I’d done some dangerous shit in my life. Stupid-dangerous shit.

Getting hooked on heroin.

Overdosing.

Almost dying at the age of twenty-two.

Yeah; those were definitely top three.

But this, right now, had to rank right up there on the stupid-dangerous list.

For one thing, I was trespassing on private property, on the lot outside a bar owned by a member of my former band, Dirty. The entire band was inside the bar, and while they had no idea I was here, they were about to find out. And I really wasn’t sure how they were going to react.

But no doubt, they probably weren’t going to roll out the red carpet for me.

For another thing, the bar was crawling with security, and the security guys who shadowed Dirty these days were mostly of the ex-military or biker variety. Which meant a whole lot of dudes who knew how to draw blood.

And last but not least, I was leaning on a motorcycle parked at the back of the parking lot behind the bar. A Harley. A bike that didn’t belong to me but clearly belonged to a serious biker—one of the West Coast Kings, according to the skeletal black King of Spades insignia painted over the gas tank.

It was Jude Grayson’s bike. Head of Dirty’s security team. At least, I was banking on that being the case.

If it wasn’t Jude’s, I was banking on, at the very least, that it was the bike of someone he knew, and therefore I was not about to get murdered the instant the biker in question stepped out the back door of the building.

I was doing what I always did when I was nervous: playing guitar. But my mind was on that door. It was painted red, with a security cam on the wall above, pointing straight down. It wasn’t pointed at me, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some other one that was.

It was early evening and the lot was deserted. There were a few big trucks, the kind that hauled band gear and film equipment and stage shit, and several other vehicles jammed into the narrow parking spaces. But there was a high fence around the lot with a locked gate, and apparently no one in Los Angeles was stupid enough to climb that fence to get in.

No one but me.

I was halfway through Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” when the red door cracked open and some dude’s head popped out. He kicked the door wide and stepped outside; he walked right over to me, winding his way through the parked cars as the heavy door swung shut behind him. And yeah, he was a biker. A baby biker. Couldn’t be more than nineteen. He had an overstuffed taco in one hand, half-eaten, so I must’ve interrupted his dinner.

Could’ve been the dude with the earpiece who’d materialized on the sidewalk shortly after I’d scaled the fence; could’ve been someone on the security cams. But someone had tipped him off that I was out here. And since it wasn’t Jude himself who’d come outside, whoever it was probably didn’t recognize me.

Someone new to the team.

This kid, wearing a black leather Kings cut over his T-shirt, a badge stitched to the chest that read Prospect, looked more stunned with my idiocy than pissed off. I didn’t know him, and whether he recognized me or not seemed beside the point. Either way, his eyes were stabbing out of his head in the direction of my ass, which was resting on the bike seat.

Maybe if I was really lucky he was also stunned by my musical skills, because his eyes kept darting from the bike to my guitar to my face.

“Do you know whose bike that is?” he said, his mouth open and full of taco meat he’d forgotten to finish chewing. Apparently, he was more concerned with my ass trespassing on the bike than with the rest of me in the lot.

I kept playing, looking him steady in the eyes, and said, “I know whose bike it is. You can tell him Todd Becker’s here to see him.”

The kid shut his mouth, chewed slowly for a bit, and stared at me like he was deciding whether I was dangerous, stupid, or just plain crazy. Apparently landing on the latter, he shook his head. He glanced at the plainclothes security dude on the sidewalk, who was pretending not to eavesdrop. Then he tossed me a biker-brat glare that said Your funeral and stalked back inside.

And for the first time today, I actually wondered if this was a giant fucking mistake.

Last thing I wanted to do was get Jude in any kind of shit.

When I first found out about the auditions for Dirty’s new rhythm guitarist, I’d planned to head straight up to Vancouver to try out. But then I changed my mind. The auditions were only starting in Vancouver, but ending in L.A. the following week. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to wait.

Then I’d called Jude and found out he wasn’t even in Vancouver. He was already in L.A.. And that sealed it for me.

I told him I was coming.

He laughed.

Truth was, I didn’t think he really believed me.

But here I was.

All week, I’d hung out at the taco dive across the street. Each morning, I watched the lineup of hopefuls grow, winding down the sidewalk behind the velvet rope and around the block. Each afternoon, I watched the crowd dwindle until the last guitarist left the building. Most of the time I’d sat on the sidewalk, playing my acoustic, and even though I wasn’t intentionally busking, people had tossed me cash.

That was weird.

I once had a number-one album. Now I had crumpled bills in my guitar case.

The end of each day, I’d bought three tacos and a juice. I’d given them to the old guy who lived out behind the taco place, along with all the leftover cash. Maybe that was just sponsoring an addiction, and maybe after all I’d been through with my own addiction I should’ve been wary of that. But the dude was seventy-six years old and living in an alley; if he wanted whiskey for breakfast, you asked me, that was his prerogative.

It was several days before I even glimpsed any members of the band.

On Thursday, just as the sun was starting to set, Dylan Cope strode out onto the sidewalk from the gated lot behind the bar—his bar—with a few other guys. The dude was crazy tall, plus his unruly auburn hair was aflame in the evening sun, so there was no mistaking him. He was smiling. Laughing.

Dirty’s drummer was definitely the most easygoing of all the band members, and it’s not like it had never occurred to me to appeal to his chill nature for forgiveness. Problem was, it would never be that easy. Dylan was a team player almost to a fault; the guy wouldn’t change his socks without the approval of the other band members first.

Especially Elle’s.

I’d seen her, too, that same evening. Elle Delacroix, Dirty’s bassist. Also unmistakable with her long, platinum-blonde hair smoothed back in a high ponytail, her slim, tanned figure poured into a skimpy white dress and tall boots. She’d come outside with a small entourage—her assistant, Joanie, a stiff-looking dude in black who was probably security, and a couple of other women. I didn’t even get a look at her face. She’d spoken with the guys, mainly Dylan, and after giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, she disappeared behind the building.

Were they dating now? I had no idea.

I wasn’t exactly in the loop.

I knew Elle had dated Jesse Mayes, Dirty’s lead guitarist, a while back; everyone knew that. So maybe anything was possible. But Dylan remained on the sidewalk with a bunch of guys, talking, some of them smoking, long after the SUV with tinted windows rolled away with Elle.

Today, the very last day of auditions, I’d waited across the street until the end of the day. Until every last one of the hopefuls had been dismissed and wandered away, guitar in hand. I could remember that feeling, vividly. Playing your ass off in hopes of getting noticed, of getting invited back, no idea if that was gonna happen or not.

I’d been in that position several times in my life. None more nerve-racking than when I’d first met Dirty at age nineteen. When their lead singer, Zane Traynor, took me home with him, to his grandma’s garage, to meet the band. Once I met them and heard them play, I knew I had to do whatever it took so they’d let me stick around. I’d played with garage bands before. But these guys were something else. And they already had a killer guitarist in Jesse.

So I knew I had to bring something different to the mix.

I spent the next three years of my life hellbent on doing just that.

From that first informal audition, to the last show I ever played as a member of Dirty—the night they fired me from the band—I knew I had to kill it. To work my ass off to earn the chance they’d given me. I had to give them something back that they’d never seen before, never heard… something they couldn’t stand to be without.

Just like I had to do now.

And to that end, I’d decided I had to be the very last person they saw today. The last person they heard. The very last guitarist to audition for the spot. My old spot.

So that no matter what came before, there was no way they could forget my performance in the onslaught of others.

Save the best for last.

That’s what I was thinking, what I kept telling myself, as I sat here on the outside, looking in. Just waiting for Jude to come outside and let me in.

But I was no stranger to waiting.

I’d waited for seven long years for Dirty to come around, to ask me to rejoin the band. I’d listened to album after album, watched them tour the world, playing my songs, with guitarist after guitarist who wasn’t me.

Then that day last year when I saw Zane at the beach… He asked me to come jam with him, just like he did so many years ago. And that jam turned into a meeting with him and Jesse, and that turned into a reunion show in Vancouver, at a dive bar called the Back Door, where we used to play. That was just over six months ago now. Me, up onstage with all four founding members of Dirty—Zane, Jesse, Dylan and Elle—for one song. Our biggest song. “Dirty Like Me.”

Then they asked me to come back to the band.

Then Jesse’s sister, Jessa, told them some ugly shit about me.

Then they fired me again.

For six months, I waited for a call that never came.

And now here I was. Poised to prove to them all how wrong they were about me, as I played my nerves out with the music. As the red door finally opened… and Jude appeared.

Big, muscular dude. Intimidating, if you didn’t know him. Or maybe even if you did. Dark, almost-black hair. Black T-shirt, gnarly tats down his arms, jeans and biker boots.

And one hell of an unimpressed look on his face when he saw me.

He gestured at the plainclothes guy, who was still loitering on the sidewalk, watching me. Just a flick of his chin. Take a walk, that gesture said. The dude was gone, around the front of the bar and out of sight by the time Jude stepped out into the parking lot and the door slammed shut behind him.

I’d switched songs, so now I was just trying not to fuck up “The House of the Rising Sun” as Jude stalked over. He stopped two feet from his bike, from me, and looked me over like he was making sure I hadn’t gone crazy.

“You kiddin’ me?” were the first words out of his mouth. They weren’t exactly hostile. More like he was mildly stunned, though not as stunned as the kid with the taco.

I stopped playing, flattening my hand over the strings to silence them. “You rode your bike here from Vancouver,” I observed. “Took a few days off?”

He crossed his massive arms over his chest. “Like to do that sometimes. Hit the road. Alone. Tune out all the bullshit.” He raked his dark gaze over me again. “You bringin’ me bullshit?”

“Guess that depends,” I said, “how you look at it.”

“From where I’m looking, it looks like bullshit.”

“No bullshit. This is an audition.” I played a few lines from Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.” Showing off, maybe. “I’m here to audition.”

Jude still looked unimpressed as shit. “Auditions are closed. Invitation-only. Pre-screened. And I never saw your name on the list… Todd Becker.”

“So screen me now,” I said, still playing, quietly, as we spoke. “What do you wanna hear? ‘Fortunate Son’…? ‘Roadhouse Blues’…?” I played a little from each song as I spoke. “‘Dirty Like Me’…?”

Jude remained silent, arms crossed, dark eyes watching me as I played. The dude was tough to read, but the Jude I knew had always liked listening to me play.

We’d established a game, early in our friendship, where he’d toss a song title at me and I’d play it for him. If I didn’t know the song, no matter what it was, I’d learn it, quick. It was because of Jude and this little game of ours, in part, that I’d become as good as I had on guitar. Because if I ever struggled to master a song he’d requested, he never let me hear the end of it—no matter that the guy couldn’t strum out a tune to save his life. And he’d made it a favorite pastime to challenge me with the hardest songs. In some cases, songs I never would’ve learned if it weren’t for him egging me on.

“You still into Metallica?” I started playing “Master of Puppets.” Not my favorite band, but back in the day, I’d mastered “Master”—no easy task—to entertain him.

He cocked a dark eyebrow at me, so maybe we were getting somewhere. “You remember it.”

“Hard to forget. My fingers actually bled learning it.”

He grunted a little at that, which was about the closest I was gonna get to a smile right now. I knew that.

“Or how about some Rage?” I switched to “Killing In the Name” by Rage Against the Machine, another of Jude’s favorites. At least it was, years ago.

He shook his head, which I took to mean his admiration of my guitar skills was neither here nor there at the moment. So I did what I knew how to do: I kept playing. My talent was the only real card I had to play here.

Maybe it was the only card I’d ever had to play.

“Killing” was another hard song—both heavy and difficult to master. I’d mastered it. I’d played it for him enough times, long ago, that it was in my blood. Any song I’d ever learned was in my blood; once I’d learned it, good or bad, I’d never lost a song. Even when I was fucked out of my tree on whatever junk I was on. Which was probably how I’d lasted as long as I had with Dirty.

Yes, I’d OD’d on the tour bus and almost died. But I could always get onstage at show time and nail any song.

Jude just stood there, that impassive look on his face; a look perfected over many years working security for Dirty and riding with an outlaw motorcycle club. But since he hadn’t yet told me to take a hike, I knew what he was probably thinking.

It wasn’t so much that he was considering his own ass—how this might play out for him if he let me into that bar. More likely he was considering how badly my ass was gonna get kicked.

“You want me to dance for you, too?” I challenged, allowing a little sarcasm into my tone.

Jude remained silent until I ran out of song. Then he said, “So this is how it’s gonna be, huh?”

“Looks like it.”

“Looks like an idiot playing guitar in a parking lot,” he said. But then he uncrossed his arms with a small, inaudible sigh. He was looking me over again, top to bottom, seeming to contemplate how quickly the band was gonna recognize me.

I knew the auditions were blind. But it’s not like I was hiding who I was. Other than the assumed name, I was still me.

I’d cut off my hair as soon as I arrived in L.A.; it was fucking hot, but the truth was, I was hungry for a change. A fresh start, maybe. No one had seen me with shortish hair since I was twelve, so that was different. I also had a short beard, but I’d been rocking a beard, on and off, for the past few years, and Dirty had seen me bearded. I had aviators on, but this wasn’t exactly a glasses on / glasses off Superman trick. I wasn’t masquerading as Clark Kent and planning to whip out my cape later.

This was just me.

Faded Cream T-shirt, worn jeans, snakeskin boots, bandana in my back pocket. Metal bracelet with the word BADASS stamped into it, which Elle had given me when I first joined Dirty and I’d never stopped wearing.

They’d see me a mile away and know who I was.

Seth Brothers.

Former rhythm guitarist and songwriter with Dirty. Fallen star. Pariah. And still, whether Dirty liked it or not, fan favorite. No guitarist who’d come after me was loved as much as I was. No one wanted me back in this band more than the fans. I knew that much from the messages I still received on a daily basis. It was the only reason I kept a Twitter account.

It was a big part of what was keeping me here, in the face of increasingly-bad odds. I was starting to feel how bad those odds were, given Jude’s hesitation to even let me in the door.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. I’d never expected Jude to be my problem.

“You sure you want this?” he asked me, his dark eyes locked steady on mine. “Now?”

“You once said you’d have my back, when the time came.”

“I say a lot of shit,” he admitted. “Not all of it smart.”

“Then we have that in common.”

He grunted again. “Tell you what. You play Metallica for me, you’ve got your audition.”

“Great,” I said.

Not great. The only Metallica song I knew well enough to impress anyone—maybe—was “Master of Puppets,” and that did not feel like the way to go with a Dirty audition. Dirty was not a metal band.

Clearly, that wasn’t Jude’s problem. He turned his back on me, a non-verbal dismissal, and headed back toward the bar.

I blew out a breath; kinda felt like I’d been holding it all fucking week.

I stuffed my acoustic into its case and picked it up, along with the other case, the one that held my electric guitar—my favorite Gibson. Then I fell in behind Jude.

It wasn’t exactly a red carpet, but it would do.