Razing Ryker (Dissonance Book 1) by Jordanna James Read Free Book Online Page A

was imagining her.
    “What?” he barked.
    “Are you alright?”
    “Perfect. Rehearsal has been cancelled. Didn’t you get the memo?”
    “I did.” He heard her take a step inside. Two. Three. “Did you?”
    He laughed darkly. “Every last one of them.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean we were shut down before we were shut down.”
    Four steps. Five. Six. She was close. “How many times?”
    “Three,” he croaked, gagging on the word. On the memories of every time.
    “How did we keep going?”
    “Because I couldn’t give up. I couldn’t let it go.”
    “I don’t underst—“
    He turned to her abruptly, his face pinched and angry, hiding all the ways he’d sold out to save them. All of the ways he hadn’t been enough. “What are you doing here?”
    “I told you,” she answered gently. “I came to see if you were okay.”
    “How’d you know I’d be here?”
    “Because I know you can’t give up.” Seven. “I know you can’t let it go.”
    He stared at her young, hopeful face and he hurt inside. She was killing him and he wished she’d go, but some sick part of him wanted her to stay. He wanted to look at her beautiful fresh face and drink it in, let it fill him and push out the ugly and the old that he’d been living with. He wanted her hope to be his, to take it from her and call it his own, but he didn’t like the idea of what that would do to her. He didn’t like the idea of what that would make him, so he stepped past her and headed for the door.
    “I’ll get you a cab,” he told her. He held the door open for her, his eyes cast to the ground.
    She walked through the studio toward him; seven, six, five, four, three, two…
    “Is it over?” she whispered, her small body only a step away from him. “Are we giving up? After everything we’ve done, we’re just quitting?”
    He looked up at her and shook his head. “It’s over.”
    “No.”
    “Yes.”
    “No.”
    He scowled at her. “It’s not a debate, sweetheart. It’s a fact.”
    “Let’s start over,” she insisted. “Let’s find a new theater off Broadway and start again. We’ll work out the kinks and we’ll come back. The show is good, you know that. It just needs a little help.”
    “It’s not that easy. Meredith is done with it. She’s buried us, she’ll never resurrect it.”
    “Fuck Meredith,” Anna shot back angrily.
    John was taken aback. Anna was such a sweet, soft spoken girl. He’d never even heard her swear. But now she stared him down with anger in her eyes and venom on her tongue, and he couldn’t believe the transformation he was seeing. Where was this passion when she was on the stage?
    “We’ll do it small,” she continued. “We’ll do it cheap. It’ll be ugly at first but it won’t matter. The content is what matters. Once it’s strong again we’ll give it another shot. Meredith can be done with it all she wants for now but if it’s a money maker she won’t be able to walk away. That woman loves money.”
    “That she does,” John agreed slowly.
    “Then we’ll do it,” Anna insisted. She wasn’t asking. “We’ll revive it.”
    John grinned faintly, the idea forming in his mind and breathing life into his blood. It could be possible. It would be ugly, yes, but only at first. Only to start, but once it was back on its feet it could be beautiful. It could be perfect.
    “People do love revivals,” he mused.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The next morning Cameron was at Greer’s door before she’d even eaten her breakfast.
    “You were right,” he informed her, stepping past her into the apartment. “Dude is intense. He didn’t say a single word while I was there.”
    “Seriously?” She shut the door and followed him into the kitchen where he was grabbing a water from the fridge. “He said nothing? The entire time?”
    “Nothing. His assistant talked to me, the piano player was a nice guy, the agent was a bitch, but J—“ he paused, looking around the room. “Is anyone else