Page 13 of Swan River

“Hey, no one answered when I knocked. Wasn’t sure what was up. I kind of expected everyone to be here primping,” Ronan said, gray eyes twinkling and lips twitching as if he’d said something hilarious.

“Only Landry and Nikki are here at the moment,” Paisley said, finger pushing into her star. “There’s a lot going on.”

Ronan frowned, waiting for her to explain, but she didn’t. She turned and ran for the front door instead.

“We’ll just head over to the pond and get things set up,” Ronan called after her, his brows bent in confusion.

Jonas jogged after Paisley, and if he hadn’t been right behind her, he wouldn’t have seen her stiffen or seen the shiver that went through her.

“What?” he asked, and when she didn’t move, when she continued to stare at the door as if it was a ghost, he moved around to see what had caused her to go numb.

There was a picture taped well below the handle, as if someone had been ducking out of the camera’s view while sticking it there. It was of Jonas and Paisley from that afternoon as they’d left the studio and locked lips in the middle of the street. The image had words scrawled on top of it. Words that were running in deep red and turned Jonas’s stomach.

You’ll die before I let you be happy.

The red dripped into the two deep grooves carved into Jonas’s and Paisley’s faces.

Emotions swam through him so fast it was hard to capture them. Fear. Panic. Anger. Disgust. And then back to fear. Regardless of everything else going on with the band tonight, this…this seemed to be about them.

Chapter Seven

Landry

SOUND OF SILENCE

Performed by Disturbed

The air was still heavy even as the sun sank below the treetops. The humidity of upstate New York in summer wasn’t anything to joke about. But then, lately, Landry couldn’t find much of anything to joke about. There were days when she felt like she was the only one even trying to keep the band moving forward. Like if she wasn’t there, it would all collapse. It was a heavy burden.

Landry pushed aside the brush as she made her way around the barely visible trail surrounding Swan River Pond. It was her favorite thing about the farmhouse. The water…the swans…the escape it allowed her from the others while she attempted to assemble her thoughts into some kind of order.

She was almost silent as she jogged along the grassy path in her bright-yellow sneakers and neon workout gear. Her long hair kept flying in her face. She swiped at it, frustrated she’d forgotten a hairband in her hurry to get out the door and back before she had to set up for Ronan and his crew. She probably should have skipped the jog tonight—another mistake she’d made in a long line of them lately.

Landry rounded the last corner of the pond, bringing the farmhouse into view. She stopped at the shoreline, turning away from the handful of lights that glittered from the windows, to try and catch her breath before she went in. The pond was swathed in shadow, making it almost impossible to see much past the beam of her phone’s flashlight. Even with a member of their detail following several yards behind her, it had been stupid to go running this late. If Paisley had done it, she would have read her the riot act.

Just thinking of Paisley made her chest ache more than it had from the run.

That had been Landry’s biggest screw-up yet. The things she’d said to Paisley and Jonas were almost unforgivable. She wasn’t sure if her little sister would accept her apology, even if she found the courage to give her the note she’d written. Landry closed her eyes as she faced the pond, wishing for a breeze that wasn’t there and trying to hold back the tears. For two years, she’d watched as Paisley built a friendship with Jonas over texts and long-distance chats, and for two years, she’d done her best to minimize their relationship to her sister.

It wasn’t just that they’d been young when they first met?Landry would be hypocritical if she’d said that was it when she’d had a slew of people in and out of her life well before she’d hit her twenties. It was more of what she’d told her friends. She didn’t want Paisley’s romanticism and loyalty to tie her to the first person who came along—a boy she rarely saw and who had a troubled past that screamed from his tortured eyes. A guy who was the reason they were receiving ugly notes with their faces scratched out.

You know that’s not the real reason, her conscience yelled at her.

Okay, so the truth was she’d also been afraid of losing her sister. Afraid of no longer being the one person Paisley relied on to hold her up when she was falling. Of not being the one who believed in Paisley more than anyone else. Because her little sister was absolutely and undeniably the most talented one of them all. Her voice was the strongest, and her words were the reason they had anything to sing to begin with.

Without Paisley, The Painted Daisies wouldn’t exist.

Or they’d exist, but they’d be just another “girl band” who’d come and gone because they were singing words someone else had created. For the first year after she and Fiadh had formed the band in high school, they’d sung cover songs while playing whatever gig they could get. It wasn’t until Landry had forced Paisley to share her songs with the others that they’d really taken off. It was Paisley’s voice and words that had first drawn Nick Jackson’s attention.

The fear Landry had felt two years ago, watching as Paisley and Jonas built a tentative friendship, was nothing to what she felt now. The rift between them felt like a huge canyon she wasn’t sure how to navigate before the band crumbled apart.

She swallowed hard. Truth was, she was even more afraid of the tension between them than she was of the stupid notes warning that hell was going to rain down on them. Or maybe she was afraid that what she’d told Ronan she wanted for Paisley was actually happening. That Paisley was coming out of the shadows to take the lead, and it would leave Landry with nothing.

While Landry was confident their security team and the police would find whoever this was coming for them, there was no one to handle the gaping hole Landry herself had caused.

A tear slowly traveled down her cheek, and she brushed it away.

A noise drew her head in Ramona’s direction. Her bodyguard had followed her around the lake at a respectful distance, giving Landry her space. She felt slightly guilty that she’d forced the woman out in the heat and the darkness. Landry used her phone light to shine back toward the path, surprised when she didn’t see the bodyguard.

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