“Okay, so I know this isn’t exactly what you wanted, but—”
“How the fuck did this get out, Max?” I growled down the line, pacing the floor of my bedroom, trying not to lose my fucking mind. My thoughts already racing through every possibility. Everything that would be completely fucked now that this was out. Whether there was a way to claw it back. Make it go away before it was too late.
“We’re looking into it, but it looks like it was leaked by a blogger.”
“Someone we know?”
“No. It’s a ghost account. No posts before this one. Are you near a computer?”
I went to my desk and punched the power button on my monitor, but couldn’t bring myself to sit. “Yeah.”
“’Kay, the first post was made as a comment on that forum, oh shit, what’s it called, um…”
“Maxine.”
“Oh right, the ‘music is my medicine’ one. You know where they have all those fan theories about your identity and—”
“Yeah. I’m there,” I said, the website coming up on the monitor. “Where is it?”
“It should be at the top of the forum page. It has about twenty-thousand comments on it now.”
The post at the top of the forum was titled Who is the Bone Man?
It was made by a user months ago and had a shit-ton of people following it, but I was looking for one particular user. The one who somehow figured out who I was. If I could find them, trace them, then I could have them take this shit back.
Maybe Grey could…
“Do you see it?” Max asked on the other end of the line as my fingers hovered over the mouse, re-reading the user name who’d posted not one but five comments on the post. Images. Facial mapping comparisons. Street cam footage of me getting off my bike and entering backstage at the Lodi show. And a signed NDA. The one I made Maxine sign when she expressed interest in managing me.
It was irrefutable.
“You see the blogger tag?”
I did, but I was still trying to process it. Knowing what it meant, but not wanting it to be true.
CrowKiller321.
The final comment uploaded at 11:25am this morning was signed off with a simple moniker. Anonymous.
The monitor cord ripped from the wall with a snap, sparks flying from the outlet as I chucked it against the wall. The sharp edge of it embedding in the drywall so it stayed there, half in the wall and half out of it like a demented form of artwork.
It brought me no fucking relief as I fought to level out my breathing, my skin cold and coated in an icy sweat.
Somewhere in the room, Maxine was calling to me, her voice broken by dead sound. I fell into the chair at my desk and lifted my phone from the floor, seeing a new call coming in on the screen. The one I’d been dreading since this afternoon.
Diesel.
“Corvus?” Maxine shouted. “Are you there, is everything—”
I ended the call with Max and answered the one from my father, inhaling shakily through my nose.
“Yeah?”
A heavy silence filled the other end of the call before Diesel finally replied. “It seems you’ve been keeping secrets from me, Son.”
He let the statement hang between us for a moment, maybe expecting me to fill the void for him, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have time to plan a response. Better not to speak at all.
“I’ll be expecting you at the house in the next thirty minutes.”
The line went dead.
I bent over my knees, pushing tense fingers through my hair to grip it tightly at my scalp. Downstairs the front door opened, and I heard Ava Jade and the guys rush inside, locked in heated conversation.
“Corvus,” Sparrow crowed up the stairs. “Are you up there?”
Fuck.
I’d been so careful with this secret.
More than any other.
There were no leaks. None save Ava Jade and Becca fucking Hart.
Then again, the fucker had sealed documents from Maxine’s office. Maybe it was her who’d sold me out. Though that didn’t seem likely either since the mystery of The Bone Man was half the fucking allure. No mystery, no cold hard cash in her wallet. Or mine. Not anymore.
My door swept open, and Ava Jade stood there, framed on both sides by my brothers.
“We can fix this,” Ava Jade said, the promise gleaming like hard stone in her eyes. “We just have to—”
“It’s too late,” I replied, detached from the words. “Diesel knows. It’s over.”
My Sparrow shook her head, gaze snagging on the monitor still protruding from my wall. “It doesn’t have to be. Why shouldn’t you be able to have both? It’s fucking stupid. Being The Bone Man never stopped you from fulfilling your duties to your family before, why should it now?”
“Dies won’t see it that way.” Grey grimaced, his face pale and ashen like it was his secret that’d been put on stage for the whole world to see. It was a mite too close to looking like pity for my fucking taste.
I got to my feet and snatched my leather jacket from the floor. “Dies is expecting me. I have to go.”
Ava Jade stepped out of my doorway for me to pass, reaching out to me before thinking better of it to claw her hand back to her side. Smart girl.
“Grey,” I said, pausing in the hall. “The fucker who leaked the intel—I think it’s the same bastard who’s been messing with Ava Jade. I doubt you’ll be able to trace him since we haven’t had a break with anything leading up to now, but it’s worth a shot. Max has the details you’ll need to try the trace.”
He nodded solemnly.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Sparrow asked, horror plain on her paling face. “It could be—”
“I’m not sure,” I told her, mostly because I didn’t want her to blame herself for this. I didn’t know why, but I was sure. I knew it was him. Either it was that fucker or it was the Ace Becca had been dating. He might’ve gleaned enough information from her to piece it together before Becca broke things off.
“Regardless,” I added. “We need to find out who it is. Either it’s a nobody who got lucky with a guess, or it’s someone with a vendetta that needs to be crushed to fucking dust.”
“I’m on it,” Grey promised, turning to stalk toward his bedroom.
“Wait,” Ava Jade called after me. “Maybe I could come with you? I could help Diesel understand—”
“You being there won’t help, Sparrow. If anything, it’ll just make it worse.”
I couldn’t bear to see how that comment hit, grinding my teeth as I stormed down the stairs. It was the truth. And sometimes, the truth wasn’t kind.
The blacktop vanished beneath the tires of my Ducati as I sped across town, ignoring every road sign and light along the way. I tried to come up with a way to explain this shit to my father without breaking the fragile bond still healing from the cracks formed over the past weeks during Ava Jade’s trials.
I’d own my shit. I always did. But a part of me wanted to chew his fucking head off. Tell him that I didn’t have a choice but to lie about it. He never would have supported it, and I wouldn’t have had the outlet I needed to keep myself his perfect soldier all this time.
My engine barked as I revved around the corner leading to his street, slowing to a static purr.
Diesel’s car sat parked up in the drive of the house where I lived with him up until two years ago.
A modest charcoal gray house with a double car garage. Two-stories. A rose garden Dies’ wife started before we came into the picture bloomed with crimson flowers beneath the tall windows next to the door. Pristine. He would settle for no less.
I bowed my head, stepping off the bike. My thirty minutes were nearly up.
I pushed into the house, the overwhelming scent of my prepubescent years filling my lungs. Cigar smoke, hot cast iron, and coffee. All of it cut with the smell that was uniquely Diesel’s. It clung to the place.
I remembered when I first entered this house, an angry, scared boy with no place left in the world to go. It smelled like a mother then. The lingering scent of Dies’ late wife had brought me comfort those first few weeks, before it inevitably began to fade. It reminded me of my own mother.
“In here,” came Diesel’s deep baritone from the living room down the hall to the right. I kicked off my shoes before going in, trying to cling to a singular racing thought so I could figure out how I wanted to handle this. But the truth of it was, I had no fucking idea what was about to come out of my mouth.
Diesel lifted his head from the laptop screen he was scowling at on the coffee table. His elbows on his knees, hands clasped tight.
He turned the screen to face me without a word.
On it was a webpage that read in massive white font on a black background The Bone Man. Below was the comparative images of mine and my alter-ego’s faces, showing all the marker matches that confirmed our identities were one and the same. How this fucker had access to that sort of software was beyond me. But it wasn’t the worst of the evidence. The signed NDA was what really made it undeniable. I was just glad I always signed as Corvus James, excluding my true surname.
A prickle of unease festered in my gut as I racked my brain trying to remember if that name was anywhere on that document. I remembered Maxine saying it wouldn’t be binding without my full name, but had I used it? Had I given her…
“Is this accurate?” Diesel asked, and I pulled myself back to the here and now, forcing myself to stand straighter. “Your face is all over the internet, son. They were talking about you on The Edge this morning.”
Fuck.
Of course he found out through the fucking radio. He always had that station playing.
“It’s true,” I confirmed, and Diesel’s eyes glimmered with malice as he stared at me from his seat on the couch, jerking his gaze away as he stood, showing me his back. Just long enough for him to get control back.
He popped his knuckles, lifting his head to stare out the window, past the roses, onto the quiet street outside. “You kept this from me…”
“I did.”
“For how long?”
“I signed with my manager a little over two years ago,” I found myself saying. There was no point in lying about any of it. Not anymore. “But I’ve been uploading my music anonymously to different sites for longer.”
He took a shaky breath.
“You’ve always been so good at keeping your secrets, Son,” Dies trailed off. “You thought you were keeping your little humanitarian project from me too, but I’ve had Julia on my payroll longer than you have.”
My teeth clenched.
“You knew? This whole time?”
“Of course I fucking knew. This is my city. I know everything that happens here.”
…but I never had a show in Thorn Valley. And that was very purposeful. Which was why he never figured it out.
He turned back to face me, hard lines in his forehead. “But this? How could you keep this from me?”
A muscle in my jaw popped as I held back a thousand words I wouldn’t be able to take back if I spoke them aloud.
“You must know,” Diesel continued. “How stupid this is.”
Heat flooded my chest.
“This gives our enemies a time and place where you’re going to be. Show dates and times. Locations.”
“Which was why I hid my identity.”
“Oh? So it wasn’t just to keep it from me, then?”
Breathe.
“For all you know, Son, it was our enemies who outed you.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it now. It’s over.”
Without the mystery of The Bone Man, the allure was gone. Max would probably fire me by the end of the week. He had nothing to worry about.
“Is it?” Diesel pressed. “Or is this what you want? Are you leaving? Do you want out? Is that what this is?”
“What?” I cocked my head at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Are you leaving the Saints? To become this… this Bone Man? Do your brothers know?”
He could see the answer on my face.
“So you’ve all been lying to me, then.” He ran his tongue along his teeth, baring them in a small growl.
“I’m not leaving,” I said, realizing what it was I needed to say. The only thing he wanted to hear. “It was an outlet. One I needed. But my loyalty, my family is here.”
Diesel shook his head, clearing the distance between us with a stiff hand raised like he wished he could rip me apart with his bare hands. I didn’t budge, and he stopped mere inches from my face.
“Family doesn’t lie to one another,” he spat. “I taught you better.”
His words stung, and I recoiled from the truth in them. Guilt over the selfish need for him to accept this part of me made the anger fizzle out, sending the beast back to its cage. Leaving me hollow.
“There’s only three more days until time’s up for our enemies in Edgewood,” he said. “I expect this mess to be cleaned up by then.”
I nodded, turning to leave.
“And Corvus?”
I waited.
“Don’t ever lie to me again.”
