The caterer had set out tea in unglazed stoneware mugs. Just looking at the chalky, porous rims set my teeth on edge; the thought of dragging a dry thumb across that rough baked clay made the nerves in my forearms flare with a violent, hollow itch. I used a folded paper napkin to shove the entire tray three inches to the left, refusing to touch the ceramic, and reached instead for a lukewarm bottle of mineral water.
Three weeks ago, water didn't taste like tin. Today, it did.
Out on the stage, the subwoofers thumped once—a dry, rib-cracking punch that shook the mirror bulbs above the dressing table. Soundcheck had run forty minutes over because Castiel kept arguing with the monitor engineer about the high-end bite on his Gibson. Through the drywall, I heard his voice: sharp, gravel-edged, unwilling to bend.
"I don't care if the house board peaks, adjust the trim," he barked. "I’m not playing through cotton wool."
I sat on an equipment trunk, resting my elbows on my knees. My bass, a battered Olympic White Precision with twenty years of sweat sealed into the lacquer, leaned against my leg. My head spun if I tilted it back too fast. Three days had passed since the second pink line materialized in the quiet of our flat’s bathroom at dawn, yet the word *pregnant* still felt like a smooth stone lodged beneath my tongue—too heavy to swallow, too sharp to spit out.
Nobody knew. Not the label, certainly not the fans who still parsed every lyric Lysander sang as though he were an eligible ghost wandering nineteenth-century moors, and not Castiel, who would likely rip a door off its hinges before deciding whether to punch Lysander or hug me.
The door handle clicked. Nathaniel walked in first, wearing a dark button-down with the sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms, drumsticks tucked into his back pocket. He had a clipboard clamped under one arm, his expression dialed into that cool, administrative precision he had perfected since we were teenagers.
"Ten minutes until doors," Nathaniel said, checking his watch. "House security says the queue wraps around the boulevard. We need to clear the wings."
"Tell Castiel to quit whining about his monitors, then," I said, my voice dry.
Nathaniel didn't laugh. He flicked a page on his clipboard, his eyes darting to the corner of the room rather than meeting mine. He was holding something back; his shoulders carried that stiff, defensive brace he defaulted to whenever he intercepted bad news from the tour promoter before it reached the rest of us. He slid a grey dossier under a stack of cue sheets without letting the cover show.
"The monitors are fine," he said shortly. "He’s just restless. Drink some tea, Manu. You look pale."
"The mugs are disgusting," I said.
He gave me a single, baffled blink, dismissed the complaint as my usual brand of stubbornness, and vanished back toward the pit.
A moment later, Castiel shoved his way inside, letting the heavy door slam against the stopper. He smelled of menthol and cold outdoor air. He caught my eye, grunted, and immediately stuffed an envelope with an unprinted black seal deep into his leather jacket pocket—moving with deliberate speed, clearly avoiding my sightline.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Bills," he lied flatly, not blinking. "Quit staring. Have you tuned down for the encore yet?"
"I did it an hour ago."
"Do it again. The humidity in this cellar is garbage." He turned toward the mirror, dragging a hand through his dyed red hair. "If Lysander doesn't finish dressing in five minutes, I'm starting the opening riff without him."
"You wouldn't dare," Lysander’s voice came from the threshold, perfectly calm, untouched by the subterranean humidity or the venue's frantic pulse.
He stepped into the dressing room, adjusting the mother-of-pearl cufflinks on his left wrist. At twenty-six, he carried himself with the exact same unhurried poise he had displayed in high school stairwells, though the tailored charcoal vest and silver cravat were finer now, bought with arena money rather than scavenged from thrift shops. His heterochromatic eyes—one golden green, one pale cyan—settled on me instantly.
Castiel rolled his eyes, muttered something unintelligible about theatrical peacocks, and pushed past Lysander into the hallway to harass the lighting crew.
The heavy door swung shut. The sudden muffling of stage noise left the room suffocatingly quiet.
Lysander closed the distance between us, his leather boots making no sound on the taped-down cables. He reached down, his fingers cool against the side of my neck, his thumb tracing the sharp curve of my jaw. "Your skin is cold, Emmanuelle."
"It's just the basement air," I murmured.
"You haven't touched your tea."
"The pottery feels like fingernails on a chalkboard. You know I can't look at it."
He smiled faintly, the edge of his lips curving with that private warmth he never showed to cameras, but his expression shadowed quickly. His other hand remained buried inside his waistcoat pocket, his knuckles curled around something bulky and stiff. When I leaned toward him, he subtly angled his shoulder away, guarding whatever he had tucked against his ribs.
"What are you hiding?" I asked quietly.
"Nothing that concerns tonight," Lysander answered, smooth as silk, entirely unconvincing. He leaned down, pressing his forehead against mine, his breath smelling of mint and black tea. "Are you fit to play? If your hands are shaking, we can drop the instrumental bridge in the fourth song."
"No," I said instantly. To prove it, I stood up, swung the heavy strap of the Precision over my shoulder, and reached down to twist the volume pot on my pre-amp rack myself, overriding the sound tech’s preset levels by three decibels to mask any looseness in my picking hand. "I’m fine. I'm playing."
He studied me for three long seconds. He didn't know about the test sitting under a pile of guitar magazines in our Paris apartment. He didn't know why my stomach had revolted at the smell of his usual cologne that morning. He only knew something was slightly out of plumb, and it troubled him.
"Very well," he said quietly. "Stay close to my riser."
We stepped out into the dim belly of the venue. The air here was thicker, charged with the roar of four thousand people packed against the barricades out front. Nathaniel was already behind his kit, tapping his snare with a single stick in a relentless, metronomic cadence. Castiel stood near stage left, glaring at his pedalboard.
On the flight case beside the monitor desk sat a small, square florist's parcel that hadn't been there twenty minutes ago. A cluster of white lilies, damp and sickeningly sweet. Taped to the parchment paper was a card typed in black ink: *For Madame Lysander Ainsworth. Good luck tonight.*
A jolt went through my chest, cold and sudden. We had married in an empty town hall in Normandy on a Tuesday morning with only two legal witnesses from the registrar’s office. Our names on hotel registers were aliases. Our fans debated online whether Lysander lived alone in a restored Victorian manor; half of them thought Castiel and I were just bandmates who shared an old family name on our mother's side.
I reached out to grab the card, but before my fingers could graze the paper, the venue's overhead lights abruptly cut to black.
The arena roared—a concussive, deafening wall of sound that hit my sternum like a physical blow. The sudden dark made my inner ear tilt. The smell of the lilies surged in the heat, mixed with synthetic stage fog, heavy and syrupy.
"Manu," Castiel’s voice called from the dark, tense and sharp. "Get to your mark."
I took one step forward. My foot found the stage riser, but my knee didn't lock. The world lost its horizontal axis. The screaming crowd sounded like it was underwater, muffled by twenty feet of ocean, and then the air simply vanished from my lungs.
My bass crashed against the wood, the strings howling with an ear-splitting screech through the live amplifiers.
I didn't hit the floor. Long, steady arms caught me beneath the shoulders before my head struck the monitor wedge, hauling me upward against a broad chest. The fabric of a velvet waistcoat pressed hard against my cheek.
"Kill the house music!" Lysander shouted—a voice stripped of all its Victorian gentility, raw and jagged with a fury I had never heard in him before. "Castiel, get the stage door open! Now!"
"What happened to her?" Castiel’s yell was right beside us, panicked, furious.
"She’s burning up," Lysander said, his arms tightening around me as he lifted me off my feet effortlessly, turning back toward the backstage corridor. "Out of my way, Nathaniel."
I tried to speak, to tell him about the flowers, about the tin taste in the water, about the two lives sharing one pair of lungs, but the ceiling lights spun into blinding ribbons of white. As Lysander carried me into the stark glare of the dressing room, the world didn't feel dangerous anymore; it felt impossibly, terrifyingly small, stripped down to his trembling hands and the rhythm of his heart racing against my temple.