Page 21 of Jealous God
By my side Elodie paled, muttering something I didn’t catch. My arm tightened around her shoulders for a second before I let her step away.
“Has something happened?” Gone was the sparkly eyed girl I had spent the last few hours with, replaced by the Elodie I kind of hated. The bad ass bitch was back.
“Has something happened?” Tate parroted back to her sarcastically, and I winced at the tone in his voice. What the fuck was wrong with him? He didn’t talk like this. He didn’t treat women like this. And not once in all the times since this tour had started and Elodie had been employed had he acted this around her. As far as I was aware, he liked Elodie. They all liked Elodie. Perhaps too damn much for my liking. “You mean apart from you talking my boy here into dumping his security and running around the city with you? Yeah, something has happened.”
“Dion.” It was the only possible explanation as to why he was blaming her for all of this instead of me. It should have been clear to anyone who knew me that running off had been purely my idea. “Is he ok?”
But I already knew the answer to that as well. If Tate was this worked up, then Dion was anything but ok.
In answer, Tate thrust his phone outward. Elodie got to him first. Her eyes pinched together as she scanned it. I read it over her shoulder, and my heart sped up with every word that filtered into my brain.
“Fuck, is he ok?”
Elodie tilted her face to mine. “Isla is…?” She glanced around, not daring to finish the sentence in public. She didn’t need to worry. I had no doubt that every single person who was slyly looking at us already knew. They had already seen. I nodded.
“Where is he?” I was already moving. My only thought was getting to him before he did something stupid. Because I knew Dion. He would go off at the deep end at this latest slanderous headline.
“Louis got him out of the bar and into Erik’s room. It’s not good Jax.” Tate followed close on my heels, Elodie and Chance just behind him. I didn’t let myself think about them waking up together because I had more important things to worry about.
Namely, why our ex-drummer had just thrown Dion under the bus and told the world he had cheated on her when she was carrying his child.
* * *
“Dion?”
Tate hadn’t been exaggerating when he had said Dion was a mess. In fact, a mess didn’t even come close to it. I had seen him in some states before, but never like that.
He looked broken. There were dark smudges under his red eyes. His face was grey and ashen. And it wasn’t just the copious amounts of alcohol that he had drunk, either. He looked like he had given up.
“Hey.” He lifted blurry eyes in my direction as I came through the door. “Is Lola…?”
I paused, not understanding what he was on about, and then realised that Louis had come up behind us silently. Dion wasn’t talking to me or Elodie. He was talking to him.
“Not particularly.” Louis’ face was murderous. And who could blame him for that? It wasn’t just Dion’s name that was getting dragged through the mud, it was his baby sister’s as well. The picture of what was an intimate moment between Dion and her looked incriminating as hell. Especially when coupled with the headlines:
Dionysus Rising lead man cosies up with another woman just minutes after being told he is going to be a father.
Can Isla Roberts look past this latest dalliance, or is it one woman too far for the ROCKY couple?
It was all bullshit, of course. We all knew that. Isla and Dion’s relationship ended because she had come back pregnant by another guy. Neither of them had been happy for a long time before that. But it had been Isla, our previous drummer and original band member, that had done the dirty, and it had been Dion who had been taking the slack for it. Even after she had done him wrong, he had still tried his best to protect her.
Months and months of bad headlines and being portrayed as the ultimate womanising dick had taken its toll on him, and this was the final straw.
I didn’t know what Isla had been thinking, or even if she was responsible for the headline, but she sure as hell looked guilty in my eyes.
“She had to leave her job in the middle of the day because the press was outside.” Louis' voice was calm, but there was a note of anger to it. And I couldn’t blame him for that. Lola was a sweet girl. We had all liked her in the short twenty-four hours we had been around her. Dion hadn’t just liked her, though — he had been smitten with her. To the point he had asked her to marry him. Whether that had actually happened, I didn’t know. But I was guessing not. If it had, no doubt the press would be all over it.
“A student spat at her.”
The room stilled as Louis' quiet anger washed over us.
Fuck.
I raked my hand through my hair, looking at Dion from beneath my lashes. And it was like looking at him coming alive in slow motion. He blinked slowly, trying to shake away the booze fog that was no doubt clouding his thoughts. His lips thinned and then disappeared altogether. Straightening himself, he blinked a few times before he was able to speak.
“They did what?”
Louis didn’t say a word. Whatever it was that he was thinking, he didn’t show. If it had been my sister, I wouldn’t have been so calm. So, it was probably a good job that I didn’t have a sister.
