We Own the Night (The Night Songs Collection Book 3) (16 page)

“But if you haven’t filmed—“

“There’s twenty-four hour surveillance cameras in the apartment,” Denise said. “But those only go to the production office.”

“Who the hell would do this?” My hysteria had yet to wane.

“Are you ashamed?” Tristan asked.

My mouth dropped open. “I don’t want the whole world watching me have sex! I’m not some porn star!”

Tristan smirked. I wanted to kill him.

I stormed out of the room, ignoring the judging looks of everyone I passed between the office and the elevator. I was going to find every hidden camera in that apartment and rip them out by the wires.

Tristan caught up to me, grabbing me by the shoulder, before I made it to the elevator. The Vultures nearby gasped. I’m sure it looked pretty rough to them, I’d barely felt it, but they didn’t know I wasn’t like them anymore.

That wasn’t true. They’d watched me drink blood on that video. Still, they didn’t know all the specifics.

“What?” I roared. I could see the reactions around us, the fans now joined by more producers in my peripheral vision. This type of exchange was reality show gold. Too bad for them I’d make sure it wound up on the cutting room floor.

“You need to calm down, beautiful.” Tristan said so calmly, and he was still smiling, making me even crazier.

“Not until I rip every one of those cameras out of that apartment.” The murmurs grew louder. This crowd, that seemed endless, they’d all seen the video. They knew what I was talking about. I turned away from him.

He grabbed my arm again. “You can’t. It’s part of the contract.”

I pulled away from him. “So what? The show isn’t going to go off the air. It’s my fucking contract!” The faces around me looked like a fun house. Jaws dropping, heads tipping, brows squinting.

Now they knew everything about me.

The elevator didn’t open right away, and that worked to Tristan’s advantage. He came back up behind me. I was tempted to throw him off of me, but we’d already caused enough of a scene.

“Let’s just go into one of the other rooms down here and talk about this,” he whispered in my ear.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. The elevator dinged, signaling it had arrived to whisk me away from this hell. I looked back at Tristan, and he nodded to reaffirm his request, looking as serious as he possibly could.

I turned away from the elevator and followed him. He put his arm around my shoulder and the crowd parted without a word to let us by.

Tristan shut the door behind him and leaned against it.

It took me a minute to calm down enough to speak in less than a scream. “How did that happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why can’t you be mad about this?” I pitched back up towards hysteria. “You can’t possibly think this is okay.”

Tristan shrugged, and one corner of his mouth turned back up. I opened my mouth to flip out some more but closed it, sucking in a deep breath.

“I don’t hate it.” Now he smiled fully. “I could watch you doing that forever.”

“It’s not for the whole world to see!” I flopped down on the couch with my hands over my face. “I hate that everyone saw that. That’s for us. And no one else.”

He sat down beside me, wrapping his arms around me. I didn’t move my hands away from my face. He kissed my hair and sighed. “I know.”

“Who would do this? Would the producers do anything like this?”

Tristan didn’t say anything right away. “I really don’t think so. I know the numbers are down or whatever, but I don’t think they’d do something like this without telling us. We usually know what’s going to happen.”

My mind transported me back to the board room, with Blade coming in so smugly and insisting he had a way to boost the numbers for Immortal Dilemma.

“Oh, God.” My eyes burned, red for sure. “I know how it happened.”

A
nother board meeting in a never ending carousel of boring corporate things I now found myself responsible for. No wonder my parents hadn’t wanted anything to do with this crap. I wasn’t sure if I still had a soul, but if I did, part of it died every time I stepped into this coffin of a room.

Every single one of the suits looked me up and down as I approached the table, and then blushed and refused to meet my eyes. Even worse, I knew exactly what they were all thinking. Heat rose under my skin, but unfortunately, I was getting used to this. Pretending it didn’t bother me, I sat down and opened my laptop, bringing up screens full of columns of figures I didn’t care about, and held on to the fading hope I’d get some answers.

Blade entered without any fanfare. I didn’t want to look up at him, but his presence drew me in like a magnet, whether I liked it or not. He’d trimmed his beard and worn a suit jacket over his button down shirt and jeans. I hated thinking that he looked hot. I diverted my eyes back to my computer before he caught me mooning over him like an idiot.

“Does anyone have new business?” Tristan’s dad sounded weary. He knew exactly what the new business was, and I was sure it made him almost as uncomfortable as it made me.

“I do.” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. Better it came from me. It gave me a tiny bit of control over the situation. I had rehearsed this so many times in my head since I saw that awful video. I cringed, knowing everyone in the room was picturing me in that video. I’d never been so happy that no one made eye contact with me. Blade grinned into space like an idiot. “There’s a video going around the internet. It’s a sex tape.” Like I had to tell them.

“What’s the matter, Callie? You don’t want everyone to see what a lousy lay you are?” Blade’s eyes burned into mine. I’d preferred it when no one wanted to look at me.

“That’s not for the whole world to see,” I whispered.

“It’s not like you’re picky with who you’ll screw,” Blade scoffed. The suits squirmed, a couple of them eyed me hopefully. “Now all your prospects will know what they’re in for, and thank their lucky stars they don’t fall into your little Venus flytrap.”

“I don’t have any ‘prospects’, Blade.” I could barely speak through my clenched teeth.

He burst out laughing. “Truer words never spoken.”

“Did you do this?” What I should have asked him was how he did it.

Blade picked up a pile of papers from a manila folder and passed them around the table. Him and his handouts. I took one when the pile came to me but didn’t look down at it. I refused to take my eyes off of him.

“So, as I mentioned in the last meeting, I planned to put some new revenue paths in motion to save the sinking ship that is Immortal Dilemma.” He smiled right at me like no one else was even here. “This new video peaked interest in the band again. The advertising opportunities are up fifty percent—“

“You’re seriously talking about advertising right now?”

“All anyone cares about in this room is money. It’s about time you get paid for what you do, anyway.”

He did it. He finally made me hate him.

“You’re going to get sued, you know that, right?” I tried to keep my composure.

Blade stretched out in his chair, looping his fingers together over his head. “There’s nothing you can prove. And the only person who loses is you. Everyone else gains. As far as I see it, it’s perfect.”

“Are all of these meetings going to be fights between the two of you?” A middle aged man who looked like he cared about nothing but numbers spoke up. He might have been the only person in this room who wasn’t picturing me naked. I didn’t remember his name, but he was my favorite one of them. “We’re here for business, not to watch some lovers’ quarrel.”

Blade laughed. “There’s no love here. I’m with you, buddy. All business.”

Once again, Blade made my heart crumble. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make me look stupid or petty. I had to man up and pretend to care about the business side of this.

“You know,” I said after some other business about the hotel had been discussed. “If you’d really wanted to make money off of these sex tapes, you would have made them for sale.”

I couldn’t believe the words just came out of my mouth. I really was a whore.

“That’s a great idea,” another suit said. I wanted to crawl in a hole.

“There’s plenty more where these came from.” Blade’s face brightened.

That was the problem. I knew there was endless footage for him to choose from. How could I ever look Tristan’s dad in the eye again after knowing he listened to this conversation? Had he watched the videos? Could he even be shocked any more, having Tristan for a son? He hadn’t said a word.

“This isn’t really going to happen, is it?” Maybe everyone would see how horrible this really was. I could only hope.

“All in favor?” My mouth dropped at Trevor’s words.

The entire table raised their hands. I pushed my laptop aside and put my head down on the table. How was I ever going to get out of this one? I must have some sort of line item veto power, like the president.

This couldn’t happen. No one in this room, except for maybe Blade, had to worry about money badly enough for me to compromise what little of my morals were left intact.

I had to do something. “I’m not.”

Blade laughed. “You should have thought of that before you volunteered your services to this little project.”

“It will never happen.”

“I’ve got like six more of these in the can. What can I say, people like to watch your boy toy do the nasty.” Blade wrinkled his nose. “And it is nasty. What’s even better is how many different people I have him on video with. It doesn’t have to be you in the video, Callie. You’re not special.”

My skin must have been as red as my eyes at that moment. All the blood wanted to burst out of my body. Blade knew how to peel away any self-control I had. Not only that, but he had an incredible knack of doing it at the times that would make me look the worst.

The only thing I hated more than the idea of the entire world watching Tristan have sex with me was the entire world watching Tristan have sex with someone else. I knew it was a reality, but I shoved it deep into a dark, dusty compartment of my brain. Having to see it made it real.

“You won’t release those videos.” I kept my voice as level as possible. “I won’t allow it.”

Blade leaned forward, and it was as if we were the only two in the room. “What are you going to do to stop me?”

I
didn’t need to see those videos with the other girls, ever. Still, I couldn’t get the idea of it out of my mind. It was like scrubbing a stain that wouldn’t go away. Exhausting and painful.

Tristan sat on the floor, his back against the couch, playing guitar and writing down notes. I lay on the couch above him, absent mindedly playing with his hair. Every once in a while, I dove inside his brain, but he was so fixated on his work, all I got was his melody stuck in my head.

When he realized what I had done, he looked up and grabbed my leg.

“What are you thinking about, beautiful?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” I continued swirling my fingers around his scalp. “You’re slipping.”

“I know you’re trying to get inside my head.” He raised his eyebrow. “What are you digging for?”

No secrets. I wished it worked both ways. “When you pick other girls to, you know, feed from, what makes you choose them? What is it about them?”