Page 179 of Blue Moon

“Brontë Daines.”

“Never heard of her.” I rolled what was left of my dinner up in the wrapper and scored a three-pointer in the trash can. “But I guess I’d better get an early night too.”

51

LUNA

“You were sensational!”

Luis swung me around, and my feet hit Romeo Serafini square in the chest. Shit!

“Be careful,” I squeaked.

“He should have stepped back faster.”

Venus and Aisha squished me in a double hug next, and my eyes began to prickle.

“You guys were awesome too.”

Tuesday night, and it was my first time back on stage since the kidnapping. I’d missed just over a week of shows, partly because the police wouldn’t stop asking me questions. I’d told them literally everything I knew. Yes, I’d slept through the entire abduction. No, I hadn’t been physically harmed. Yes, I’d gotten lost on a mountain when I tried to escape. The worst part was having to talk about Julius, because they had questions on that too. The snake that killed him had gone to live at the Las Vegas Zoo, and now that I had my money back, I’d used some of it to sponsor Karma’s new enclosure. Honestly, it was the least I could do. The rest of the snakes from the cabin had also been given new homes, all except for the boomslang. Mark Antony—I still struggled to think of him as anything else—had told us he had one of those, but it hadn’t been in the snake room, and nobody could find it in the house.

Mark Antony had held on to life by his fingertips, but he wasn’t so lucky when it came to his toes. Most of his right leg had been amputated to stop the spread of the infection. Really, the whole thing was a tragedy. Until my encounter with him, I hadn’t realised just how little provision there was for mental healthcare in the United States, and he’d slipped between the cracks. Kept to himself, stopped taking his meds, and acted upon a story his mind had created. The person who could have helped him the most—Julia Strand—had fed the fantasy rather than grounding him in reality.

As Emmy had said, it was a total fuckup.

And I had a lot to process.

A jumbo jet full of baggage to unload.

Spending time with Ryder made me realise just how much I’d neglected my own mental health over the years. Mom had always told me to be strong, to ignore the haters and put on a brave face. But there was only so much I could bottle up inside. When I landed back in Vegas, at a big white house on the edge of the desert, the place they called the Cathouse, I’d hugged Caro for a long minute, eaten a piece of cake, and then cried in Ryder’s arms for two hours straight. I’d been a real freaking mess. Then I’d ended up on the phone to his therapist for half the night, trying to work out how to deal with feelings I’d been suppressing for years, and I’d spoken with her every day since.

I’d be speaking with her for a long time yet.

Who wouldn’t I be speaking with? My mom. She’d been on every TV show telling the world how grateful she was to have me home, that I’d survived an ordeal, but the family would get through it together. Together? Pah. We hadn’t spoken at all since I got back. Not one word. I’d sent Jubilee a text to let her know I was okay, and she’d told me Mom was worried and “being a bit weird,” whatever that meant. Weirder than normal?

Anyhow, I had the one person I needed, and that was Ryder. He’d watched the whole of tonight’s show from the wings, and now he was leaning against a table, watching me with a faint smile on his face. Damn, I loved that man. Plus I now knew how hot he looked in his commando outfit. Getting kidnapped again had never been so tempting.

“Good news,” Romeo said. “We’ve managed to reschedule the missed shows, but they’ll be at the Nebula. We did a deal with Braxton Vale.”

“When?”

“At the end of your run here.”

Thank goodness. The missed shows had been preying on my mind because fans had purchased tickets, and I didn’t want to let them down. But Kalinda de Leon’s show at the Nile Palace was already sold out, and they couldn’t cancel the start of her run to accommodate new dates for the end of mine. A different venue was a compromise, but one I could work with.

“Thank you.”

“Brax also agreed to donate five percent of the revenue to State of Mind.”

Which would match the Serafinis’ gesture. The donation had been Romeo’s idea, a suggestion he made during a tear-filled meeting the day after I got back. My tears, not his. A meeting he’d shown up to with fresh scratches on his face. I was pretty sure he’d gotten into a fight with Tulsa because I’d seen them leaving a room at the Cathouse five minutes before, and she’d looked furious.

Anyhow, the scratches were healing now, and so was my soul. My public image? That would take a bit more rehabilitation. Half the world, the half that didn’t much like me, was convinced I’d faked my own abduction in an endless quest for ratings, never mind that Luna at the Palace was sold out already. Even some of the cops who questioned me had sounded sceptical.

“There are gifts,” Kacie announced. “I put them in your dressing room, and the letters too.”

“Did you read through the letters?”

She nodded. “I put the weird ones in a different folder. Those go to Ryder?”

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