Kyle frowned, but he blew out a breath and nodded slowly. “Well, how bad is the damage?”

“Bad,” Jared said. “The photo’s all over the Internet, and they have quotes from Becca saying I do this kind of thing all the time.”

“That’s because you do,” Hector growled.

Jared glared at him, and I jumped in before this got any worse. “Lacey must have done this,” I said. “When she stole my glasses, she threatened me, something about how we shouldn’t get in her way or else.”

“We have to tell Dan,” Kyle said. “She can’t get away with this shit.”

Jared sank onto his bed and grabbed his laptop. “It doesn’t matter. We’re screwed. No one is going to vote for us now. The producers will make sure of it.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with him. Just like he thought the band had only become popular because of his bad boy image, now he thought we were doomed because of one photo of us together. Still, we couldn’t afford to lose even a single vote at this point in the show. I just hoped there were no other photos of the two of us floating around. We’d been so stupid and hadn’t been careful enough, and now our reckless passion was coming back to haunt us. God, what had we been thinking?

My phone buzzed, and I was almost too afraid to look. Messages from Carla and Julie, asking if the photo was real, asking if I was okay, asking more questions I couldn’t answer.

“Damn,” Jared said. “Do not read any of these articles. Especially the comments.”

“What?” I leaned over his shoulder to read his screen. The photo was on one of the most popular blogs about the show with the headline: “The Sound’s Secret Affair.” Below, the article called Jared a playboy and made him out to be some horny asshole who slept with women as some sort of power trip. They described how this had led to Villain Complex losing their bass player, with a few harsh quotes from Becca to back it up, and compared our band to the show’s former winner Addicted to Chaos—exactly the thing we’d been trying to avoid.

According to this article, I’d abandoned my internship with the LA Philharmonic to chase after him like some sort of star-struck groupie. They brought up how my father had cheated on his wife with my mom and my mom’s subsequent alcoholism, like that explained everything about me. Like I was just reliving her mistakes all over again with Jared. I couldn’t believe they would post stuff like this, shedding light on all the things in our past we tried to keep hidden. Things no stranger had a right to know about us. How did they even get all this info about me?