Chapter 2: The Unfinished Song
The studio air was stale, thick with the ghosts of cigarettes and the metallic tang of warm equipment. Andy Biersack sat slumped on a worn leather couch, a half-empty bottle of whiskey dangling from his fingers. The control room was a mess of tangled cables, scattered lyric sheets, and empty takeout containers. Through the glass, in the live room, his bandmates had long since packed up their guitars, leaving only the silent, patient shapes of amplifiers in the dark.
He’d stayed behind, chasing a feeling he couldn’t name, drowning it when he couldn’t catch it.
A single microphone stood in the center of the room, and the speakers in the control room hissed with a raw, unmixed vocal track. His own voice, stripped of its usual power, cracked and wavered through the silence.
“…and I traced the lines they said we’d never cross, your name a fever, my love the cost…”
It was an old one. A song from their first year together, when every look felt like a promise. He was butchering it, his voice slurring on the high notes, twisting the melody into something angrier, more desperate.
The door to the hallway creaked open.
He didn’t look up, assuming it was the night janitor or a straggling technician. Then he caught a familiar scent cutting through the stale beer and smoke—jasmine and vanilla. His head snapped up.
Lily stood in the doorway, backlit by the harsh fluorescent lights of the corridor. She wore a simple black coat, her hair a dark cascade against the white frame. She looked like a ghost from his happiest past, her presence so sudden and out of place it felt like a hallucination.
“Lily?” His voice was rough, shredded from singing and whiskey.
She stepped inside, letting the door sigh shut behind her. Her eyes, those piercing brown eyes he’d written a dozen songs about, scanned the room—the debris of his current life—before landing on him. There was no warmth in her gaze. It was all assessment. Cold, hard facts.
“I got your messages,” she said, her tone flat. “All forty-seven of them.”
He set the bottle down on the floor with a dull thud. “You didn’t answer.”
“What was I supposed to say, Andy? ‘Thanks for the sentimental drunk texts at 3 AM?’ My lawyer has them all, by the way. He’s not impressed.”
He flinched, running a hand through his disheveled hair. The song continued to play, his recorded voice groaning about forever. He fumbled for the console, stabbing a button to shut it off. The sudden silence was louder than the music.
“I was working on that for you,” he mumbled, gesturing vaguely at the now-silent speakers.
“Don’t,” she said, the word sharp as a slap. “Don’t you dare. You don’t get to write songs for me anymore. You lost that right when you let her into our bed.”
The image, the one he’d tried to drown, surged to the front of his mind. The hotel room. The stranger’s laugh. The sickening plunge of guilt. He stood up, unsteady on his feet, the room tilting slightly. “It was a mistake, Lily. One fucking mistake.”
“A mistake is adding salt to your coffee. What you did was a choice. A series of them.” She hugged her coat tighter around herself, but her posture was rigid, unyielding. “I came here to tell you to stop. Stop calling. Stop texting. Just sign the papers so I can forget you.”
He moved then, closing the space between them in a few unsteady strides. The smell of jasmine filled his head, a scent that used to mean home. Now it just smelled like loss. He could see the faint, tired lines around her eyes, the weight she’d lost. His doing. All of it.
“You can’t forget me,” he whispered, his voice low and thick. He saw her jaw tighten. “You can’t. Because I can’t forget you. I still taste you in my dreams.”
He saw the flicker in her eyes, a crack in the ice. A memory of something else, something that existed before the betrayal. It was all the invitation he needed.
His hand came up, not to strike, but to frame her face, his thumb brushing the high curve of her cheekbone. She stiffened, her breath catching. “Andy, don’t.”
“Tell me you don’t feel it,” he challenged, his face inches from hers. His other hand found her waist, pinning her gently against the edge of the giant mixing console. The cool metal pressed into her back. “Tell me you’re over it. Over us. And I’ll let you walk out that door.”
She opened her mouth, a denial ready on her lips, but nothing came out. Her eyes were locked on his, wide and conflicted. The air crackled with the ruins of their history.
He didn’t wait for the lie.
His mouth crashed down on hers.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision of teeth and regret and three months of pent-up, toxic longing. She made a sound against his lips, a muffled protest that dissolved into a gasp. For one terrifying, exhilarating second, she kissed him back. Her hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch at the leather of his jacket, her fingers digging in as if he were the only solid thing in a spinning world.
It was familiar and wrong and felt more like home than anything had in a year.
Then she froze.
She wrenched her head back, turning her face away from his. Her chest heaved. “Stop.”
He released her instantly, stepping back as if burned. The space between them was charged, humming with what had just happened.
Lily brought a trembling hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with a horror that wasn’t directed at him, but at herself. “I can’t do this,” she breathed, the words barely audible. “I can’t be this person.”
She looked at him, really looked at him, and he saw the ghost of the girl he’d married finally vanish, replaced by a woman who knew exactly how much he could hurt her.
Without another word, she turned and walked out, her footsteps echoing down the empty hall.
Andy stood alone in the silent, messy room, the taste of her lipstick and his own shame bitter on his tongue. He looked at the console, at the button that had stopped the song. He pressed it again.
His broken voice filled the room once more, a perfect soundtrack to the wreckage.
The raw vocal track, his own voice laid bare and ugly, wrapped around him in the silence. He stared at the door she’d vanished through, the ghost of her jasmine and vanilla scent now mingling with the stench of his failure. With a sudden, violent sweep of his arm, he sent the whiskey bottle flying; it exploded against the soundproof wall, shattering into a thousand glittering pieces that scattered like his composure.
He gripped the edge of the mixing console, his knuckles bleaching white, the tendons in his neck pulled taut. The song kept playing, his recorded voice a whining, pathetic echo of the man he’d pretended to be for her. He was supposed to be the rockstar, the unbreakable frontman, but here he was, completely shattered by a closed door.
“Just shut up,” he growled at the speakers.
They didn’t listen.
His body gave out first, a controlled collapse to the grimy studio floor. He drew his knees up, resting his forehead against them, trying to block it all out. The cool air from a vent above kissed the back of his neck. He could still feel the imprint of her body against the console, the desperate pressure of her fingers clutching his jacket before she’d remembered to hate him.
A hot, sharp pressure built behind his eyes, a feeling so foreign and unwelcome he tried to choke it back. It was no use. A single, traitorous tear escaped, carving a clean path through the smudged eyeliner and sweat on his cheek. Then another followed, and the dam broke.
Tears fell freely.
They were silent, wrenching sobs that shook his entire frame, each one a confession he’d never speak aloud. They dripped from his jaw onto the worn knees of his jeans, darkening the denim. He cried for the hotel room, for the stranger’s laugh, for the specific shade of hurt in Lily’s eyes. He cried for every stupid, selfish choice that led him to this cold floor, utterly alone with the sound of his own broken love song.
He didn’t wipe them away. He just let them come, a flood of regret he could no longer contain. The track finally ended, clicking off, plunging the room into a true and absolute silence. Into that void, he whispered a single, ragged word to the empty room. “Lily.”