My Boyfriend Muted My Mic For His Ex, So I Joined His Fiercest Rival To Destroy Him

The red recording light on the soundboard pulsed like an erratic heartbeat.

It was past two in the morning, and the rehearsal room felt like an oven. The air smelled of burnt dust and sweat, thick and stale enough to stick to the back of my throat. We had run the chorus of the new track six times in a row, pushing the tempo until my fingertips were raw and my ribs ached.

"Again," Jude said from across the rug, his fingers hovering over the fretboard of his Les Paul. "From the downbeat of the second verse. Don't pull back on the transition, Willa. Hit it like you mean to break something."

I gripped the cold steel neck of the mic stand. "I'm ready."

I wasn't.

Felix counted off with four sharp clicks of his drumsticks.

Sam dug into a low, rumbling bassline that vibrated through the floorboards straight into the soles of my boots. Jude struck a discordant, ringing chord, dark and driving.

I opened my mouth to sing.

Nothing came out.

It hit me without warning—a sudden, suffocating wall of ice that slammed into my chest.

The room didn't blur; it narrowed to a pinprick. The air vanished from my lungs as if someone had wrenched a vacuum seal over my mouth and nose. My throat seized, tight and dry, clamping shut like a rusted iron gate.

*Not here,* I thought desperately. *Not now.*

My knees buckled.

The microphone stand clattered against the monitor wedge with a sharp, ugly squeal of feedback. I barely caught myself on hands and knees against the frayed carpet, gasping for breath that simply wouldn't go down.

My vision began to fray at the edges, dark static creeping in.

*You're pathetic, Willa.* Tyler's voice hissed through the ringing in my ears, smooth and condescending. *Your throat always closes when the pressure gets real. You need me to carry you.*

I braced for the sound of someone throwing their pick down in disgust. I waited for the sigh, the cutting remark, the familiar sound of Tyler telling the room to take ten because the broken girl was having another episode.

Footsteps crossed the rug, heavy and purposeful.

They didn't sound annoyed. They were fast.

A shadow fell over me, blocking the glare of the overhead track lights.

Jude dropped to one knee directly in front of me. He didn't hover, and he didn't call out to Felix or Sam to give us space. With a flick of his hand behind him, he signaled the others to kill the sound, and the sudden silence in the room was absolute.

"Look at me," Jude commanded.

His voice wasn't harsh, but it held a low, unshakeable weight that cut right through the panic clawing at my windpipe.

I tried to shake my head, squeezing my eyes shut as a cold sweat broke across my forehead. My hands were shaking so violently I couldn't flatten my palms against the floor.

"Willa. Look at me."

His fingers hooked under my jaw, firm and warm, tilting my face up.

I forced my eyes open.

His dark eyes were locked onto mine, completely devoid of pity. There was no disgust in his face. No disappointment. Just a steady, immovable focus that felt like an anchor dropped into a storm.

With his other hand, Jude reached down, grabbed my trembling right wrist, and pulled my hand up.

He didn't just hold it. He pressed my flat palm hard against his chest, right over the center of his ribcage, directly above his heart.

Beneath the worn, thin cotton of his faded black T-shirt, his skin was scorching hot.

And beneath that heat was a slow, heavy, relentless rhythm.

*Thump. Thump. Thump.*

"Stop listening to your head," Jude said, his voice dropping into a rough, quiet gravel. "Follow my rhythm."

I gasped, my shoulders hitching, my lungs burning for oxygen.

"Feel that?" he murmured, leaning closer. His hand remained pressed firmly over the back of mine, keeping my fingers pinned against the steady rise and fall of his chest. "That's four-four time at sixty beats a minute. Count it. Don't fight it."

*One. Two. Three. Four.*

The beat didn't rush. It didn't waver. It was steady as an iron piston.

"Breathe in," Jude ordered softly.

I drew in a jagged, trembling breath through my teeth. The cold, suffocating clamp around my lungs loosened by a fraction of an inch.

"Hold it."

His thumb brushed gently across the back of my knuckles, keeping me grounded.

"Now let it out."

I exhaled. The ragged shudder that tore through my shoulders was deep, but this time, the air actually left my body.

"Again," he said.

I kept my hand pressed against him, focusing on the dull, solid vibration in his chest until the white noise in my ears began to recede. My pulse, which had been hammering like a bird trapped in a cage, slowly began to decelerate, matching the tempo under my palm.

The room came back into focus.

The smell of dust. The low hum of the tube amps cooling down. The silence between us.

It was only then that I realized how close we were.

Jude was still kneeling inches from me. His grip on my jaw had loosened, but his fingers hadn't left my skin; his thumb rested just below my cheekbone, warm and calloused from steel strings.

His face was shadowed by the dim amber work lights hanging from the rafters. His dark hair was damp at the temples, falling forward over his brow.

Every breath he took ghosted across my mouth.

He was looking down at my lips, his dark eyes clouded with something thick and heavy, completely stripped of his usual defensive bite. The silence stretched between us, electric and precarious, so fragile that the slightest movement would have brought our mouths together.

My breath hitched again—not from fear this time, but from the sudden, dizzying heat that rushed into my blood.

Jude’s jaw tightened. He seemed to realize the shift at the exact same second I did.

He cleared his throat, slowly dropping his hand from my face. He released my wrist, though his chest rose with a sudden, uneven intake of air.

"You're back," he said, his voice returning to its normal, low rasp.

"I'm back," I managed to say, my voice raspy.

Jude stood up, towering over me once more, though he kept his movements deliberate so as not to startle me. He rolled his shoulders, glancing toward the empty control booth. Felix and Sam had slipped out into the alley for a smoke break while we were on the floor.

"You need water," Jude said, running a hand through his hair. "Ice water. I'll get some from the cooler in the lobby."

"Jude, I'm fine—"

"You're not fine. Sit there for two minutes." He didn't wait for an argument. He turned on his heel and pushed through the heavy acoustic door, his boots thudding softly down the corridor.

I sat on the edge of the monitor wedge, rubbing my throat.

The panic had broken, leaving behind a hollow, tired ache in my muscles, but my mind was remarkably clear. That transition in the chorus—the reason my breath had seized in the first place—was too fast. The modulation from the pre-chorus was choking the melody.

I needed to fix the chord chart before Jude came back. If we dropped the transition down a half-step, the vocal line would have room to breathe.

I stood up, my legs still slightly unsteady, and walked over to the small wooden table in the corner where we tossed our lyric sheets.

I found my notebook, but my pen was gone.

I glanced around the dim corner. Sitting on an overturned milk crate beside the mixer rack was Jude's battered canvas backpack, unzipped just enough to show a tangle of patch cables and sheet music spilling out.

"He's got to have a Sharpie in here," I muttered to myself.

I crouched down and pulled the zipper open wider.

I pushed aside a couple of spare nine-volt batteries, a roll of black gaffer tape, and a handful of crumpled draft papers covered in Jude’s jagged handwriting.

Beneath the discarded lyrics, my fingers brushed against a thick, stiff folder.

It was heavy, professional bond paper—not the cheap spiral-bound stuff we used for rehearsal notes.

Curious, I pulled it out to reach the bottom pocket for a pen.

A stark, glossy logo was embossed in silver foil at the top of the crisp white cardstock:

*MERCER ENTERTAINMENT GROUP / MERCER RECORDS.*

Jude's father's label. The corporate machine Jude swore he hated. The machine he claimed he had cut ties with three years ago to play dirty basement gigs.

My eyes drifted down to the bold, capitalized header beneath the corporate seal.

*MASTER CATALOGUE ACQUISITION & PUBLISHING RIGHTS ASSIGNMENT.*

A cold trickle of unease crept into my stomach.

I flipped the cover page open.

There, stamped across the top of the schedule of assets, were the titles.

*"Hollow Crown."*

*"Bleed Through the Static."*

*"Cold Glass."*

*"Paper Armor."*

Every single one. All twelve tracks.

The entire catalogue I had spent two years writing while working graveyard shifts, bleeding into voice memos at three in the morning. Every lyric, every bridge, every modulation Tyler had taken credit for.

Down at the bottom of the execution page was Tyler Vance's sharp, arrogant signature, dated two weeks ago.

And directly opposite it, under the buyer's authorization line, was the signature of the vice president of Mercer Records.

The purchase price was listed in bold ink: *Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.*

Beneath the signatures was a short, typed addendum on Mercer letterhead:

*All master recordings, publishing rights, and associated intellectual property of the aforementioned twelve compositions have been transferred exclusively to the Mercer Records vault. Unreleased stems and original demos to be surrendered to Dead Reckoning's rehearsal facility for executive review.*

The paper trembled in my hands.

My breath, which had only just returned, stopped entirely.

Jude hadn't saved me in that hallway because he believed in my talent.

He hadn't brought me into this studio to get revenge on Tyler.

He had brought me here because his family already bought everything I ever wrote before I even walked out the door.