On stage, technicians and crew members ran around with their walkie-talkies, and I could see the pattern of Janet’s dress behind the wall of bodies as she hovered above her son. The paramedics finally managed to put Frank on a backboard and lifted him up after a brace was settled around his neck. Cries filled the arena—a fusion of sounds of anger, fear, and disappointment.
Low thuds and feedback came from the speakers as Dante tapped the microphone. He pushed the tangle of dark, wet locks off his forehead and held up his hands, asking for silence.
When the paramedics pushed the stretcher away from the audience’s line of sight, blind panic clutched my brain and I barreled my way in and grabbed the side rail, needing to look at him, needing to know what exactly he was going through. His eyes were wide open, unblinking and full of horror as they looked past me.
“Ma’am!” One of the medics elbowed me, knocking my purse off my shoulder. “Please step aside!”
My gaze swept the length of Frank’s body, checking for blood. One small cut carved the skin near his sweat-coated temple. I reached for his fingers and they were stiff and unresponsive.
“Ma’am! We need you to step aside!”
“Miss Evans, please!” Roman insisted, ripping me away from the cluster of paramedics trying to work on Frank.
Dante’s voice reverberated in the back of my head. He was talking to the fans. I heard Carter resuming on the drums. The noise of the show began to fade away as we scrambled past the backstage crowd and into the hallway. A muddle of sobs, shouts, and radio static trailed the stretcher as it clattered against the floor.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked no one in particular. My lungs were out of air and the words that tore through my throat were dry spurs. “Where are you taking him?” I caught Janet’s sleeve.
She glanced at me over her shoulder. “Cedars Sinai.”
The strap of my dress fell and my purse dangled against my leg as I trailed behind in my four-inch heels.
Outside, the distressed blues and reds of the ambulance gleamed against the polished bodies of the eighteen-wheelers that lined the dock.
The muffled roar of the audience filled the parking lot as I watched the medics loading the stretcher into the back of the vehicle. Janet and Billy jumped in behind it. Roman went next.
Eyes trained on Frank, I slung my purse over my shoulder and pushed through the chain of security.
“Only family!” a voice barked at me as the ambulance doors slid closed.
“I’m his girlfriend!” I cried out, my fist thrust in the air in an attempt to hit the vehicle, but my coordination was off. Heck, my brain was off too. My entire life was crumbling like a sandcastle under the tide.
“I’m sorry. Only family!”
“Roman!” I called and waved my hand to get his attention, but he was turned with his back to me.
“Ma’am, please step aside.” A security guard rested his heavy hands on my shoulders. A flashlight jerked across my face.
Delirious, I stomped my foot. “Don’t fucking touch me and don’t fucking ma’am me!” My blood boiled with rage.
“You need to calm down, ma’am!”
I spit out another string of expletives, but the piercing noise of the siren devoured my words. The ambulance moved. Without me. I wasn’t sure what exactly I felt at that moment. Mad. Terrified. Erased?
Emotions clogged my throat. I dropped my gaze to my chest and realized my backstage pass was missing.
People around me yelled and ran in different directions. Inside the arena, the noise was subsiding. The drums had stopped. I spun on my heels and scanned the crowd, looking for a familiar face. My heart was a thrashing mess somewhere in the pit of my stomach. My pulse raced. Brooklyn stood near one of the trucks with a phone pressed to her ear. I couldn’t make out a word she said, but for the first time since I’d met the woman, I saw her emitting emotions. Mostly shock.
Corey was nowhere to be seen. My hands shook when I pulled out my own phone to check the reception. With twenty thousand people Tweeting and Instagramming about another Hall Affinity fiasco, the chances of getting an Uber from anywhere within a half-mile radius of the Forum were less than zero.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I growled, staring at the single bar in the top left corner of my screen.
The app lagged.
I felt it then. The tears of despair pooling at the back of my eyes. I didn’t know what triggered them, the incident itself or the fact that I hadn’t made it into the ambulance, but the sudden shift terrified me. The unknown terrified me. The helplessness terrified me.
It had been my sixteenth birthday when my mother shared her wisdom with me, the motto I’d always followed.
Don’t ever let a man in to the point where when he’s gone, he’s taken a part of you with him.
She called it the breaking point.
Tonight was exactly that. The moment I’d been avoiding at all costs. And it happened the moment the ambulance left, taking Frank, taking my sanity, and taking my heart along with him. The entire night felt like an episode of a badly scripted reality show with an unlikable, unstable female lead. Me.
Stop it, Cassy. You’re an independent woman. You don’t fucking cry in the middle of a crowded parking lot.
I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth and choked down the wave of defeat. My gaze darted from person to person until it reached the dark shock of Dante’s hair near the back entrance. Cigarette dangling between his lips, shirt unbuttoned, he was surrounded by the screaming crowd. Something told me some of those people might have been overzealous fans who’d snuck in. Carter was right behind
