Page 78 of Crimson Desires

The band finished with a catastrophically loud finale.

As soon as they were done, the stadium lights cut out. Then, the girls vacated the stage, their moving shadows barely visible against the stage’s black backdrop.

Despite the thousands of people, the stadium felt eerily quiet as we all waited in the dark for Wicked Crimson to set up. I became hyper-aware of the fact that I was a single body amongst a sea of many.

However, this realization didn’t make me feel small. Instead, it overwhelmed me with a sudden and powerful sense of belonging. I felt as though a string running through my very soul connected me with every other person in the stadium. No matter where our lives had begun, no matter where time would take us—for this one moment in time, we had all found ourselves here. Together.

A single chord rang out through the stadium. The audience exploded into hungry cheers.

Lights pulsed as Axel strummed his guitar. I could feel the vibrations from the speakers rattling me down to my very core.

Then, all at once, the stage exploded into a supernova of light and sound. Wicked Crimson catapulted into their first song, a spirited ballad that I knew every single word to.

Jack’s husky voice echoed through the speakers, his body already glimmering with sweat beneath the hot stadium lights. I swallowed thickly as he locked eyes with me and smirked.

It was honestly unfair how fucking sexy he was.

As I watched him move his body to the music, gyrating his hips and running his hands along his defined abs, I felt foolish for having ever believed that I’d be able to resist him.

Wicked Crimson played through their setlist. I absorbed every second of their performance. I screamed every lyric along with Jack, jumped up and down in tandem with the audience, and screamed like an obsessed fangirl when I heard the establishing notes of my favorite song.

Even though I’d seldom seen Wicked Crimson’s concerts, I knew their setlist sonically by heart. So, I knew that their last song of the night was also their most popular.

Still, I managed to feel shocked and delighted when Jack sang the opening lines. Behind me, a woman standing just behind the barricade screamed in ecstatic joy and reached out over my shoulder. Without thinking, I grabbed her hand.

It was a strange thing to do, but in the heat of the moment, it felt perfectly natural.

The woman squeezed my hand, and we relished in our joy together. The physical connection between us felt familiar. Our fingers laced felt like the crisscrossing threads of sisterhood.

Only at the end of the song, when I finally turned around to look at the woman whose hand I’d clutched, did I realize why the feeling of her hand in mine had felt so immediately natural.

The woman’s eyes were blue. Her hair had been dyed red, but I could see her dirty blonde roots peeking through at the top of her curtain bangs. Looking into her face felt like looking into a mirror.

Her name left my tongue like a curse.

“Violet.”

Chapter Nineteen

Jack

I saw Violet before Aster did.

Honestly, I don’t know how I knew the woman in the front row of the audience was Aster’s sister. But I realized it instantaneously.

Maybe it was the face. Though Violet looked a bit older than Aster, their features were nearly identical. From their button noses to their doe-like blue eyes—Aster was Violet, copy-and-pasted.

Throughout the show, I hoped that Aster wouldn’t turn. She stood directly in front of Violet. So, as long as she kept her eyes on the stage, neither sister would ever realize that they’d come within a radius of the other.

But then, Violet grabbed Aster’s hand during our final song. And I knew that fate was a train barreling toward Aster at one hundred miles per hour. And Aster was too distracted by the show to realize that she was standing on the tracks.

I wanted to warn her, but I couldn’t. Not while I was still singing to a crowd of ten thousand.

As soon as we finished our final song, I saw Aster turn. It was like a slow-motion scene happening before my very eyes. Aster’s beautiful, blissful smile vanished as she locked eyes with her older sister.

I saw her lips move. “Violet.”

Then, she fled.

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