Page 132 of Jude

The legal win felt hollow and useless.

My bed was still cold, and the only woman who once mattered was gone.

The high-octane grind of the European arena circuit was chewing through my mental reserves.

After Sofia’s departure, the run became a pure, unadulterated hellscape, making all tours before it seem like a cakewalk.

Food sucked, drinking was a non-option, and my bone-deep depression was unprecedented.

I spent every free moment picking apart each life choice that brought me here.

I was running on absolute fumes, finding no glory nor thrill from the jaunt.

It was just a brutal, bloody grind.

As was my relentless, toxic obsession over my fallout with Sofia.

The silence from her was deafening.

Not a syllable from her since she walked out of our hotel’s rooftop restaurant in Rome.

I had no clue where she was on the map.

The stubborn, fractured pride in my chest kept me from swallowing my anger and dialing her number myself.

A few days later, when my temper had simmered down, I checked the Find My iPhone feature on my device.

She’d disconnected it.

Damn.

However, she was a grown woman with money in her bank account, and my gut told me she was long gone on a plane crossing the Atlantic.

I hoped she was heading for Nashville, to our home, staying put and safe till I could get back and iron out things with her.

Despite my aching heart, her security niggled at me.

The last thing I wanted was a retaliatory hit from Compagni on her, who had their fingers everywhere.

So I called Brian again and asked him to assign one of his firm’s private investigators to track her down.

He came back to me forty-eight hours later.

‘She’s back in Nashville, son, but no activity registers at your house. We don’t have a firm bead on her location.’

‘At least she’s back on my turf,’ I growled, my grip crushing the phone. ‘Continue hunting. Let me know the second you locate her.’

‘Will do.’

After that call, I wanted to wallow in what I knew best: brooding.

However, I had little downtime to dwell on my troubles; the band was contractually required to keep the show on the road.

We bounced from city to stadium on the chartered Boeing, landing on pitch-black runways at two in the morning, hauling forty tons of sound gear into and out of arenas.

Then repeating the entire brutal cycle every few days.

Berlin was a whirlwind of sold-out arenas and blinding stadium lights, but I scarcely took note, so lost in ruminating over the fragments of my marriage.