sinister “Dark Waltz.” But it’s all beautifully dark. All of his anger, his passion, his pain come through that instrument and flows to Chris’s paintbrush. Chris paints a storyboard of a hurricane-brushed night in San Francisco with haunting images of people rushing through the streets, fighting the force of wind. I watch and listen in wonder as does everyone else. I now know how Kace performed the night his parents died. I need a violin in my hands right now. I need you to understand that. The violin is how he grieved and survived. When the performance is over he and Chris claim their seats with me and Sara. Kace sits next to me but he doesn’t touch me. I touch him though. I take his hand and it’s not until the bid on the violin goes ridiculously high that his hand closes around mine. The three paintings Chris created are next and the bids go nuts, once again. As soon as Chris’s auctions are over, Kace stands and takes me with him, heading for the door.
We enter the hallway and Savage is there waiting on us. “Let’s go,” Kace says, pulling me down the hallway. Chris is suddenly here with us, too, and the hallway is just wide enough for him to step to Kace’s side and grab his arm. “Wait. Man, I know this isn’t how you wanted this to go down, but it did. It’s here. It’s now. Tell her everything. Just tell her. Tell her and face it together.”
“Let go of me, Chris,” Kace orders.
“Not yet.”
Kace shocks me by shoving him against the wall. “I said let go of me.”
“You want to fight,” Chris challenges. “You want us both to screw up our hands? Maybe you do. You’re on a mission to punish yourself, but you’re punishing her, too. I’ve been here, man. You know I have. It goes no place good.”
Seconds tick by and Kace steps back from him and scrubs his jaw, cursing under his breath. He grabs my hand again, and starts walking, charging toward the exit and I have to double-step to keep up. He all but blasts through the exit and thankfully the SUV is waiting on us. Adrian is leaning on the door and quickly straightens.
“Behind you,” Savage says, as Adrian opens the door for us.
Kace pulls me in front of him and I climb into the backseat. He follows but he’s back to not touching me. I’m insanely aware of him not touching me, too. Savage and Adrian climb inside the front of the vehicle and Adrian sets us in motion. “Someone needs to pack up our room,” Kace says. “We’re going to the airport. I need the plane ready now.”
I rotate to face him. “No. No, we are not going home tonight, Kace.”
“We’re going home, Aria. Decision made.”
“Because it’s your life, not our life?”
“Because it’s the right decision.”
“For who? Alexander? He wanted to get to you. He did. He wanted to destroy us, you’re trying to let him. Do not do this.”
“We both need out of this city.”
“What we need is to talk.”
“No,” he says. “No, we really do not need to talk.”
“Damn it, Kace. I love you.”
He grabs me and pulls me around and half in his lap. “I told you not to say that.”
“I love you, but right now you’re letting all the wrong things control you.”
“You don’t know what this is, Aria.”
“Because you won’t tell me. And because you didn’t, you gave him the chance to burn us. Don’t let him win.”
He sets me back down in the seat. “Airport. Turn up the radio.”
Savage flicks us a look and turns up the radio. Kace’s rejection twists and turns inside me,