Page 90 of Bound By Threads
The song ends.
The lights dim.
And I’m left standing in the aftermath—skin slick with sweat, chest heaving, the echo of music still pulsing in my veins. The crowd claps, loud and mindless, but it’s all just noise now.
They didn’t see what I left behind up there.
They didn’t feel it bleed out of me.
I step off the stage, boots striking the waxed floor in sharp, defiant clicks. My body hums with adrenaline and fury, but I don’t slow down until I hit the hallway leading to the dressing room.
Archer’s already there.
Leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, jaw tight with tension. He looks like he’s carved from stone—still, watchful, dangerous.
I eye him, heart still pounding. “You good?”
He nods once, but his voice betrays him. “I get it now.” It’s low and rough, thick with something I can’t name. “Watching you up there… watching them watch you…” He shakes his head slowly, and my heart plummets. “It was fucking brutal. I wanted to tear every single one of them apart just forlookingat you like they had the right.”
A pause. His throat works like it’s hard to swallow the fire burning in him.
“But I get it. You needed that stage. Needed to let it out.”
His gaze drags down my body and back up again, reverent and raw. “And you were…fucking unstoppable.”
My breath catches.
I swallow hard, heat curling low in my stomach, grateful he understands—but equally undone by the rasp in his voice, the edge of hunger in his tone beneath the protectiveness.
Possessive.
Fierce.
Unapologetically mine.
And it terrifies me how much I want to belong to him and Oscar. To feel loved again.
Oscar joins us a second later, brows knit as he studies my face.“Feel better?”he signs.
I nod, too out of breath to speak yet. He tilts his head… studying me, but I turn away from them both. The heat is still simmering in my chest, but it’s not the kind that leads to comfort.
It’s the kind that lingers after a storm.
Oscar closes the door, and the silence swells, pushing at the walls like it wants to crawl inside my skin.
I grab a towel from the bench and start wiping off the sweat, but my hands won’t stop shaking. My throat tightens, the edge of grief curling around my ribs again like barbed wire.
I can feel their eyes on me. Not talking, just standing there—watching me unravel one breath at a time, ready to catch me when I fall.
I turn, signing and talking. “I thought it would help. Dancing. I thought if I let it out on that stage, the guilt wouldn’t hurt as much.”
“Did it?”Oscar asks, and I swallow.
I thought it would.
“For a minute. Then it came back. The anger. The guilt. Everything I thought I buried when I left behind the name Scarlett.”
I pace the room, then stop, looking at the two men who are holding me together. “He told me to run. My dad gave me my freedom, and I never once looked back. I didn’t even try to find out if he was okay. I just… died.”
