Ugh.

Shit.

I mean…

I couldn’t even finish that thought.

My body was floating. And humming and my head was expanding with every heartbeat like a balloon being blown up too big.

Don’t pop, I told my head. Don’t pop. I still need you.

This new thing Dr. John was giving me to help me sleep…it was bad. I mean, it was great in that it turned off my brain enough that I slept, which was a miracle.

But it made me wake up like a stranger. Like I had no idea who I was.

I was twenty percent myself. Eighty percent someone else. Someone I didn’t like a whole bunch. I didn’t even hear music anymore. And my hands, when I held the airbrush… they didn’t know what to do.

It was too much. I would tell Dr. John that. He would listen; he wasn’t like my mother. I was paying him to do what I asked. Jesus, I couldn’t lift my eyelids. Or my head. I was a thousand pounds. How was I supposed to go onstage like this?

Oh, that’s right, I wasn’t. It was over.

A dark and awful queasiness rippled through me. Something that felt like failure. Or regret. The North American tour was done and Europe was supposed to begin and I didn’t…I didn’t know how to do it. How to keep going. I wanted—in my dark, tiny heart—to stop.

That’s how Dr. John got hired two weeks ago in the first place. He was supposed to wind me up like a doll and send me dancing off onto the stage. His pills and syringes took care of the anxiety that crept up and followed me like a shadow, the fear that made me cling to my dressing room chair, wishing I’d never started any of this.

And then, when I got offstage, he gave me the nighty-night shot.

The nighty-night shot was a real problem.

Who was I kidding? All of it was a problem.

But this life… this pop-star thing? It was so much harder than I’d thought it would be.

Something cold brushed my hand, and the very distinct smell of dog washed over me.

“Beth?” I said, but it came out of my dry throat like a whimper.

The dog nosed me again and his tongue licked my face and with my eyes closed I stretched out a hand and found the dog’s back. I burrowed my fingers into its thick fur until I felt the warmth of its skin.

I’d wanted a dog, but everyone told me it didn’t make any sense on the road. Except my assistant, Beth. Beth told me I should get one. Beth told me I needed something to take care of.

Something rattled in the back of my brain about my assistant, some low-level anxiety slipping over me. What did I do to Beth?

Funny that my assistant’s name was also my name. I felt like I was talking about myself in the third person half the time. The dark irony of asking what did I do to Beth? was not lost on me. It could in fact be the name of my autobiography. My juicy tell-all.

CliffNotes version: I killed Beth. That girl I’d been. The patient, waiting victim. So good, that girl. So dumb. Terrified of being wrong. Terrified of…everything, really. Beth had been useless, so I became Jada.

Jada was fucking fierce. Jada wasn’t scared of shit. No one—absolutely no one—hurt Jada.

I loved Jada.

I opened my eyes and stared into the face of…Jesus. Was that a dog? It looked like a rat. Or a squirrel. Its tongue came out and licked its own nose, its long tooth hanging out of its jaw.

Did I really get a dog? Did I, in fact, get the ugliest dog in the world? Someone should stop me from doing that kind of thing. I couldn’t take care of a dog. I could barely take care of myself.

Assistant Beth would have to take the creature back where it came from.

“You stink,” I said to the dog, though no sound came out. I closed my eyes again. God, I was thirsty. So, fucking thirsty.

“Can someone get me a drink?” I croaked. “Anyone?”

Silence. Nothing but silence. Maybe everyone was in the other room? Which was weird. There were people with me…always. Like in bed with me. In the bathroom with me. Half the time I didn’t know their names or how they came to be peeing while I took a shower—but it seemed to be part of this life I’d picked.

Like by choosing door number two—international fame—I also picked a group of nameless people who just constantly milled around me. I hadn’t been alone in months.

I loved it. What a relief it was, that break from all my solitude.

“Come on!” I barked, the sound more like a pitiful gasp. “Someone!”

No one.

I opened my eyes again, the world slowly coming into focus.

It wasn’t whatever was in Dr. John’s syringe making me feel like I was moving.

I was moving in the backseat of a car.

And I was alone back here. Just me and the dog, the black leather beneath me warm from my body heat. I’d been here awhile.

“Hey!” I yelled. “What’s…what’s going on?”

The driver didn’t answer, and I realized I was barely audible, my throat all swollen and pinched. My head was pounding.

I slowly sat up, my hand over my eyes keeping out the sunlight. “Where are we going?”

“We’re almost there,” a deep voice said. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

“We’re almost where?” I asked.

He rattled off some address that meant nothing to me.

“Where’s Beth?” I asked.

“Your assistant?”

I groaned. “Yes, my assistant.” Who was this driver? Some new guy?

“You don’t remember?” he asked, and I sensed a little bit of judgment in his voice. And man, nothing got to me like judgment.

“Fuck you, man,” I snapped. “You’re just the driver.”

Was I a hypocrite fighting judgement with judgement? Yes. The guy probably had a screen play or a fitness YouTube channel. No one was just one thing.

“Sorry,” I said. Apologizing was an old habit I couldn’t quite break.

“Me too,” he said.

Look at us playing nice.

I looked around for my phone, checked my pockets. Realized not only did I not have a phone, I didn’t have my purse. Or shoes.

“What the hell?” I muttered. I shifted around until I saw the driver in the rearview mirror.

Shit. He was big. Really big. Huge shoulders, big wide chest in a white dress shirt. He had a black tie pulled loose around his neck. But despite that tie and the dress shirt, he looked like a thug. He had a neck, sort of. And his nose had been broken a few times too many. He had a weird crackling energy around him. Still…but not. Calm…but not. Like he was waiting.

And he was a total stranger.

I’d been using the same driver for like the last few months. The record company had been paying for him.

A chill ran across my scalp.

Somehow my mother had found me, she’d broken through all the disillusionment charms and spells I’d cast around my life (Harry Potter references, another old habit I couldn’t break) and gotten in touch with my people, who’d gotten her in touch with me. I had no idea who it happened, how she tracked me down after all these years. Maybe, she’d recognized me somehow in the footage of my spectacular disaster at the Hollywood Bowl the other night. I had no clue. And it didn’t even matter.

All that mattered was that she’d found me.

And now she was making noises about seeing me. Having me evaluated. Putting me under her care again.

All things she could do. Only because she’d proven all along that there was very little she couldn’t do. Not when it came to me. And now, after that thing onstage, I’d blown the one advantage I had over my mother—my own credibility.

“Did my mom send you?” I asked, my brain clearing in a hurry.

“No,” he said. “I have nothing to do with your mom.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him, and I shifted a little bit more, wincing when my skin peeled off the leather. Finally I got a look at the man’s face.

He had blue eyes and pale blond hair, cut short. He was…very handsome. The way real people were handsome. With flaws and imperfections that told a story. I’d spent the last few months with people who worked hard to get rid of those imperfections. Who looked good in a completely perfect way.

It was creepy.

But he wore that scar on his chin and the healed-over piercings in his ear and his chapped lips, his badly broken nose—he wore them well. And the story those things told was a rough one.

Outlaw.

His eyes were narrowed against the sun coming through the windshield, and when he winced, flipping down the visor—though it did little good—in the corner of his mouth, right there in his cheek, he had a dimple.

I sucked in a breath. Held it. Couldn’t let it go.

Did I know him? I knew him? Everything in my body screamed that I knew him.

And that he was…dangerous. Dangerous to me somehow. A threat.

And not just because I didn’t know who he was and I was in the backseat of his car.

There was something worse. I just couldn’t remember it.

My stomach went cold, my belly full of fear, and the rush of adrenaline cleared whatever drugs lingered in my system.

This…this wasn’t right.

How did I not remember getting in a car?

I had to fire Dr. John. Had to. Beth had been right; he was a total mistake. I’d let shit get out of hand.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He glanced at me for a long time in the rearview mirror, like maybe I was supposed to know him.

“My name is Sam,” he finally said.

“You have ID, Sam?”

He tossed back a driver’s license and a license for an agency. They bounced off my leg and landed faceup on the seat beside me. Sam Johnson.

Seemed legit.

But…not.

The dog in front of me whined in its throat as if the thing could tell I was freaking out.

“Why do you have a dog?” I asked.

“Come here, Pest,” the driver said, and just like that the tiny little rat dog tried to climb up over the middle console.

“Can you give her a boost?” the guy asked and I gave the dog a little shove up and over the middle console and she tumbled into the passenger seat. What is going on? “That better?” the man asked, and I met his gaze in the rearview mirror. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t seem to have a choice. Those eyes were magnetic. And familiar?

“Sorry if she was bothering you.”

“What kind of driver brings their dog?”

“She’s a working dog.”

“Are you blind?” Sarcasm was my lifeboat in a storm.

“Social anxiety.” The curl of his lip said that he got the joke.

“Whatever,” I muttered, looking out the window, refusing to acknowledge the humor. “Where are we?”

“Arizona.”

“Why?”

He was silent for a long time and then shrugged. “You called me, Jada.”

“I gave you the address?”

He nodded.

I didn’t know anything about anything in Arizona. Except there were fancy spas in Arizona. And I’d been spending time with the kinds of people who went to fancy spas in Arizona. Had I decided at some point last night that what I needed was to get away from everyone and everything and eat some organic salmon and sit in some mud? Maybe get myself off some of the shit Dr. John was giving me?

That sounded like an excellent idea. I hoped last-night me did exactly that. It would be a relief to actually go ahead and believe that. But I couldn’t.

My mom was in the picture again, and I couldn’t trust anything.

“Can I use your phone?”

“For what?”

“To call someone.” Beth would be freaking out; we didn’t go a day without talking. Barely went three hours without talking. “I don’t have my phone.” Or my purse. Or my shoes.

Why would I leave without my stuff? My laptop? I didn’t go anywhere without my laptop.

“I can’t…I can’t do that,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“We’re on a time frame,” he said. “I can’t have you throwing off the time frame.”

That reeked of bullshit.

“I’m paying you, aren’t I? It’s my time frame. Give me your goddamn phone.”

“Nope.”

Was I being…kidnapped? I mean, I had no experience with that. Katy Perry told me a story once that scared the bejesus out of me, but so far none of my fans had gotten too weird.

This felt weird. Really weird.

I sprang up from the seat, and it must have been too fast, because my head went all swimmy and my stomach tried to crawl up my throat.

The nighty-night shot was a real problem in the morning.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his eyes pinning me to the seat through the rearview mirror. That was some potent eye contact.

“I think… I’m going to be sick.”

And just like that Sam, my potential kidnapper, pulled over to the side of the road, gravel crunching under the wheels of the car. The car was barely in park before I had the door popped open. The fresh air cleared my head enough that I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to puke.

We were surrounded by the high desert, nothing but dirt and cactus and scrub for miles. The breeze that blew in smelled hot and sandy.

It certainly looked like Arizona.

Sam opened the front door of the car and came to stand in my open door. I looked up, closing one eye as the sun gave him a halo effect around his head and blinded me. I tried—I really did try not to notice how solid he was. How lean and thick at the same time. I imagined under that coffee-stained shirt, he was all muscle.

He didn’t look like a driver. At all.

“Are you kidnapping me, Sam?” I asked. He opened his mouth to answer, to no doubt say something about being a driver or just following my orders, but this whole thing felt wrong. “And cut the bullshit.”

“Kidnapping,” he finally said, like he was really sorry about it, “is a really strong word.”

I sucked in air, my head reeling.

Shit. Shitshitshitshit.

“If it makes you feel any better, you said you wanted to leave that house.”

“No, Sam, it doesn’t make me feel better. Did you happen to notice I was out of my mind at the time?”

He nodded, his ears were red and I realized maybe coming at my kidnapper with my claws extended was not the best call.

“Are you… are you a fan?” I tried to smile, to make this normal. I mean, I watched Nashville; I knew the script.

“No,” he said with a dry laugh. “I’m sorry to say, I am not.”

Shit. That wasn’t in the script.

“Are you doing this for money?” I asked. “Because whatever you’re being paid… I can double it. Triple it.” That was unlikely. For being one of the biggest names in music at the moment, I had no money. Not real money. I had money my manager gave me like an allowance. Or he paid for things—like Dr. John and food. Parties. Drugs.

Beth was sure I was getting ripped off.

“I’m doing this because I don’t have a choice,” he said.

“Everyone has a choice.” I tried to smile, but it didn’t feel convincing. Not having a choice was something I understood.

Some people just had choices taken from them.

Some gave them away.

Some didn’t even know what choice looked like.

And I’d been all three of those people at different parts of my life.

“Do you remember me?” he asked like if I remembered him, this would all make sense.

“Yes, you’re Sam the Driver.” Slash kidnapper.

But he wasn’t. It was obvious. There was something so much bigger going on.

Oh God, what was I supposed to say? About a million times in the last seven months I’d wished there was some kind of handbook for this life I’d been thrust into. And this, dealing with crazy, kidnapping non-fans—it would be nice to know what to do.

“You don’t remember me,” he said, his voice not sad or mad or anything.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He smiled, just a little, with like one-quarter of his mouth. The dimple flickered but didn’t commit. “It’s better that way.”

“I can tell.”

The air cleared my head, and I took giant breaths of it, stalling while trying to figure out what to do.

The car was still running.

Before I’d fully thought it out, I was over the console and into the front seat. I had one foot on the gas and my hand on the gear shift when my lap was suddenly full of dog. Or rat or whatever. She had her paws on my shoulders, her snaggletooth practically in my face.

I was stunned.

And that stunned moment was all my kidnapper needed to reach in the open door of the front seat and take the key out of the ignition.

“Pest,” he said. “Scoot.”

The dog licked me before jumping over to the passenger seat. Kidnapper crouched down in the open door, and I couldn’t look at him—I was about to cry and I wouldn’t be giving him that kind of satisfaction.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, hating that my voice shook.

“It’s… it’s a long story. Beth—”

He stopped. I stilled. Chills ran down my arms. Across my whole body.

No one called me Beth. No one had in a long time. I wasn’t Beth anymore. Hadn’t been for years. Legally and everything.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I…it was an accident.”

“Bullshit!” I cried, looking at him, feeling wild and at the edge of something. Something I didn’t want to be at the edge of.

I could only take him in in half glances. Tiny glances. The dimple. The sky-blue color of his eyes. His broad shoulders under that white shirt. He filled up the space of the open car door, and I didn’t stand a chance against his size. I couldn’t push him or shove him or hurt him.

He could swat me down like a fly.

I couldn’t even win against his dog.

And he knew my name. My real name.

“I promise you,” he said. “You will not be hurt.”

He reached for my face as if to wipe away a tear, and I flinched so hard I hit my head against the headrest, knocked my elbow into the dog, who barked.

“Don’t—” I had my hand up like there was a chance I could stop him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t... I’m…sorry.”

Kidnapper was easing back, and I took the moment and shoved him as hard as I could, throwing him off-balance enough that he fell to the ground on his ass. I put one bare foot against the door frame and launched myself out of the car.

It was dawn, so the asphalt wasn’t hot as I ran across the road for the desert and scrub grass beyond it. There was barbed wire and probably snakes and tons of other shit that could take me down and ruin my escape. But it was this or stay a prisoner, and I’d been a prisoner before.

I’d been a prisoner most of my goddamned life.

No way was I doing that again.

I ran as balls-out as I could, the gravel biting into the bottoms of my feet. I’d hit the gulley beside the road when he yelled;

“Stop. Jesus. Beth!”

I felt him there, just behind me. His heat and his size and then his hand on my shoulder and he was yanking me around, grabbing me. He had my arms pinned against my sides so I couldn’t hit him, but I screamed and kicked and tried to head butt him. When that didn’t work, I leaned forward and, swallowing my revulsion, sank my teeth into his shoulder. I bit as hard as I could and he swore a blue streak but he didn’t let me go. He crossed the road back to the car and practically threw me in the backseat.

“Pest,” he said, and the dog was suddenly there like my prison warden.

Kidnapper stood up and looked at the bite I’d given him, his body in the way of any escape I might make.

“Jesus,” he yelled. “You fucking bit me.”

“I’ll do it again, asshole.”

“I don’t fucking doubt it. What are you thinking, running off like that? You don’t have any shoes!”

I blinked, disoriented by his concern about my shoes. But only for a minute.

“Whose fault is that?” I yelled.

“Mine,” he said. “It’s mine.”

The futility of all of this washed over me. I was strung out and suddenly starving, and I didn’t have any goddamned shoes.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this.” I was furious and near tears and at the end of whatever rope I used to have.

“Neither do I. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“You’re working for someone?”

“Sort of.”

My heart rate spiked, and adrenaline cleared my head. I’d bite him, I’d beat him, whatever I needed to do to stay away from the only person I knew who would go to this kind of trouble to get me back in their life. “You are working for my mother!”

“I’m not,” he said. “I swear on Pest’s life that I’m not.”

“What’s your name? Your real name.”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, in my head I’m calling you the Kidnapper, so if you’re okay with that?"

“Tom,” he said and took a deep breath. “My friends call me Tommy.”

Tommy.

That name. The dimples…

It was like my heart stopped. It was like the earth stopped.

I pushed my hair out of my eyes and looked at him. Really looked at him. And he looked back at me like he knew what was happening in my head. My body.

I knew a Tommy once. A long time ago.

He’d changed me. Changed everything.

But this guy…he didn’t look like the boy I’d known.

He looked like the boy I’d known, all grown-up and fed and cared for.

He was Tommy magnified.

“No,” I said. Shaking my head, denying the truth even as it stared me in the face with it’s blue Viking eyes. “That’s… you’re impossible.”

“I’m sorry. I really…I’m sorry.”

Tommy had been skinny and tall. All bones over taut white skin. This man was a giant.

“Oh my God…” I breathed, all the memories I’d shoved behind doors and under beds spilling out from their hiding places. “Tommy?”