Renna Rose Lancaster never searched for love.
She stumbled into it long before she was old enough to know what to call it.
It lived inside flower crowns that barely survived a minute on his head. Pebbles he slipped into her pockets because every tre...
"If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever."
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The Theatre Royal reeked of rotting wealth, overpriced champagne, cloying perfume, and my own goddamn blood pressure hitting an all-time high.
My shirt was plastered to my spine. The collar was choking me, turning the whole venue into a velvet-lined sauna. I felt like a trash rat that had squeezed into a state dinner, sitting there while three tiers of the city's upper crust looked down their noses.
Three hours. Three fucking hours trapped in this torture chamber, watching my life pass by in slow motion.
Why the fuck did I agree to this?
Right. Because she asked me to. Because when Renna looked at me with those big, wrecked eyes, I'd probably let her carve my heart out with a dull knife if it meant she slept a bit easier. But sitting here in the pitch-black, forced to watch the girl I'd die for get felt up by some pretentious prick under a million quid worth of stage lights? This was a completely different kind of slow death.
Up in the private boxes, the city elite were preening under the gold-leaf chandeliers. These were the fuckers who owned half the city, dropped five grand on a ticket like it was spare change and currently ogling my girl like they wanted to buy her for the night.
And right in the center was Ryan Lancaster, looking like he'd been hand-delivered by God Himself. He was sitting there utterly unfazed while a bloke in tights and kilt skirt dragged his daughter across a stage for a room full of tax-dodging creeps to stare at.
Fucking hypocrite.
Down on that fucking stage, Renna was bleeding through her satin while a room full of coughing old bastards watched her die in slow motion.
She looked like a ghost. Floating over the oak like gravity was just a suggestion she was too polite to break. The audience sat there breathless, dead silent, looking at the prodigy. The fucking masterpiece. I wanted to put my boots through every single one of their teeth.
They didn't see her. They just saw the doll. They didn't see the girl hiding under my hoodie in my flat, sobbing into my chest because she hated every breath of this artificial life. They didn't see her knuckles turning white against the bathroom sink as she ripped the tape off her shredded toes, swearing through her teeth that she was going to burn her pointe shoes and buy a plant shop in the middle of nowhere.
She fucking hated this world. But God help us all, she was too goddamn good at it.
The orchestra hit a melancholic chord that felt less like music and more like a headache taking root behind my eyes. On stage, Julian—or whatever fake, pretentious name this lanky piece of shit was using tonight—was practically inhaling the oxygen out of Renna's mouth.
