The first time I see Elias Storm in real life, he’s trying to break a piano.
Not the whole thing, just the top three octaves. His palm slams down on the keys; a jagged, wrong chord detonates through the glassed-in studio like a car crash. A few loose coffee stirrers vibrate in their paper cup. Through the control room window, I watch his shoulders rise and fall under a threadbare black T‑shirt, all tension and fury and something I recognize too well: panic disguised as anger.
I should leave.
Instead, I shift my weight, hugging my laptop bag tighter to my side like a shield, and wait for him to look up.
He doesn’t. He swears under his breath, shoves a hand through his hair, and stares at the lyric notebook lying open on the music stand. There are pages and pages of scratched-out lines, entire verses obliterated in frantic black ink.
Miranda’s voice cuts through the control room like perfume with a blade in it. “Don’t worry, Naomi. He’s only broken one instrument this quarter. That was a rental.”
I glance sideways at her. Miranda Cole is all angles and gloss: perfect blazer, perfect eyeliner, perfect indifferent smile. She holds an iPad like it’s a gavel. Behind her, the label logo glows on the wall: a clean, reassuring brand that has nothing to do with the sweat and noise happening in the live room.
“I thought this was supposed to be discreet,” I murmur. The glass between us and Elias is soundproof, but I still lower my voice, habit more than necessity.
“Discreet,” she says, “not imaginary.” She taps the iPad. “He knows someone’s coming in to…consult.”
“Consult,” I echo. The word tastes like a lie. We both know what this is. Ghost in, fix the problem, ghost out. No photos, no credits, no one the wiser.
She turns fully to me, assessing. “You read the contract?”
“All thirty-seven pages.” And then I read the NDA twice, just to be sure it really did say what I thought: no public acknowledgment, no press, no social media. If anyone outside this building found out I was here, I’d be in breach.
“Good.” Miranda’s smile warms a fraction, professionally. “He’s overdue by six months. The board’s breathing down my neck, sponsorship deals are on hold, the tour is a question mark. He’s blocked, anxious, and stubborn. You know the brief.”
“Salvage an album. Save the golden boy. Vanish,” I say.
“You get your usual fee plus a bonus if we hit our Q3 targets,” she adds. “And, Naomi”—her gaze flickers, almost softer, almost human—“this one matters. You pull it off and I can steer a lot of work your way. Bigger fees. Better terms.”
Better terms. As if I haven’t already signed away everything but my bloodstream to NDAs.
In the live room, Elias slumps on the bench, elbows on his knees, fingers knotted in his hair. The tattoos on his forearms flex, lines of black ink against pale skin. I’ve seen them in a hundred glossy photos, high-res and color-corrected. They don’t show the way his hands are actually shaking.
“Does he know who I am?” I ask.
Miranda’s lips curve. “He knows you’re the best.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
She shrugs, already bored. “He thinks you’re a vocal producer who consults on lyrics sometimes. Which you are. He doesn’t need your full résumé.”
My full résumé includes three of his favorite artists’ biggest hits. All released under other people’s names. I am a ghost that haunts his playlists.
I swallow. “And he’s okay with that? With…help?”
“Elias Storm is okay with absolutely nothing that wasn’t his idea.” She checks the clock on the wall. “We’re at eight minutes. That’s the window before his attention goes feral. You ready?”
I’m not. Not for him, not for this, not for the way my pulse jacks up when I know someone is about to turn and really look at me. But the thing about my life is that I’ve built it around not being looked at. Around staying two steps behind the curtain while someone else preens in the spotlight I lit for them.
In here, it’s just one man behind glass.
“I’m ready,” I say, because my rent is due in five days and Jonah just bought a new compressor on my promise that this gig would cover it.
Miranda pushes open the door to the live room. The sound hits me at once—the ambient hum of amps, the faint hiss of the air conditioner, those harsh piano chords still hanging ghostlike in the air.
Elias doesn’t look up when we walk in. Up close, he smells like coffee and citrus soap and the metallic edge of sweat. His leg bounces a staccato rhythm against the bench.
“Elias.” Miranda’s voice sharpens. “This is Naomi. She’s here to—”
“I don’t need a writer.” His voice is rough, frayed on the edges. He still doesn’t turn around. “I told you I’d finish it myself.”
My spine locks. My first instinct is to retreat—back into the doorway, back into anonymity—but something hot and stubborn fires in my chest.
“I’m not here to write your record for you,” I say.
That gets his attention. He straightens and swivels on the bench, eyes cutting toward me.
The first thing that hits me is how tired he looks. On album covers and award shows, Elias Storm is all teeth and swagger, a leather-clad god with a guitar. In person, under unforgiving studio fluorescents, the myth peels back. Dark circles shadow his eyes. His hair is an unruly mess, not artfully tousled. There’s a tiny white scar along his jaw I’ve never noticed in photos.
The second thing is that he’s beautiful in a way that makes my stomach clench and my palms itch. Which is annoying.
He drags his gaze over me quickly, like a scanner: jeans, oversized sweater, dark curls piled in a hasty knot, zero makeup. No camera-ready gloss, no pop-star polish. His mouth twists, uncertain if I’m a threat or an insult.
“You’re not like the others,” he mutters.
“Which others?” I ask. My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
“The ones they parade in here with their platinum plaques and their ‘let me just fix that line for you, babe’ bullshit.” His accent roughens on the swear word. “They write hooks about tequila and skinny jeans and have no idea what it’s like when you’re on a stage and your lungs just—” He cuts himself off, jaw clenching.
Miranda interjects, all easy charm. “Naomi doesn’t do parades. She’s a specialist. A…diagnostician.”
I shoot her a look. She smiles sweetly. This woman would call arson ‘strategic warmth’ if it tested well with focus groups.
Elias leans back, crossing his arms. “A song doctor.”
“If you like,” I say.
“What’s wrong with my songs, then?” There’s a challenge in his voice, but underneath it, I hear something rawer. Fear.
I set my bag down, fingers brushing the worn leather strap. The room feels smaller than it is, the walls closer, the silence heavier with him watching.
“I haven’t heard them,” I say. “Yet.”
He scoffs. “Then what are you doing here?”
“The label thinks I can help you finish the album.” I choose the word help carefully, feel it land. “Not write it. Not own it. Help you get where you already want to go.”
His gaze narrows. He’s trying to read me, to decide if I’m just another suit in softer packaging.
“Humor us,” Miranda says briskly. “One hour. If it’s a waste of time, I’ll pull her, and you can go back to…” She flicks her eyes at the massacred notebook. “This.”
His hand flexes around the edge of the bench. For a moment, I see the option on his face: refusal. Tantrum. Walkout. He could do it, and they’d spin it as tortured-genius behavior.
But he doesn’t. He exhales slowly, nostrils flaring, and turns back to the piano. “Fine. One hour.”
Miranda claps her hands once, satisfied. “I’ll leave you to it. Lucas will be in the control room if you need a playback.” She gives me a parting nod that means Don’t screw this up and glides out, door thudding shut behind her.
The quiet that follows is different. Thicker. Shared.
I move closer to the piano, my heart doing that stupid fast thing it does when there’s nowhere to hide. The instrument’s wood is nicked and worn, the middle C key slightly yellowed. I’ve sat at a hundred pianos in a hundred anonymous studios, but this one feels like a stage.
“Can I?” I ask, nodding at the notebook.
He hesitates, then shoves it toward me with more force than necessary. “Knock yourself out.”
The pages are a battlefield. Verses slashed, choruses rewritten, bridges scribbled in margins. But beneath the ink carnage, there’s something electric. His lines are jagged and aching, full of images that don’t quite land but almost do. Thunder in a bottle. Glass lungs. Neon confessions.
I read aloud softly, more to myself than to him. “‘I built a kingdom out of power chords and half-priced beer / but the crown don’t fit when the mirror’s too clear…’”
“Don’t,” he snaps.
My head jerks up. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t read it like a poem.” He’s watching me, eyes darker now. “It’s not… That’s not how it sounds.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“You’re trying to decide how to fix it.” His mouth curls. “This is the part where you tell me the metaphor’s mixed and the rhyme scheme’s derivative and suggest I write about—what was it last time, Miranda?—late-night drives and worn-out Levi’s?”
“So you have worked with others,” I say lightly. “And you hated them.”
He doesn’t smile. “I don’t need help.” The words are automatic, like a reflex. “My name’s on the cover, my face is on the billboards. I write my own—”
He stops abruptly, throat working.
I see it then, the edge he’s standing on. The myth he’s clinging to with white-knuckled hands.
My own temper flares. “Look,” I say, leaning in, “do you think I flew across the city in rush-hour traffic because I’m dying to slap my name on your track list?”
His brows lift. “Isn’t that why people do this? Chasing credits, chasing clout?” He gestures vaguely, encompassing the whole machine.
“That’s why some people do it.” My voice sharpens. “I do it because I like paying my bills. And because I happen to be good at getting stubborn, talented people out of their own way.”
He blinks, thrown. No one’s said he’s stubborn and talented in the same sentence today, I’d bet.
“And,” I add, quieter, “because the last time I put my own name and face on a stage, the world laughed. So forgive me if I’m not exactly greedy for the spotlight.”
The confession is out before I can grab it back. My skin prickles. I haven’t told anyone that in years. Not like that.
Elias studies me, eyes searching my face as if he might find a punch line hidden there.
“They laughed?” he says slowly.
“Doesn’t matter,” I deflect, fingers tightening on the notebook. “You want me to help or not?”
An uncomfortable silence stretches. In the control room, someone—Lucas, probably—adjusts a fader, the faintest crackle of movement through the speakers.
Elias turns back to the keys and lets his hands fall onto a simple progression: G, D, Em, C. Muscle memory. His shoulders loosen by a degree.
“Play me what you hear,” I say, stepping to the side so I can see his fingers.
He hesitates. “Without the band? It’s going to sound…empty.”
“Good. Empty is honest. We can build from there.”
He glances at me, something like grudging respect flickering in his eyes. Then he starts to play.
The chords are more interesting than the progression suggests. Little suspensions in the right hand, a walking bass line that isn’t quite country, isn’t quite rock. His voice slips in almost shyly at first, then steadies.
“I built a kingdom out of power chords and half-priced beer…”
The lyrics land different with melody. The clunky phrases smooth out, become vulnerable instead of overwrought. On the word kingdom, his voice cracks, just a hair. He grimaces, pushes through.
I close my eyes, listening. There, in the pre-chorus, is the snag I felt on the page: the melody reaches for a note the lyrics can’t justify.
“Wait,” I say, raising a hand.
He stops abruptly. “What?”
“Go back to ‘mirror’s too clear.’”
“That line’s trash.”
“It’s not.” I flip back a few pages, scanning quickly. “The whole verse is about you building this image, right? This ‘kingdom.’ But the mirror isn’t the problem. The problem is what you see in it. You’re not scared of reflection; you’re scared of…exposure.” The word slips out. For both of us.
He’s staring again, fingers hovering above the keys. “I didn’t write it that way.”
“Doesn’t matter. That’s what it wants to be.” My pulse is racing; this is the part I live for, the click of a song finding its spine. “What if it’s not ‘the mirror’s too clear’? What if it’s ‘but the lights come up and the cracks reappear’?”
He repeats it under his breath. “‘Lights come up and the cracks reappear…’” His fingers find the chord again, gentler this time. “That scans.”
“It also gives you somewhere to go in the chorus,” I say. “You keep talking about lights, you’re setting up a switch. Stage lights, spotlight, interrogation—”
“—microscope,” he murmurs.
“Exactly.” I feel myself leaning closer, pulled into his orbit. The distance between us narrows, only a foot of worn floor and shared air. “Try it.”
He plays the verse again, singing the new line. It fits. Not perfectly yet, but like a puzzle piece sanded down to almost click.
At the end of the phrase, he pauses, fingers resting on the keys. The silence that follows feels charged, as if the room itself is waiting.
“It’s…better,” he admits. The word sounds like it tastes strange to him.
I let a small smile slip. “It’s honest.”
His gaze hooks on mine. Up close, his eyes are a muddled green-brown, flecks of gold near the pupil. It’s disorienting, being the focus of that kind of attention. Usually, I’m the one looking while the singer stares at the glass, at their own reflection.
“So that’s your thing?” he asks quietly. “Honesty?”
My throat tightens. I think of NDAs, of songs released with other people’s names on them, of my face mercifully unknown to anyone with a Wi‑Fi connection.
“No,” I say. “My thing is getting the song right.”
He huffs a half-laugh. “That’s the same thing.”
“Not in this business,” I say before I can stop myself.
He studies me for a moment longer, then looks back at the keys. His knee bumps mine as he shifts, a brief, accidental contact that sends a stupid little flare of heat up my leg.
“Okay, song doctor,” he says. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it my way. No formulas, no ‘write about trucks and heartache and we’re good.’ We’re not chasing radio.”
“We’re chasing truth,” I say lightly.
He glances sideways at me again, that unreadable warmth-distance thing in his eyes. “We’ll see.”
From the control room, a voice crackles through the talkback, making me jump. “You guys good in there?” Lucas’s tone is wary, as if he’s waiting for something to explode.
Elias leans toward the mic on the stand. “We’re fine,” he says, not looking away from me. “Roll it.”
I flip my notebook open, pen ready, heart thrumming in time with the red recording light that blinks to life behind the glass.
For a second, just one, the thought slips through my defenses, startling in its clarity:
If I’m not careful, this might be the one that changes everything.
Elias’s fingers crash into the opening chords, and I don’t know yet if I’m more afraid of him failing in front of me—or of what happens if, together, we don’t.
