Stolen Melody (Snow and Ash #2) (17 page)

Have I ever done the right thing?

I’m wearing clothes—all the girls are. Figure-hugging dresses with knee-high boots and our hair skinned back from our faces and pulled high on our heads. Straight out of the 1960s, I’m telling ya.

I take a deep breath and look out at the crowd. All men, of course. This one is strictly for Barry’s soldiers. The place smells like old beer and smoke. The smoke comes from a huge fireplace and a series of candle chandeliers. The beer? I’m sure someone around here grows hops. Guys never give up on stuff like that.

We’ve decided there’s no point in playing any of the songs I’m famous for. We’d need synthesizers and electronics for that, and they’re all dead. Microphones too, and speakers. We’ve pooled what we remember of pre-apocalyptic music. Our playlist is, to say the least, eclectic.

I bend around to the musicians. “‘Ode to Billy Joe.’”

It’s a really old song, but it was one of Pastor North’s favorites, and it’s ideally suited to the instruments we have. The first guitar kicks in, then the steel guitar, and that’s my cue.

“
Was the third of June, another sleepy dusty delta day…
”

The men respond with everything from appreciation to full-on crudity. They’re much like the men at the fort, but more restrained. I have a wide range, and I can really belt out a tune if I want to. My voice is a little on the husky side, though, and three bars into the song, the crudity dulls, the voices quiet, and I see longing in the eyes of men separated from loved ones, perhaps forever. It’s a song about grief, and all of us know a little about that.

From there we move into Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” and then I steal from Sam Smith and kick into “Stay with Me.” As I stand there on the stage, my gaze moving from face to face, I realize that these are just men, like any other. They’re trying just like the rest of us to keep civilization going—or at least the memory of it. I’m bringing them more death. It doesn’t sit right, somehow, but that’s how it has to be.

I’m halfway through a version of “Make It Rain” when I see him. Like a magnet pulled north, I zero in on Colonel Barry. I falter, but only for a second. I want to cover my face, to run away, but I can’t. What’s done is done. He gives me a half smile and takes a seat near the front.

At the end of the song, a young guy with tattoos all up and down his neck hands me a cup of water. I smile and take a grateful sip. Then I gag; it’s straight vodka.

This gets a laugh from the audience.

I put my hands on my hips and raise my brows. “All right, fine. Enough of that. You guys got something you wanna hear?”

“Alicia Keyes,” calls out Zack. At least it sounds like him.

“Anyone here know how to play the piano?” I raise my brows. No way. I never learned any of her music, and these girls don’t have the voices for it.

“No? Come on, guys, gimme something!” I offer them my best flirtatious smile.

“‘Crazy in Love,’” another guy shouts out. “You guys know that one?”

I cup a hand over my eyes and squint into the audience. “You mean Beyoncé?”

“Yeah!”

“The slow one or the fast one?”

“Slow, baby. Always slow,” comes another voice.

A chorus of laughter erupts.

“All right, ‘Crazy in Love.’ Who am I dedicating this to?”

“To Shannon.”

I turn to my crew. “If you can do the chords, I can carry the rest.”

“All right! To Shannon, from the man who’s crazy in love!”

The guys shout and applaud. The music starts. It’s the perfect song for guitar and violin, and I close my eyes. I can’t help thinking about Axel, and soon the lyrics and the swell of the music overwhelm me. I sing it like I mean it. I belt it out like I’m holding my lover, like I’m pleading with him to love me back, explaining what he means to me. I’ve never sung like this before, and it’s like magic descends over the room.

No one seems to notice when the front door opens and a straggler walks in. He’s halfway down to the front of the room when I realize it’s Axel. He’s here! Even my soul flutters. A thrill bigger than the Carolinas fills my chest, and I sing the next few bars to him. Only him. Even though we’re seconds from ugliness, all I can think about is telling him how I feel, what he means to me. And then he moves, and by the light of the chandelier I catch the expression on his face.

Hatred.

Betrayal.

And I realize he knows. Did Mia rat me out?

The doors shut with a bang, and from the clanking I hear, it sounds like they’re being chained. I stop singing. The music stops playing, and fire erupts on the front window curtains. No one said anything to me about setting a fire. I rip my gaze from Axel to the flames, then back to my lover, and what I see chokes my breath. There is death in his eyes.

Within seconds the fire spreads to the ceiling, and the guys throw down their instruments. The audience members shoot to their feet and race to the front of the room, where the main door is. Zack motions for the rest of us to follow him to the back, perhaps to another door, but I’m frozen by the look in his eyes. Axel’s.

The fire spreads, and so does the smoke. Soon the room is cloudy, and it becomes hard to breathe.

“Come on, Melody! Come on!” Felicia tugs on my arm. Juicy is already gone, and the flames now climb the side walls and race for the stage.

My eyes burn, but I’m riveted where I stand. Axel crosses his arms and just stands there. That’s when it hits me. He means for me to die—for both of us to die. The cold chill of horror races up my neck, and I retreat a step, then another. He shifts his weight and begins to advance toward the stage. He sends a promise in the clench of his jaw, the squint of his eyes, and my lungs stop working.

I fling a look back toward the rear entrance where few have thought to go. The others, my former audience, scream and trample each other as they push to get out through the front, even though by now it’s a wall of flames.

I suck in a breath and turn to run. Coughing, nearly blind with smoke, I stumble. Someone catches my arm, and I jolt to awareness.

It’s him. Colonel Kent Barry. “Too good to be true, I guess.” The wrath in his eyes presses in on me, but in my panic all I can do is stare at him like it doesn’t really matter. Nothing matters. He must see something in my expression, I don’t know what—desperation? Horror? Grief?—but it wipes his face clear of emotion.

“Come,” he says. “Out the back.”

Tears fill my eyes, and I nod. I fling a glance over my shoulder, toward Axel, and that’s when I realize how close he is.

“Run!” I cry. “He’ll kill you!”

We only make it a few steps before my arm is practically wrenched out of its socket. Axel seizes me by the hair, pulls me close, and bares his teeth. He’s not sane, not at all. I look into his eyes and see my death. He appears to struggle with himself, and in the end he flings me off and turns toward the colonel.

I slam face-first into a support beam. Something cracks. My eyes go blurry, and I stumble to the floor.

Flames are taking the Moonlight Bar as Axel pummels the colonel like he’s made of nothing but sticks and lint. My face is sticky. Wet.

“Stop!” I scramble to my feet and grab Axel’s arm, but he flicks me off like I’m a spider. “Please, you don’t know what you’re doing!”

The look he flings me should have opened my carotid artery. “He touched you,” he spits, “and you let him!”

I shake my head but weakly. “Axel, he didn’t. He let me go.”

The colonel grabs Axel by the neck and tries to gain the advantage, but he ends up with a fist slammed into his face.

“Is that why you asked the other girls to leave?” he snarls. My Axel.

The colonel grabs him by the throat and rolls him over. He’s got Axel on his back and he’s pressing down on Axel’s neck with his full weight, murder in his eyes.

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.
It doesn’t feel real. I’m dizzy, and I think I’m going to puke.

Axel gains momentum and rolls the colonel onto his back. He slams the guy’s head into the floor once, twice. He picks him up and throws him face-first into the fire.

“No!” I cup my hands over my face as I hear the colonel scream. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard.

“He didn’t do it! He didn’t!”

Axel bears down on me. I wag my head as I back away. “I would have done anything to save you. Anything. I would have slept with every single one of his men if it meant you got out of it alive, but he said I looked too miserable and he let me go, Axel, I swear!” My voice rises toward the end, but it’s cut off by his hands around my throat.

“I loved you,” he rips out, but his eyes are full of tears. “You were my girl, the only good thing that ever happened to me. I believed in you.”

“I’m pregnant,” I manage to choke.

His face scrunches up, and I think he’s going to snap my neck. At the last second he lowers me to the floor, grabs me by the hair, and drags me out the rear door.

I struggle to look behind me, and I meet the eyes of Colonel Barry. His face is half melted off. Terror overcomes me, and I can’t control the sobs.

Axel gets me fifty feet from the building, flings me to the ground, and stalks away without a backward glance. Just before the roof collapses on the Moonlight Bar, a solitary figure staggers out.

My neck hurts. My head hurts like it’s been cracked in half. The world spins and I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

Felicia finds me passed out right where Axel dropped me. Between her and Zack, they get me to my feet and to the section of the fence where our men took out the guards. No one has come to replace them, so I assume they are out fighting the fire.

Trying to save the lives of anyone who’s left.

“Axel.” I choke, and hack at the smoke that still burns my lungs.

“He’s all right,” Felicia assures me. “Just breathe. You can do that, right?”

I don’t know. Can I? I’m not even sure I want to. Those things he said to me, the things he did… I know there’s no way to convince him he’s wrong.

But he is wrong.

When Colonel Barry ordered me to strip, I froze. He was a stranger, a cold-staring enemy seated across the desk, assessing me like a prize cow. I got about as far as peeling off one bra strap before he stopped me.

Why, he’d asked, would I go this far when I’d just told him no way? I’d told him I had other people to think about, not just myself. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

He’d given me a funny look and told me to put my clothes back on.

When I’d worked up the nerve to ask him why, he’d told me he liked his women either wild and untamed, or submissive and ready to suck dick. A frightened teenage girl repulsed by the thought of his touch didn’t meet either of his criteria. He was an asshole, he told me, not a monster.
   

A monster. Like Axel.

He’d guided me out of his office and instructed his aide to take me to the others and see that we had food, clothes, and a decent place to stay. Then he’d promised to come to my concert.

My heart sank when he said that, because I knew if he came, he’d be in the battle. All the way up to the fire, the knowledge sat in my gut like a flaming snake.

It starts to snow. Axel helps Juicy scale the debris pile and then comes back for Felicia. He ignores me completely. Doesn’t even look in my direction. I count to fifty, slowly, before I admit that he won’t be coming back for me, and I start my own climb, but I’m unsteady. My hair is in my eyes, sticky with blood and sweat, and I’m dizzy. I stumble.

“Need some help?” It’s Michael Centos, that leader guy from the Sadie’s Bend raid.

I moisten my lips. He holds out his hand, and I take it.

“Thank you,” he says as he half pulls me up the side. “You did a good job back there.”

A good job of what? Burning a hundred soldiers alive? Of melting the face off a good man and alienating the only person who’s ever really loved me?

“Thanks,” I mumble. I don’t look at him. I try not to look at anybody, but when we reach the other side, Axel is chatting up Juicy—Olivia, I mean.

The ache in my chest is unbearable. How can he talk to her and not me? I can’t let him believe I slept with the colonel. I can’t. I edge closer. Olivia catches sight of me and stiffens. She nods at Axel and bleeds off to join the others.

I swallow. “Axel?”

His shoulders bunch, but he doesn’t turn.

“You have to talk to me.”

“You don’t get it, do you? You’re dead to me.” His voice is low, savage.

I choke back a sob. “But I didn’t do anything!”

He spins around and lunges for me. His fingers dig into my shoulders. “Don’t you lie to me. Two people—two!—told me you ordered them out of the colonel’s office. You’re a goddamn slut!”

I cry openly now. “I would have done anything if it would have saved you—”

“You’re a whore!”

“—but I didn’t. He let me go.”

He steps back and shakes his head. His eyes are hard, like a wall of steel has grown between us. “I don’t believe you. But even if he let you go, you would have. You said so yourself.”