Razing Ryker (Dissonance Book 1) (6 page)

“You ran the background checks?” Ryker asked Grant, pouring himself another whiskey.

“Yep, on all of them. They all came back clean. Couple of them have some serious credit card debt, but that’s pretty standard for just about anyone these days. Two of them don’t have any credit history at all, which was weird.”

“Greer?”

“Yeah, her and Cameron Dillard.” Grant frowned at him. “How’d you know she was one of them?”

“She doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“How is that possible? My cat has a cell phone.”

He shrugged. “Sounded like she couldn’t afford one.”

“Not surprising. She doesn’t have any addresses listed before the one she’s at now and she’s only been there ten months.”

Ryker fell into the chair across from Grant. “Then where was she before that?”

“No idea.”

“Somewhere outside the city? Maybe living with family?”

“If she was, she wasn’t getting mail. She’s never reported another address. Not since she was thirteen and a New York address was registered at her school. A school that she dropped out of.”

“At thirteen?”

“Yup. You know what that means, right?”

“Young kid leaving home and school behind at an inappropriate age?” Ryker surmised with a smirk. “She’s a child star too?”

“No, she’s a runaway.”

He lowered his glass. “What?”

“There are a lot of them in New York. It’s not that surprising.”

“Shit. How the hell did she learn to dance like that?”

“Probably on the streets. There’s a lot of talent in the gutters. It sounds horrible but it’s true. It’s true in L.A. too. Lot of dance crews, lot of singers, lot of musicians – all of them scraping by performing on the streets and dodging the cops. If I’m right, Greer is one of the lucky ones to use her talent to get off the streets.”

“Dillard too?”

“I think so. His record has a couple odd jobs on it now and then after he turned eighteen, he was in the foster system for a while as a kid, but other than that he’s a ghost too. Came into the show at the same time she did. Got a roof over his head the same month.”

“They were together.”

“I think so.”

“Are they involved? I mean romantically.”

Grant grinned. “Not in the file, man. Sorry.”

Ryker bristled at his own question, taking a long sip of his whiskey to hide his frown. He stood up and paced the room briefly, unable to shake the image of Greer on the streets. Cold. Hungry. It made him angry.

“You sure about this?” Grant asked him, gesturing to the table between them.

Ryker sipped his whiskey as he stared down at the headshots spread out over the coffee table. The girls were hot, the two guys in the mix were good looking but with a totally different look from himself. They wouldn’t pull focus during the concert. All of them would blur together in the background as they danced and sang his backup and they’d do it with professionalism. With a fucking modicum of class, which was more than he could say for his previous dancers.

The phone call he’d taken during Greer’s audition was from Lexy. She’d been hounding him so hard he’d considered changing his phone number, but he wasn’t sure even that would stop her. She was angry and annoyed, petulant and despondent. She told him he was overreacting and being childish, and when that didn’t get a rise out of him she started crying and talking crazy saying she couldn’t sleep without him and she didn’t know what would happen to her if he didn’t forgive her. If he didn’t see her and let her make it up to him.

Not happening.

He’d ended up hanging up on her and heading back inside, hoping he could catch the end of Greer’s audition. He’d been surprised to find her in the hallway and he instantly worried when he saw her with her head pressed against the window. She looked beaten. Sad. It’d angered him immediately. He’d told Grant she was a lock. That in no way was she to be turned down. She was the only one he demanded be in the show, no question. He couldn’t even explain why he wanted her there. Why he
needed
her in the show. There was something in her eyes, in her tone, that called to him. They’d barely talked but looking at her made him feel a little bit less alone, a feat no one had been able to manage in a year. Not since his mother had died and he’d been left with no one but his piece of shit father and cokehead girlfriend.

And Grant. He had Grant and he honestly didn’t know what he’d do without him. He was the only real friend that Ryker had anymore. The only person he even considered trusting. Everyone else wanted a piece of him or all of him if they could manage it. But even that friendship couldn’t fill the emptiness that plagued him night after night and left him waking at three am. Lexy hadn’t filled it. Booze didn’t fill it. His music wasn’t what he wanted and it left him more lost than anything else. Hearing his own songs on the radio was like listening to someone else’s music. It didn’t resonate with him. He couldn’t connect with it and he’d wrote the shit. It was messed up and he hated it. He hated almost everything lately. It was depression, he knew it, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He wanted to write, to create, but there was nothing in him to put to paper. He was hollow and it scared him more than anything else in his life ever had before.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he told Grant, his eyes falling on the corner of Greer’s headshot that was peeking out from the pile. Her large green eye was squinted at the edge from her smile, a line of laughter that hit him in the heart like a jolt of energy. He wanted to reach out and pick up her photo to get a better look, but he knocked back the remainder of his whiskey instead. “Call ‘em. Line it up.”

“You got it, man. I’ll see what I can do.”

“You don’t think they’ll all want to do it.” It wasn’t a question.

Grant shook his head doubtfully as he pulled the headshots into a neat stack. “I don’t, no. I think the girl from
Surrendered
, Cara, is going to stay with the production. She said in her audition that she wasn’t sure she could get away long enough to work with us.”

“Yeah, I know. Call her anyway.” He hesitated, watching Grant pull out his phone and pick up Cara’s headshot off the top of the pile. Cameron, the guy from
Rendezvous,
was underneath it. “Give me that one. I’ll call him.”

“Sure.”

“Give me all of them from that production. I’ll call them all.”

Grant chuckled at him. “You know we’d be better off if you personally called Cara and the others still involved in running productions, right?”

“Yeah,” he muttered, taking the headshots and walking to the bar to refill his drink.

“Ry.”

“You’re a silver tongued devil, Grant,” he said, not looking back at his friend. “You’ll stand a better chance getting them than I will. Give me the locks. I can’t screw those up.”

“You won’t screw it up, man.”

“I screw everything up lately,” he grumbled dialing Cameron’s number.

“Come on, you—“

“On the phone!”

Grant watched Ryker’s back as he waited impatiently for the call to go through. His shoulders were high and tight, anxious. This was important to him. It was important to everyone involved and the success of this concert could change the tide for Ryker’s entire career, but Grant had a sinking, awful feeling that it wouldn’t be enough. He knew his friend. He knew he needed more, but what that ‘more’ was, he didn’t know. Even worse, he understood that Ryker didn’t know either.

Ryker made the calls to all of the members of
Rendezvous
.

All but one.

He listened as Grant laughed and joked with the other dancers and he knew he’d get them. Every last one of them because that’s the kind of charisma Grant had. The same kind that Ryker used to have. He recognized it and envied it. Especially now as he looked down at the final headshot, the final phone number, and he wondered if he wanted to call her after all. He wanted her in the show but he didn’t know if he could handle the joyful exuberance that would most likely follow his offer. The joy and the screams and the appreciation that Mia had just given him. He didn’t think he could stomach it. Maybe he didn’t have to call. Maybe a text would be enough.

“Shit,” he muttered, running his hand through his hair. She didn’t have a cell. This number was a landline. He had to call. Annoyed that he was afraid of a phone call, he whipped his cell phone off the bar and dialed the number quickly. He’d tell her she got it, congratulate her, and hang the fuck up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, can I speak to Greer, please?” he asked.

“This is Greer. Jace?”

He paused, thrown by the sound of her saying his name. He realized then that he hadn’t heard her say it in their brief conversations. Most people tried it out at least once while talking to him as though to cement the moment in their minds. “Yeah, it’s Jace Ryker.”

“How are you?”

“I’m good. I’m calling to tell—how are you?”

She chuckled lightly. “I’m great. Just sitting around brushing up on my Old McDonald.”

“Have you reached the duck yet? The duck was always my favorite as a kid.”

“Not yet. I’m stuck on goat.”

He frowned. “Do goats make a sound?”

“Exactly my problem. I think I’ve sung myself into a corner here.”

“You could always skip them.”

“I’m no quitter.”

“I think they say ‘bah’, like sheep.”

“But then what do I do when I get to sheep?”

“Fall asleep?”

“Now we’re rhyming,” she laughed. “I think we just wrote a song together.”

“My first in months,” he chuckled dryly.

“That’s not true. I heard one of your new ones just the other day.”

“You weren’t supposed to. No one was.”

“Oh. You mean it was leaked?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s
your
work,” she replied as though it were obvious. “It’s a piece of you and you aren’t in control of it. That sucks.”

He swallowed in surprise at her reaction, at how close it hit to home. “Yeah, it does.”

“Do you know how it got out?”

He hesitated, not sure he wanted to continue this conversation. Greer was deceptively easy to talk to and he probably shouldn’t have told her as much as he just had. He definitely shouldn’t tell her who he suspected of leaking his material because if it found its way to the press it’d be another scandal he had to deal with. He wasn’t ready to face that. He was already cleaning up from the last mess. “Not a clue,” he said, his voice clipped. “Anyway, I was calling to let you know we want you in the show if you’re available.”

“Seriously?” she asked, sounding breathless.

Ryker winced, prepping himself for the screams. “Yeah. Definitely. We need you in the show.”

Want,
he thought angrily, scolding himself.
We
want
you in the show.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

He paused, unsure of what was happening because it definitely wasn’t screaming. “You’re welcome.”

“Is it all right if I ask what the show is now?”

“Yeah, of course. It’s a one night concert in my hometown back in Washington. We’ll have rehearsals for a couple weeks before hand, we’ll need you in Washington for a couple of days gearing up for the show, then you’re free immediately after.”

“That sounds amazing.”

“It’s a small commitment,” he clarified. “No promises of future work. Just this one show, that’s all we’re asking for.”

“I understand that. It’s still amazing. I’ve never been out of New York before. Oh God, that’s embarrassing,” she mumbled. “Forget I admitted that. I was kidding. I go to Milan like every weekend.”

Ryker chuckled at her lie. “Me too.”

“See, when you say it I actually believe that.”

“I’ve been to Milan a couple times,” he admitted. “Not that great.”

“Well, I’ll sell my summer home there immediately.”

“Smart.”

“Any suggestions on where I should spend my summers now?”

“Not Washington.”

“Are you hating on your home?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it my home. I was born there. That’s about it. I’ve spent more time in the studio than I ever spent in that town.”

“Then why are you going back?”

He hesitated again, stumped as to how she kept getting him so close to these topics. She should have been a reporter.

“Never mind, none of my business,” she said quickly before he could shut her down. “I’m just excited to be a part of it.”

“I’m glad you’re going to be a part of it too.”

His honesty hung in the air between them and he suddenly didn’t know what to do with it. Obviously she didn’t either because the silence drug out between them until it felt like a tangible thing linking her to him from across the town and over the sullen streets. She was a light in the air that found him and swirled through the receiver until he breathed in warm, crisp air that tasted like sunshine on his tongue.