I was halfway through my third stale donut of the night when the universe decided to ruin me.
“Lyla, stop chewing like you live under a bridge,” Max called from the live room, all faux-charm and nicotine breath through the talkback mic. “We’re punching in the chorus again. Our ‘artist’”—he air-quoted the word like it offended him—“needs to sound like she actually feels something.”
I wiped sugar dust off my jeans and slid my headphones back on. “Maybe she’d feel more if you paid her,” I muttered, not quite under my breath.
The intern on the couch snorted. Max didn’t hear. Or he pretended not to.
The track started, another mid-tempo breakup anthem for an Instagram model whose voice would be tuned within an inch of its life—or replaced by mine altogether. I slipped into the melody without thinking. My body knew the drill: straighten spine, relax jaw, deliver ache.
I hit the first line and watched my nameless reflection in the glass between me and the control room. Dark curls shoved into a messy bun, mascara smudged from the twelve-hour session, cheap hoodie I bought in college. The girl behind the glass looked tired and a little feral, like if anyone offered her a way out, she’d take it and never look back.
That should’ve been my warning.
“Good,” Max said when we finished the third take. “Almost like you’ve actually had your heart broken. Again, but with more air on the word ‘never.’ Like you’re suffocating.”
“Love that for me,” I said, stepping out of the booth. My throat burned from pushing emotion into words that weren’t mine. “Can I at least get a credit on this one?”
He laughed like I’d delivered the joke of the year. “You get twenty bucks and free donuts. Aurora Sound doesn’t stick names on demos, you know that.”
Aurora Sound. The monolith on the hill. The label whose rooftop I could almost see if I leaned out the studio’s cracked window and squinted up at the glittering skyline. The place I’d been dreaming about since I moved to LA with a suitcase, three songs, and a completely unjustified sense of destiny.
I took the twenty in crumpled bills and shoved them into my backpack. Rent was due in a week. Nora had already started leaving passive-aggressive Post-its on the fridge about the electric bill.
“Hey.” Max’s tone shifted. Greasier, somehow. “Don’t say I never did anything for you. I got you on the list tonight.”
I blinked. “The list for what?”
He jerked his chin toward the flat-screen replaying a glittery interview on mute. An anchor’s lacquered smile, subtitles screaming: LIVE FROM THE AURORA SOUND SPRING GALA.
I felt my stomach flip. “Shut up.”
He smirked. “One of my old buddies does sound. They had a last-minute cancellation on a staff ticket. I told him I had a girl who could pass for not-embarrassing. You’re welcome.”
Heat rose up my neck. “As what? Coat check?”
“As nobody,” he said bluntly. “You’ll stand in the shadows and pretend you’re too cool for selfies. But you’ll be inside Aurora, Hayes. That’s more than most of the delusional TikTok kids get.”
He slid a laminated pass across the console. The Aurora logo—sleek silver A cutting through a ring of light—glinted in the fluorescent glare.
I reached for it before I could stop myself. It was cool and heavy in my hand. Real.
Max’s eyes narrowed, reading my face. “Don’t get ideas. You’re not there to pitch anyone. You breathe wrong at a producer and you make me look like a clown, that pass disappears and so do your sessions. Clear?”
Crystal. He didn’t have to say he was the only one who gave me work. Or that my bank account was a nightmare. Or that I still owed my mom two grand for the time my car died and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d chosen rent over groceries.
“Clear,” I said anyway, slipping the lanyard over my head. It felt like a collar.
By the time I got home, Nora was on the couch in our shoebox living room, laptop open, hair in a satin bonnet, scrolling through what looked like a spreadsheet of my financial failures.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said, toeing off my boots. “I brought carbs.”
“You brought late,” she shot back, but her eyes softened when she saw my face. “You okay?”
I hesitated. “Define okay.”
Her gaze dropped to the lanyard around my neck. “What is that. And why does it have the logo of Satan’s favorite record label on it?”
“It’s…a gala pass.” I tried to say it casually, like my heart wasn’t thudding in my ears. “Max got it from a friend.”
Nora sat up so fast the laptop nearly flew. “Are you kidding me? Lyla. That’s—this is—” She grabbed the pass and inspected it like it might bite. “The Aurora Spring Gala is, like, stupid exclusive. They seat streaming numbers and stock prices next to God. You’re going.”
I swallowed. “It’s just a staff ticket. I’m going as a nobody. To stand in a corner and not embarrass Max.”
“Yeah, and Cinderella went as just a girl in a dress,” Nora said. “And look what happened.”
“She lost her shoe and almost got murdered by a clock?”
“She got noticed,” Nora insisted. “You’re taking your songs.”
“Absolutely not. Max said—”
“You think Max cares about you more than your career?” she snapped. “You think he’s going to magically start putting your name on tracks out of the goodness of his nicotine-crusted heart? You go. You look expensive. You network. You accidentally stand near a powerful person until they ask who you are. Take the shot.”
My protest died on my tongue. I’d been the background voice for three years. A rumor under someone else’s face. Maybe Nora was right and the clock was already ticking.
“I don’t have anything to wear that doesn’t smell like old coffee,” I said weakly.
Nora’s grin was downright feral. “Lucky for you, I have access to the magical land of Rent-the-Runway and the favor of a drag queen with a sewing machine. Sit. We’re turning you into a label executive’s problem.”
Two hours, one emergency seam fix, and a minor wrestling match with shapewear later, I barely recognized myself in our cracked bathroom mirror.
The dress was gunmetal silk that clung in the right places and skimmed over the wrong ones, with a slashed back that made me feel half-naked and powerful at the same time. Nora had tamed my curls into glossy waves, smoked out my eyes, and painted my mouth with a matte wine stain that made my lips look dangerous.
“You look like you write breakup songs for men you’ve destroyed,” she said, satisfied.
“I write breakup songs for men who don’t know I exist,” I corrected, but my pulse fluttered under the compliment.
She stepped back, expression shifting from gleeful to serious. “Hey. Listen to me.”
I met her eyes in the mirror.
“Whatever happens in there,” she said quietly, “remember that you’re the talent. Not them. Not the suits. You. Don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re lucky to be in the room. They’re lucky you walked in.”
The words lodged under my breastbone. I nodded, because if I opened my mouth I might cry and ruin her contour work.
She pressed the gala pass into my hand. “Go. And text me if you see Kai Renford in person so I can live-tweet your meltdown.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know he’s not my type.”
“Please. Fame is everyone’s type.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that fame scared me more than it thrilled me—that every time I saw a headline about someone like Kai, some overexposed pop god being carved alive by the internet, part of me thought, No thanks, I’ll keep my dignity and my bus pass.
But the other, louder part whispered: You can’t afford dignity.
Aurora Sound lived in a building that looked like a spaceship had landed in downtown LA and decided to charge rent. Glass and steel curved in impossible ways, catching the last smear of sunset and turning it into a thousand paparazzi flashes.
The red carpet unfurled like an artery from the entrance, lined with barricades and bodies. Fans screamed behind metal rails, phones held high. Light exploded from camera rigs, strobes pulsing like a heartbeat. Music thudded faintly from somewhere inside, bass sliding under my skin.
My Uber dropped me at the staff entrance, two blocks down from the chaos. The pass got me through security and up a freight elevator that smelled like disinfectant and anxiety. A bored woman in a headset scanned my badge and waved me toward a side hallway.
“Staff and low-priority guests this way,” she said without looking up. Her clipboard had names on it I’d written demo hooks for.
Low-priority stung more than it should have.
The gala proper was a forest of chandeliers and glass. Champagne towers glowed under soft amber lights. People in gowns that cost more than my student loans floated across marble floors, laughing like they’d never checked a bank app in the dark.
I hugged the wall, trying to disappear and be noticed at the same time. A trio of influencers I recognized from my ‘writing for clout’ gigs brushed past, perfume and politeness masking the way their eyes slid over me and dismissed me in one breath.
This, I thought, clutching my tiny thrifted clutch like a talisman, is what a dream looks like when you’re not invited to it.
“Cute dress,” someone said behind me. “Very ‘I swear I’m on the guest list, just let me in.’”
I turned and almost choked on my champagne.
Evan Blake stood there, in the flesh and the leather jacket his stylist had probably taken out a second mortgage for. His music was all over the Top 40, frothy hooks and bitter-sweet choruses I’d secretly envied. Up close, he looked younger than his videos—sharp cheekbones, a mouth built for smirking, eyes that flicked over me with amused appraisal.
“You’re Evan Blake,” I blurted, immediately wanting to die.
“And you’re…not impressed?” He seemed delighted by the idea.
“I’m just trying not to spill two-hundred-dollar champagne on your shoes,” I said, forcing my fingers to loosen around the glass.
His grin widened. “Relax. It’s Aurora. They’ll bill it to some poor songwriter’s royalties.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a confession. His gaze snagged on my pass, just for a second, and something in his eyes sharpened.
“Staff guest,” he read. “So you’re either important or severely underpaid.”
“The second one,” I said before pride could slap a hand over my mouth.
He laughed. “Honesty. That’s refreshing.” He leaned in, dropping his voice. “If anyone asks, tell them you’re here with me. It’ll keep the vultures from trying to sell you something.”
“Why would they sell me anything?”
“Because you’re pretty and you look uncomfortable,” he said simply. “That’s like blood in the water here.”
Heat crawled up my chest. I opened my mouth to respond—and the air in the room shifted.
It was subtle at first. A hitch in the background noise. The way half the faces turned in the same direction, like fields of flowers bending toward the sun.
I didn’t have to follow their gaze to know who had just arrived. His face was on three billboards between my apartment and my bus stop.
“Kai’s here,” Evan said, like he was commenting on the weather. His expression didn’t change, but his posture did. A fractional straightening, a practiced loosening of his mouth.
I told myself I wasn’t going to look. That I didn’t care about Aurora’s golden boy, the one with the perfect jawline and the haunted eyes that Photoshop couldn’t quite hide. That I was here for an opportunity, not a celebrity sighting.
My neck turned anyway.
He was taller than I expected. Cameras always shortened people, but in person, Kai Renford cut through the crowd like gravity. Black suit, black shirt, no tie, the top buttons undone just enough to look deliberate. Dark hair shoved back in what I suspected had taken a stylist three hours to make look effortless.
He was flanked by handlers and security, a moving constellation of earpieces and sleek black dresses. Flashes burst around him in a silent storm. He smiled for them—a perfect, blinding curve of mouth that never reached his eyes.
A woman in a silver sheath dress—Marissa Cole, if the industry blogs I doom-scrolled were accurate—pressed a hand to his arm and murmured something. He nodded, the motion precise. Trained.
I watched him the way everyone did, with a kind of hungry awe. The human content machine. The boy whose voice had soundtracked my senior year. The man whose last album had broken streaming records and whose last tabloid story had whispered “meltdown” and “rehab scare” without ever using the words out loud.
For a second, just a second, his gaze drifted away from the cameras. It swept the room like a searchlight. And it caught me.
It was nothing. A fraction of a second, a fluke of line-of-sight. But it felt like standing on a stage and having a spotlight slam into my chest.
My fingers tightened around my glass. Our eyes met.
Brown, I thought stupidly. His eyes are brown. Warm and dark and—
Empty.
It hit me harder than any gossip column. Up close, that emptiness wasn’t aloofness; it was exhaustion carved into bone, a practiced distance that said, I am here, but not for you.
The woman—Marissa—tugged at his arm again, redirecting him toward a knot of executives near the sponsors’ step-and-repeat. The moment broke. Air rushed back into my lungs.
“Yeah,” Evan said softly, watching me watch Kai. “He does that.”
“I wasn’t—” I started, then stopped. “What?”
“Makes you think you’re the only person in the room when he looks at you,” Evan said. “He’s very good at it. Learned from the best.”
“You?” I tried to joke.
He clinked his glass lightly against mine. “The label.”
Before I could answer, a roar went up from outside. The muffled chaos of the red carpet surged. Security tensed, touching earpieces. Marissa’s posture snapped into high alert.
Then the doors at the far end of the hall burst open and the paparazzi flood spilled in, cameras waving like weapons.
“Renford! Over here!”
“Kai, look this way!”
“Kai, is it true you—”
The questions blurred into noise. Kai’s mask slid on even smoother, shoulders squaring, smile sharpening. The handlers moved, trying to corral the chaos, but someone had messed up. The barricades outside hadn’t held, or a crowd had pushed past security. Fans poured in after the cameras, faces flushed, phones raised.
“Kai! We love you!”
A girl lunged toward him, tripping on her heels. She collided with the champagne tower. Glass exploded, liquid raining down in a glittering arc.
The room fractured into shouting and motion. I stumbled back as a spray of champagne dotted my dress. Someone cursed. Someone laughed nervously. Security surged toward Kai, but the crowd moved faster, bodies pressing, voices rising.
For one disorienting heartbeat, I saw his face unguarded.
Not empty. Not cold.
Scared.
Not of the people, exactly, but of the way they closed in. Of the space disappearing around him. His hand flexed at his side, fingers clenching like he was catching at nothing.
I knew that feeling intimately. The shrinking room. The disappearing air.
He looked around—left, right—like there should be an exit where there wasn’t. Marissa tried to reach him and got caught in the tide of bodies. A security guard shouted into his radio.
The crowd swelled.
I was close. Too close, somehow. I’d been edging along the wall, trying to get away from the chaos, and now I was right in the channel where the press and the fans were funnelling.
Kai’s gaze caught mine again. This time it wasn’t the practiced sweep of a star acknowledging a stranger.
This time it was a drowning man spotting shore.
He moved.
One second he was ten feet away, blinked in flashes; the next he was in front of me, taller, real, dripping champagne. His cologne hit me first—clean and sharp with something warmer underneath, like lime over cedar. His pupils were blown wide.
“Here,” he said, voice low and hoarse, like we were mid-conversation.
Before I could process, his hand closed around mine.
Warm. Callused. Firm.
Electric.
He tugged, not hard but with absolute certainty, pulling me into his orbit. My body went with him because there was nowhere else to go. The cameras pivoted as one, tracking his movement, and suddenly their lenses were on my face too.
“Who’s that?”
“Is that your date, Kai?”
“Smile!”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. My brain had short-circuited at the point of contact.
“Walk,” he murmured, almost under his breath, like an intimate instruction. His thumb brushed my knuckles, grounding and urgent. “Please.”
There was a tremor in that last word.
So I walked.
We pushed through the swell of bodies, his security finally converging to carve a path. Phones flashed inches from my face, catching my stunned expression from every angle. People shouted questions I couldn’t make out over the roar in my ears.
Kai didn’t look at me again. His jaw was tight, his posture deceptively relaxed, like he was playing a role he’d rehearsed a thousand times. But his grip on my hand didn’t loosen until we ducked through a side door and the noise cut off like someone had slammed a lid on the world.
We stumbled into a dim service corridor lined with industrial gray walls and exit signs buzzing faintly. The door thudded shut behind us, muted and final.
Silence rushed up, thick after the chaos. My heart hammered against my ribs, trying to catch up with my body.
Kai leaned back against the wall, head tipping up, eyes closed. For a moment, I forgot that he was famous. He just looked like a guy who’d run too far too fast and wasn’t sure where he’d ended up.
His hand was still around mine.
I became hyper-aware of every point of contact—each ridge of his fingers, the faint tremor in his muscles, the way my palm had gone damp but he hadn’t recoiled.
I swallowed. “Um.” My voice sounded too loud in the narrow corridor. “Are you…okay?”
His eyes opened.
Up close, the emptiness I’d seen earlier wasn’t all there was. Underneath it, shadows moved—fatigue, yes, but something like embarrassment too. His gaze dropped to our joined hands as if noticing them for the first time.
He let go.
Cool air rushed back between our skins. I almost missed the weight of him immediately.
“Thank you,” he said, composure snapping back into place like a mask on a hinge. His voice was smoother now, controlled. “For walking.”
I stared at him. “You grabbed me.”
A flicker, like amusement almost reached his eyes. “Semantics.”
“No, that’s…that’s legally relevant,” I said, the words tumbling out because if I didn’t joke I might scream. “If I sue you for emotional distress later, I need the record to show—”
“You’re funny,” he cut in, and the ghost of a smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Most people would be taking selfies right now.”
“I left my phone in my bag. Also, I think my brain left my skull about thirty seconds ago, so.”
He looked at me properly then, not as a prop or a shield, but as if trying to place me.
“You’re not press,” he said.
“God, no.”
“Not staff.” His gaze flicked to my dress, my shoes, my slightly crooked eyeliner. “Not…one of them.”
“You say ‘them’ like you’re not inside the same building,” I said before I could stop myself.
His jaw twitched. For the first time, his expression cracked—just a hairline fracture, but enough.
“Trust me,” he said quietly. “I’m not.”
Something tightened under my ribs.
He straightened, running a hand through his hair. The motion made his cuff ride up, exposing a sliver of ink on his wrist—black lines disappearing under his sleeve. A secret half-told.
“Look,” he said, businesslike now, walls slamming back into place. “I’m sorry. For involving you. It was…chaotic. I needed to get out, and you were closest.”
I thought of his eyes in the crowd, the way they’d searched the room and landed on me like an answer.
Closest, I echoed silently. Right.
“It’s fine,” I said aloud. “Free adrenaline rush. I’ll add it to my LA experience bingo card.”
His mouth twitched again, like he wanted to smile and had forgotten how.
From the other side of the door, we could hear the muffled thump of bass and distant shouting. The world we’d just escaped kept spinning, oblivious.
He glanced toward it, then back at me. For a heartbeat, he seemed suspended between personas—the brand and the boy.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Lyla,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “Lyla Hayes.”
His gaze flickered, like the name snagged on something in his memory.
“Lyla,” he repeated, and in his mouth, it sounded like a lyric.
He nodded once, as if making an internal decision I couldn’t see.
“Okay, Lyla Hayes,” he said, pushing off the wall. “I think I just got you into a lot more than you bargained for.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
His hand hovered near the door, not yet touching it. He studied me with that cool, assessing stare I’d seen on a hundred magazine covers, but now it felt personal. Calculating. Almost resigned.
“It means,” he said slowly, “that when we walk back out there, they’re going to want a story.”
My stomach dropped. “A story about what?”
His smile this time was razor-thin and tired. “About why their favorite train wreck just held your hand like you were the only solid thing in the room.”
The exit sign buzzed overhead, bathing us in sickly red light.
“For what it’s worth,” he added, softer, “I didn’t plan this.”
I believed him. That scared me more than if he’d lied.
“Do I…have a choice?” I asked.
He held my gaze for a long moment. Something like apology passed through his eyes.
“Not anymore,” Kai Renford said, and reached for the door.
His fingers brushed mine as he pushed it open.
On the other side, the roar was already waiting.
