A Billionaire for Christmas - Page 23
Raji laughed at his stupid joke. That was a good sign.
He continued, “And Cadell, the lead guitarist, he used to have a serious heroin problem, but he’s been clean, probably, for almost a year now. He found out he had a daughter from a groupie hook-up—”
“I thought you guys didn’t hook up with the groupies,” she said, but her dark eyes were lively again.
“Yeah, well, people do stupid things when they’re stoned. Anyway, Cadell’s daughter had a liver problem and needed a transplant. That’s how he met Andy. He had to get off the heroin and be clean for months before Andy would use him as a donor and save his daughter’s life.”
“So you’re telling me that four guys out of the original five in the band have had major substance abuse problems. How about the lead singer, Xan Valentine? All lead singers are drug addicts, right? He’s the songwriter, too. Double whammy.”
“Not heroin. Steroid injections for his throat for a while because he can’t take a break. He has real problems with vocal nodes and inflammation because he’s obsessed.”
“But he does drugs, doesn’t he? I mean, the singer-songwriter isn’t going to be the lone holdout in a band full of drug addicts.”
“He’s some kind of crazy, all right, but I don’t think it has anything to do with drugs.”
“Oh?”
Peyton knew better than to spill Killer Valentine’s sordid secrets to anyone outside the band, but this wasn’t some random groupie who had managed to get backstage by blowing a roadie. This was Raji, his friend, maybe his only real friend in the world.
Of course, the guys in the band were his friends, too. The music bound them together as tightly as family, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.
Peyton didn’t like where the family analogy was heading. He and Georgie had had a pretty serious relationship a few years before. Seemed weird.
But needing someone outside the band to talk to wasn’t weird. Everybody had people outside the band.
He had his old friends from Juilliard, of course, but most of them had stayed in classical music. They didn’t understand his choice to sign with Killer Valentine. No one knew about Georgie and him, so everyone thought that he had just abandoned serious music and run off with a rock band.
And his family, well, they were New Englanders. Nobody talked about anything. Ever.
So maybe it wasn’t wise to spill his guts to Raji, but Peyton needed to talk to somebody.
He leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Xan Valentine is a scary guy. There’s something deeply broken about him, something from his childhood. Sometimes, I’m afraid for Georgie, except that when he looks at her, his whole body changes, like the crazy drains out of him. It’s like she’s his sanity. If I thought Georgie was in any danger from him, I would do anything I could, everything I could, to get her away from him, but I don’t think she is. I think if she left him, he would be a danger to himself.”
Raji asked, “Do you think he’d hurt you?”
“No, because I think if anything happened to me, Georgie wouldn’t like it. We have managed to become friends, even after everything.”
“So, she forgave you for all that stuff in high school?” Raji’s eyes were wide open now.
“I begged her to, and she says she did. She wouldn’t hold a grudge. I’ve done everything I can to make it easier for her to be around me, and I think we’ve worked it out.”
“I’m sorry you lost her,” Raji said to him.
He poked the remnants of the rubbery egg white omelet with his fork. “I’m not sorry. She’s better off with Xan. I couldn’t even stand up to my friends when they talked shit about her. Xan and Georgie stood up for each other, and Xan gave up everything for her.”
“Everything? He’s the lead singer in a rock band. He’s famous and probably getting rich as shit. He doesn’t seem to be too badly off,” Raji scoffed. “What the hell did he give up?”
Peyton struggled with himself for a minute before he said, “Xan used to be a famous, child prodigy violinist. His name was Alexandre Grimaldi back then. I never heard him play in person, but I’ve heard recordings of him when he was a teenager. He was brilliant. He was brilliant like once-in-a-century brilliant. He was a genius like Mozart was a genius. When Xan and I went after Georgie after she had been kidnapped by the Russian mafia—”
Raji frowned. “I assumed you were kidding about that.”
“—to get out of the zip ties that were tying his wrists, Xan shattered his left hand. He destroyed it. Now, it’s held together with steel pins, wires, and scar tissue. He’ll never play any instrument again. He gave up the violin to save her.”
Source: readsnovelonline.net