Final Serenade (The Encore Book 1) Read online

  We laughed at this notion together. How Levi had turned out to be so rock ’n’ roll while growing up in such a strict Jewish household had always been a mystery to both him and me. His father had wanted him to take on the family real estate business.

  “You need to relax. Linda will make it happen.” I actually wasn’t so convinced myself. She still had to run all the press requests by the band’s management, and those guys were hard to predict.

  “She better. All those margarita’s I bought her at the Kipling album release party…” Levi never missed an opportunity to complain about the bill he raked up once while trying to make friends with Linda. It was probably the only stereotypically Jewish thing about him.

  “No one was forcing you.”

  “I was trying to show my appreciation.”

  “You want a tip? One drink is usually more than enough to show your appreciation. Doesn’t have to be six. Six means you’re trying to get a woman drunk, not thank her.”

  “She didn’t say no.”

  “Will you take my advice for once?” Levi had no clue what to do when it came to charming women. I didn’t remember him ever having a girlfriend. Not that my love life was any better. My last relationship had lasted a whopping two months before it went up in flames like a box of matches doused with gasoline.

  My gaze slid down the screen of my laptop. The entire web was buzzing. The news had spread like wildfire, which was both scary and fascinating.

  Even after seven years of silence, Frankie Blade made headlines.

  “Okay,” Levi’s voice boomed in my ear. “Text Linda and check on your boy, Dante. I need to post this ASAP, before Pulse Nation comes up with a massive write-up on the band’s history.”

  While working on beating Rolling Stone’s numbers, Levi was practicing beating the numbers of other competitors. Pulse Nation was his guinea pig this year.

  “We can do one too,” I offered.

  “Can you run a poll on our Facebook page? Ten best Hall Affinity songs. Or something along those lines?” Levi’s brain was working overtime. He pitched five more engagement post ideas before we finally said our goodbyes.

  Heat creeping up my cheeks, I set my phone on my desk near the keyboard and spun in my chair several times. Adrenaline simmered beneath my skin. It’d been ages since I’d been this excited about a press release.

  After years of picking the brains of people whose faces decorated everything from coffee mugs to billboards, the excitement had become routine. It was part of the job and it had to be relegated to the background to give way to competence and reliability.

  My mind was the definition of a hot mess. It wondered and scrambled, dozens of scenarios playing out inside my head. My gut simply told me to stay put and wait.

  Linda would make it happen. The Douglas & Krueger Cancer Benefit was one of the hardest events of the fall to get credentials for. It was a high-end, celebrity-stuffed concert and auction. The tables cost five thousand dollars each. Jay Brodie only approved outlets that had print issues. Rewired had a quarterly one, which didn’t sell great, but it’d opened up a lot of doors where just a handful of magazines, like Rolling Stone, AP, and Pulse Nation, could get in. Rewired was also on the list of Linda’s favorites. And that list was very short.

  The first post-accident photo of Frankie Blade surfaced on the web the morning after the press release. I woke up at the ass crack of dawn to the maddening rattling of my phone against the nightstand. There was one missed call and two text messages with TMZ links from Levi.

  “Crap,” I muttered, staring at my phone through the blur in my eyes. At moments like this, I hated this job. Sleep had been secondary for me ever since I met Levi. The blazing headlines were ridiculous. Whoever came up with those must have been doing some hard drugs or had an unhealthy addiction to Mary Shelley’s literary work.

  “Frankie Blade: Back from the Dead, or is He?”

  “Frankenstein of Rock ’N’ Roll: Rock Singer Spotted Leaving Beverly Hills Doctor’s Office”

  I rolled my eyes at the last one and clicked on a photo below it. The image wasn’t from the best angle and must have been taken in a rush, because one of the two bodyguards escorting Frankie toward the building was turned toward the camera, his expression mean and menacing, eyes like two rocket launchers. Big guy obviously took his job seriously.

  The man in question was wearing a baseball cap that hid his face and a hoodie that disguised his physique. An outfit that, in this particular case, didn’t do a stellar job of concealing his celebrity status. I had no doubt it was Frankie. The tips of his sandy locks grazed his cheeks and fell down the back of his neck, just like they did in dozens of other pre-accident photos. His rigid posture gave away his unease, but the way his hands hung loosely at the sides of his body told me he’d been ready for the ambush and didn’t care.

  A strange flutter tickled my chest as I zoomed in on the photo to study it, trying to make out the face, to no avail.

  Frankie Blade was an enigma. A mystery. A man who was worth seven years of scars, and the entire planet wanted to see what those scars looked like.

  After checking a couple more websites to get a better idea of what was going on, I texted Levi.

  You just made it to number one on my kill list.

  Levi: I wasn’t already?

  Are you upset?

  Levi: Very.

  A lazy smile stretched across my lips. I dropped my phone next to me on the bed and stared at the ceiling absentmindedly, praying to the universe to make this interview happen.

  A text message alert yanked me out of my daze. I fished the phone from the blankets and looked at the screen.

  Levi: Who was number one before me?

  Laughing, I tapped out a reply.

  My alarm.

  He responded with an eye-roll emoji.

  Unable to go back to sleep, I dragged myself out of bed and resumed working on my summer write-up, but my head felt heavy and my tired brain was scrambled for words.

  Levi called around noon when I was on my third cup of coffee.

  “Did you see it?” he asked. The tone of his voice could be described as perpetual shock and was accompanied by the sounds of slurping and chewing.

  “What are you talking about?” I opened my browser.

  “TMZ just released an entire Frankie Blade gallery.”

  “Any decent photos, at least?” I tried to mask the sudden wave of anxiety with a joke.

  “Don’t worry. Your teenage crush has still got it,” Levi said, a pinch of amusement in his voice.

  I pulled up the TMZ page and flipped through a gallery of freshly uploaded photos. There were clear professional shots of Frankie, taken somewhere in Malibu while he was dining. He looked good. There were no scars or any facial deformities, contrary to popular hearsay. I took a moment to study the shots. Frankie wasn’t alone. Dante and Johnny Z were with him in half of the photos.

  “You think Carter’s out?” Levi pondered.

  “Why would he be out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they wanted Quin on it. Probably would sell more tickets. The original line-up.”

  “Nonsense,” I countered.

  Right now, Frankie could probably sell out an arena on his own and people would pay crazy money to hear him sing a phone book backwards or an instructional manual from Ikea.

  Besides, the only two band members that really mattered were Frankie and Dante. They brought the chemistry on stage. Carter and Johnny Z were merely a nice backdrop. Everyone knew that.

  Levi didn’t pursue the subject further, because this wasn’t something Rewired would post anyway. TMZ speculated. We created original content.

  “Will you have anything ready for me today?” Levi inquired.

  “In a couple of hours,” I lied. The article wasn’t anywhere near done. “I’ll upload it when I’m finished. Can you prep the draft?”

  “I’m on it… Hey, check this out! They just updated their website.”

  The iMes
sage window popped up on my computer’s screen with the incoming link from Levi.

  I clicked on it and pulled up the band’s page, my heart beating a little faster. The signature red and orange flame logo on the homepage had been replaced by an all-black background with a burning butterfly. Nothing else. I stared at the artwork for a good minute, reveling in its intrigue and listening to Levi’s speculations about what Frankie had possibly been doing during his long sabbatical.

  The imagery was dramatic…and sad. It made my chest twist a little when I tried to imagine what being dragged by a motorcycle across a quarter-mile-long spread of the freeway might feel like.

  I remembered the day very clearly. It’d happened a few weeks before I started my internship at Jay Brodie PR. The news had broken early that morning, and I’d spent an entire day staring at my phone and waiting for updates on Frankie’s condition. My weak teenage heart barely held it together.

  Levi’s voice was a muffled noise in my ear as he went on with his theories, slurping some more. He had this stupid habit of eating while talking or doing other things. He was a class-A workaholic. And the condition was contagious as hell.

  “Hey, I really need to get this finished, okay?” I interrupted him.

  My gaze swept over the digital clock on my laptop screen. I had four hours to put something coherent together. For a second, I thought of using my writer’s block as an excuse to bail on dinner at my mother’s, but my conscience told me to suck it up and go. I didn’t want to be another kid who was a letdown. Ashton was a huge disappointment and I felt obligated to try to change that, although my attempts to talk some sense into him hadn’t been successful. He was still undecided on everything. College, job, life. His music.

  “Fine. Talk later, Cass,” Levi said and hung up.

  My mother’s apartment was in the heart of Hollywood, a few blocks north of Franklin, which just strengthened my hate toward the family dinner tradition. Looking for parking near her building on Wednesday afternoon was like looking for a needle in a haystack without a flashlight. The blasts of music inside my car muffled the noise of the traffic surrounding me as I circled the block in search of a spot for my Honda. Seeing the photos of Frankie Blade had triggered a wave of nostalgia. I was on Hall Affinity’s third album by the time I hit the gridlock near my mother’s place, and Frankie’s voice was the only thing that managed to keep me sane.

  My summer recap had been finished and posted in draft on the website for Levi to review, and I felt good about today.

  The apartment smelled like the kitchen of Fig & Olive. My nose picked up the faint scent of cumin and rosemary all the way from the courtyard and my taste buds screamed with delight. Our mother was a great cook. Her hot homemade meals had been a desperate attempt to give our family some sense of normalcy after our father left us, and while it hadn’t always worked, I’d appreciated the efforts.

  Despite the lack of desire to visit the home that’d harbored so many miserable memories, I still looked forward to our mother’s culinary creations.

  Ashton’s room sounded like a battlefield. I knocked twice before entering. He didn’t respond, which added more fuel to my burning irritation.

  “Incoming,” I warned, peeking inside. The air was stale and the curtains were shut. The place was reminiscent of a bunker.

  My brother was sprawled on his twin bed like an amoeba, his eyes staring unblinkingly at the chaos happening on the huge plasma monitor mounted to the wall. The only sign of life was his twitching hands holding the game controller.

  “Hey!” I called, surveying the piles of dirty clothes and empty soda cans.

  “What’s up?” Ashton muttered. His gaze never left the horde of animated people who were dressed in camo and running around with guns on the screen.

  Pop, pop, pop! The shots sliced through my head like a hacksaw.

  “Could you turn this down?” Wincing, I gestured at the monitor. “Please?”

  “Hold up.” His hands jerked along with the controller. He wasn’t present. The assault on my ears continued.

  “Ashton!” I raised my voice. My frustration was about to reach the point of no return. “Come on!”

  “I said hold on!” A low growl carried over the noise of the video game.

  This, right now, reminded me of the time preceding my father’s departure. He’d been withdrawn, lost in his own world. Getting a reaction from him had seemed almost impossible.

  One day he’d gone to the store to get cigarettes and never come back.

  Rage racing through my blood, I walked over to the monitor and yanked at the cord. The gunfire stopped and the screen went dark.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” Ashton cried out, tossing both hands in the air.

  Good, I thought triumphantly, at least that made him move. But part of me still crumbled. I hated arguing with my brother, but sadly, he didn’t understand any other language.

  “Since when has ‘fuck’ become a word in your vocabulary?” I stomped over to the chair and went through the pile of dirty T-shirts, examining them one by one. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Drugs, maybe, or an explanation why my brother had been ignoring the outside world for the past four years.

  “Since whenever I want. Get out of my room.” Ashton slid from the bed with the intention of turning the game back on, but I intercepted him before he got to the power cable.

  We stood in front of the monitor, his lanky six-two with a messy mop of California sun-kissed curls against my rigid, dainty five-four, staring at each other like two sworn enemies.

  “You need to check yourself,” I started, trying to keep my voice steady. “If you don’t want to go to college, you can’t stay here after you graduate.”

  He laughed in my face. “I’ll stay here for as long as I want to. Mom said I can.”

  “Mom’s going to lose her housing assistance the day you turn eighteen, asshole. You need to start looking for a job.” My rage grew stronger with every second.

  “I’m not moving out.” Ashton’s lips twitched with irritation. “End of story!” He rolled his eyes for good measure.

  Arguing with him was like beating my head against a brick wall.

  I blew out a breath, then I lost it. “You can’t do this anymore! There comes a point in every person’s life when he has to man up and take some responsibility. And your responsibility is to make sure Mom doesn’t have to work two jobs to keep this apartment while you’re wasting away in your room playing dumb video games and waiting for a miracle to happen. Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t get your lazy ass out of bed!”

  There was a mean side of me that wanted to bring our deadbeat father into the conversation, because Ashton was living proof that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but something, maybe respect and empathy for our mother, stopped me from saying it out loud.

  “You two need to stop!” Her voice drifted at me from the hall. From the corner of my eye, I saw her small figure appear in the doorway.

  “She started it, Mom,” Ashton whined.

  “He hasn’t cleaned his room in months.” I gestured at the pile of dirty clothes on the floor by my feet and spun around to face our mother.

  The air in the room became heavy with invisible threat. “Both of you!” Her finger bounced between me and my brother. She looked ruffled and disproportionate. Her face pale, jaw clenched. “Wash your hands! Dinner’s ready.” There was a certain level of creativity in the way she ignored obvious problems. Just like she ignored my commentary on the condition of Ashton’s room. Sometimes I wondered if my brother’s lack of enthusiasm and incapacity to handle simple day-to-day tasks had been inherited from her side of the family.

  We gathered in the dining room a few minutes later. The silverware and plates were put out in grim silence that seemed to drag on forever, and sticking around for dinner seemed pointless, but I forced myself to behave.

  “I’m not going to tolerate this anymore,” our mother said when we finished setting the ta
ble. Her arms fell to her hips and she gave us a long, exasperated stare. “You need to stop fighting.”

  “I’m not even doing anything,” Ashton grumbled, dropping into a chair.

  “Okay then”—I took my seat across from him—“why don’t we talk? Why don’t we have an adult conversation?” I tried hard not to sound like a cynic, but it didn’t work. My voice was a perfect blend of harsh, mean, and bitter.

  “Yeah, why don’t you tell us what your problem is, sis?” Ashton tore his gaze from his plate and flashed me a classic go-fuck-yourself smile.

  My problem is that you’re a lazy douche who doesn’t think about anyone but himself.

  But I choked back the words and decided to be smarter this time. “Did you hear from Scott?”

  No response.

  “Honey?” Our mother perked up.

  “Not yet.” He shook his head.

  “Really?” I pressed, “Last time I checked, Scott was still hiring.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ashton leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “I guess he didn’t like my application.” A shoulder shrug.

  “I believe you didn’t care to fill it out,” I countered. “I talked to Scott a couple of days after I picked up the application. He said you never came.”

  A frown carved into my mother’s already distraught face.

  “It’s not fair!” He looked at her, probably hoping for some sort of support, but none followed. “Why does she get to do whatever she wants and I don’t?”

  “How the hell did working twenty-four seven turn into doing whatever I want?!” The nerve the little bastard had. I was ready to strangle him right there and then.

  “No screaming at the table.” Our mother lifted both hands in a placating manner and closed her eyes. The vein in her temple pulsed madly.

  “You get to hang out with all the bands and party while I’m supposed to wash dishes in some lame ice cream shop?”

  “First of all, I don’t hang out. Second, I don’t party. This is work. We don’t have days off, Ashton. I think you’re disillusioned about what I do.”