Page 130 of Don't Bang a Bandmate

“Got back from where?” Addison asks. “New York?”

August turns up his hands rather than answer yet again that he doesn’t know.

“Whatever,” Knox says, brushing it off. “It wasn’t them, anyway.”

“How do you know?” Katrina asks.

“Because Jordan would never do anything like this,” he says with a laugh. “She makes the rules. She doesn’t break them.”

I smile to myself.

“No,” Knox says definitively. “It’s far more likely that she ditched us for a fancy new contract in New York City, and the sooner we all accept that fact, the better.” He snorts. “Joke’s on her anyway, now that Monroe is out. You know, I bet any second now, she’s going to come crawling back and I think we should tell her where she can stick it.”

“Stick what, Knox?”

Knox startles, instantly standing off his stool as Jordan appears in the doorway. Dressed for show night in a tight pencil skirt and a silver blouse, she scans the room with a short smile.

Everyone reacts. Some stand up while others stiffen in the seats.

I sit still, quietly lowering my chair legs to the floor.

“Oh, thank god,” August says, deflating. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” she says.

“Christina, too?”

“Uh, yeah.” Jordan pivots, one hand pointing back. “She’s talking to Roy over?—”

August doesn’t wait. He drops the clipboard into Jordan’s hands and bolts out of the room.

“… there,” Jordan murmurs before holding the clipboard by her side.

Knox clears his throat. “Hi, Jordan.”

“Hi,” she replies.

“Bye, Jordan,” he spits.

“Hold on,” Jonah says. “I wanna hear what she has to say.”

“Who cares what she has to say?”

Katrina raises her hand, prompting everyone else to do the same. Myself included.

Knox crosses his arms and glares.

“I’m sorry, Knox,” Jordan says as she takes out her phone. “I had to make it look convincing so Christian would take me to Monroe.”

With a tap of her thumb, an audio recording plays.

“Less Criminal Records means less Midnite Music. You remove Criminal Records and… it all comes down. Sure, they might stay afloat for a while with some barely legal pop princess or an aging old rockstar trying to reclaim his former glory, but they won’t recover. And if they do, well... Under my leadership, underourleadership, Sugar Sound will havealready overtaken them. But for that to happen, I had to first find out how to bring Criminal Records crumbling down…”

I smile.

“So, it was you,” Katrina says over the audio. “You leaked the recording toGossipa.”

“Not just that,” Addison says, impressed. “She got him to spill his shit to a microphone.”

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