Chapter 1: The One Who Didn't Look
600 Words
Twenty thousand people were screaming his name.
Kai Voss had never felt more alone.
The lights hit him like a wall of white fire. Below, the crowd moved as one body, one creature with a hundred thousand hands, all of them reaching for him. They knew every word. They always did. He could have stopped singing, and the arena would have carried the song without him, his own voice pouring back out of twenty thousand throats.
He belonged to all of them.
That was the problem.
He crossed to the edge of the stage and the noise turned feral. A girl in the front row sobbed so hard she couldn't stand. Two others held a sign with his face on it, his name ringed in little hand-drawn hearts. He gave them a smile. The one that had sold nine million records.
They screamed louder.
His eyes kept moving.
Past the front row. Past the pit. Up to the press platform where the photographers stood in a cluster of black clothes and long lenses.
He found her without trying.
He always found her.
Elena Reyes wasn't looking at him.
Her camera was up, but not pointed his way. She'd turned it on the crowd instead, on the sea of lifted phones and open mouths, like they were the show, and he was only the thing that made them scream. Dark hair pulled off her face. The same scuffed boots she'd worn for three years.
Twenty thousand strangers would have died to stand where she was standing.
She looked bored.
Kai missed his cue.
Half a second. Nothing. A breath where the next line should have been. The band covered it. The crowd never noticed.
But up on that platform, one face finally turned toward the stage. Elena looked straight at him. And the corner of her mouth curved, like she knew exactly what had just happened and found it funny.
Then she raised her camera and took the shot.
He finished on muscle memory. Did the encore. Did a second one, because the crowd would have torn the building apart otherwise. He thanked the city. He let them love him.
And the whole time, some animal part of his brain stayed locked on the woman in the cheap boots who hadn't clapped once.
Backstage was chaos. It always was. Lanyards and earpieces moved around him in a current, holding out water, towels, a phone with someone important on the line. His manager was talking about numbers. Streaming numbers. Biggest opening night of the tour. A record. Another record.
Kai didn't hear a word.
"Where's the press pool shooting tomorrow?"
His manager stopped mid-sentence. "What?"
"The photographers. From tonight. Who hired them?"
"Kai, you've got a six a.m. flight to—"
"Who hired them?"
A pause. The kind that happened when people were deciding how worried to be. "The label brought in a local agency for the tour. Different crew for each city. Why?"
He didn't answer.
He looked at himself in the black glass of the dressing room mirror. The famous face. The one the whole world wanted.
And he thought about the one girl who'd known that face before it was worth anything.
Before the stadiums. Before the lie that bought him all of this.
The lie that cost him her.
She was in this city tonight. She'd stood forty feet away and photographed everyone but him.
Kai set the towel down.
Three years. He'd spent three years telling himself he was over it. Over her.
He'd find out at six a.m. exactly how big a lie that was.
- Writer
