“Police! Hands up! Clear the room!” There were a ton of cops, too many to count. Hell, too many for Rafe to even see. It was a tidal wave of uniforms, some blue cotton while others wore the red-gray livery of a Los Angeles hotel he’d stayed in before.
And in the middle of it—Jack fucking Collins, lead guitarist and Rafe’s mostly-on-sometimes-off lover, staring him straight in the face. Jack’s handsome face was curdled with rage, and the white light coming from the hotel corridor formed a corona around his broad shoulders, gilding his sun-streaked hair.
“Fucking Christ, Rafe. What the hell did you do?” Jack accused, a hot spit of words and anger pouring from his lanky body. “You’re out of the band. Missing last night? Too fucking much, but—this? I just—God, Rafe. What the hell?”
Naked, cold, and hungover, Rafe did the only thing any rational bass player would do when standing over a stiff corpse and being surrounded by cops. He leaned over and vomited all over the dead guy’s body.
Nine Months Later
REHAB TOOK everything out of him. More than two hundred days of white walls, porridge, and singing “Kumbaya My Lord,” and Rafe’d been about to kill himself just to get free. Sobriety sucked, and even worse, he’d spent his birthday craving a blow job and some coke. What he’d gotten was a cupcake and a call from his mother.
He’d clung to her voice. In an instant, he’d become a little boy again, curled up around a plastic headset and crying, deep, jagged sobs violent enough to tear him apart. They’d been the longest five minutes of his life, too short for his brain to grasp and too long for his soul to take.
It would be the last time they spoke for months.
Thank God for Brigid and Donal, or he’d have gone mad.
Rafe’s skin didn’t stop itching until three months into his sentence. As court orders went, he’d gotten off easy. Locked up in rehab on a suspended sentence was nothing compared to jail time, and despite a grumpy judge’s opinion of Rafe failing the course, he’d done pretty good. Despite what everyone’d thought of him, when he sobered up later that fateful evening, the horror of what happened in his hotel room haunted him.
He also couldn’t seem to get his feet clean of the dead blond’s—of Mark’s vomit.
Now he was slinking home, worn through and torn apart by his own demons. Despite the cleaning service his former manager set up, his Nob Hill penthouse smelled stale and dead. The doorman’d been friendly enough. Once Rafe established he actually belonged in the building and once security reassured themselves of his ownership, the property manager scurried out from his office and handed Rafe his new keys.
“There were some issues, Mr. Andrade,” the beak-nosed man simpered. “Some very hateful things painted on the side of the building, but it was taken care of. Have no worries. We rekeyed the penthouse as a precaution.”
There was no good-to-have-you-back nonsense from the sour-faced man. Rafe knew if he hadn’t actually bought the penthouse outright, there’d have been a fight to get him out. No matter what anyone said, life was always just like high school. Fuck up royally, and people were more than happy to rip his ass to shreds and hand it back to him piece by piece.
This time, he didn’t blame them.
Set on one of San Francisco’s steep hills, the building had gorgeous views of the city and bay. When he’d first seen the penthouse, Rafe knew he had to have it. It was the furthest thing from the shithole he’d grown up in, a symbol of how far he’d climbed from being a charity case begging for scraps of education and food. He’d always wanted more—wanted what his friends Connor and Sionn had, longed for a time when he didn’t have to look at price tags and juggle food against electricity or snatch cigarettes off the back of a truck to sell in a Chinatown alleyway for a bit of extra money.
The water glittered off in the distance, and the city’s spires below hadn’t quite shaken off their foggy veil. On a clear day he could see Finnegan’s, where he’d washed dishes for Sionn’s grandmother, wanting to be too proud to take the day’s leftover food home, but he hadn’t been stupid. He’d taken everything anyone offered and sometimes without permission. He’d sucked out what he could from the private school education his mother’d gotten him and charmed his way out of shit he’d fallen into.