Restricted Access

The last note leaves your throat, and eighteen thousand people lose their minds.

For four seconds, you are the only real thing in the building.

Then the lights drop. The roar follows you backstage, muffled but still thunderous through the concrete walls, and you walk into the dark with sweat cooling along your spine.

This is the part nobody buys a ticket for. The come-down. The empty corridor after the screaming stops, where the woman who just owned an arena has to become a person again before she reaches the car.

You know every inch of this walk. The gaffer tape on the floor. The water station. The two men from your detail who should be waiting at the mouth of the tunnel. One takes your left flank while the other walks point. It has worked that way for three years, so consistently you barely think about it anymore.

That is why you notice immediately when something is wrong.

You round the corner, still buzzing from the stage, and there is only one man waiting where there should be two.

You stop.

He is enormous. That is the first thing you register, before your eyes climb high enough to take in the rest of him.

He fills the corridor. Shoulders broad enough to block the exit sign behind him. A chest like a loading door. Forearms crossed, inked to the wrist in black work that disappears beneath a jacket pulled tight across his frame. Blond hair dragged back from a hard face and knotted at the crown. A close beard. Pale grey eyes fixed directly on you.

For a second, you forget about the missing men entirely.

Seven years collapse in an instant.

You are twenty-five, standing in a concrete arena corridor, and somehow eighteen again too.

Every part of you goes still.

“No.”

Not to him. To whoever thought putting him here was a good idea.

“Sabine.”

Just that. Your name.

He says it low and even, and somehow that makes it worse. Nobody else in this building says your name like that. Not your manager. Not your crew. Not the people paid to keep you moving from one place to the next.

“It’s Soren,” he adds when you still haven’t answered.

As if you could have forgotten.

“I know who you are.” It comes out sharper than you mean it to, but you let it. “What I don’t know is why you’re in my tunnel.”

“Your detail’s down.” He does not uncross his arms. “Both of them. Something they ate at the venue commissary. They started getting sick about an hour into the set. Rincon’s in an ambulance. The other one’s not far behind.”

You blink, the irritation gone in an instant. Rincon has two kids and calls you kiddo, and you would burn this arena down for him.

“Are they okay?”

“They’ll live. It’s ugly, not dangerous.” He pauses. “I checked before I came to find you.”

Of course he did. He would have checked on them before coming to find you. That was always who Soren was, and apparently seven years had not changed it. You had either forgotten that or worked very hard not to remember.

“So they called you,” you say.

“They called the agency. The agency called me because I was ninety minutes out, cleared for principal work, and everyone else was in another state.” His tone stays even. “I didn’t ask for it, if that’s what you’re about to say.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to say something.”

He is right, which is the single most infuriating thing about him and always has been. You close your mouth.

Behind you, a runner calls that the car is ready and the after-party is confirmed. Forty people are waiting for you to decide what happens next, but for the moment, all you can focus on is the man you haven’t seen in seven years.

Now that the initial shock has passed, you really look at him.

He is bigger than he was at twenty-four. Broader through the shoulders, heavier with muscle, more imposing than you remember. The jacket is expensive and fits him perfectly, and there is an ease in the way he stands that was not there before. Back then, he was still proving himself. Now he looks like the man everyone else answers to.

The tattoos are new too. Black ink covers his forearms and disappears beneath his sleeves.

But it is the way he looks at you that catches you. Calm. Controlled. Giving nothing away.

That part is different.

You hate him. You have been very clear with yourself about that.

“My father sent you.” It is not a question.

Something shifts in his expression, but it is gone before you can read it.

“Your father doesn’t know I’m here. This is a work call, Sabine. I do a job, and tonight the job is you.”

Tonight the job is you.

You really wish he had worded that differently.

You will think about that sentence later, at three in the morning, in ways you are not going to admit to.

Right now, you lift your chin.

“Then do it from over there.”

You walk past him toward the car, close enough that you are suddenly very aware of just how much space he takes up. You keep your eyes forward and refuse to acknowledge the way your pulse picks up.

Behind you, Soren falls into step without a word, taking the position your security team normally would. You hear him before you see him beside you.

“After-party,” he says. “Where?”

“A penthouse.” You don’t turn around. “You’re going to love it.”