“No shit?” Hector asked, and the rest of us made similar, shocked comments. Being number one was huge. Not only did it mean more money in our pockets (granted, not much after the show took its massive cut, but still better than nothing), but all the downloads translated to votes. That made our chances of staying to the finals even better—assuming people loved this week’s song, too.

“We’ll have to find some way to top it for the next show,” Dan continued. “The theme is, ‘Tainted Love,’ so I guess they want some messed-up love songs. Any thoughts?”

“Bad Romance,” Jared said immediately.

“The Lady Gaga song?” Kyle asked, looking at his brother like he was crazy.

“We can do a rock version of it, make it dark and twisted.” He grabbed the mic and sang the chorus, his voice rough and sensual. The same voice that had cried out my name only hours ago. It nearly turned me into a molten puddle right there in the studio, and when he winked at me, I knew he’d intended that.

“Interesting choice,” Dan said. “It will definitely stand out.”

“I like it,” I said, and Jared gave me a smile full of naughty thoughts. Yes, he was definitely doing this on purpose. Not that I was complaining.

Hector tapped a drumstick against his hand. “I don’t know…”

Dan pulled up the song on his phone, and we discussed how we could tweak it for our style. There was no actual guitar in the song, so we could interpret it in different ways. I played the main melody for them with some heavy distortion on my guitar, and that finally convinced Kyle and Hector.

“One other thing,” Dan said. “For this week’s show, the mentors have to do a performance of one of our songs with each band still on their team. Pick a Loaded River song you want to cover, and I’ll join you for practice every other day.”

We let Kyle choose, since he was the biggest Loaded River fan. He wanted “Nothing Breaks Me,” a song I’d heard a million times growing up, with grungy guitar riffs and gritty vocals that would sound great with Jared singing them. It shouldn’t be too hard to learn, but now we had two songs to perform, not one. Dan bumped our rehearsal time to eight hours a day, and combined with all the added publicity we had to do for the semi-finals, that meant we’d barely have any time to breathe this week.

We spent the rest of the day rehearsing the new songs and then dragged ourselves back to the hotel. We had tonight off for a rare change, and I couldn’t wait to take a nice, hot shower and relax. Preferably with Jared.

As soon as we walked into the lobby, we could tell something was wrong. Everyone turned to look at us and not in a friendly way.