Chapter 2: The King of the Showcase
Everett Sloane liked to arrive at rehearsal before anyone else, because the empty studio at Sloane Music Group belonged to him in a way the crowded room never quite did. He was fifty-four, broad-shouldered and impeccably dressed, with silver at his temples and a watch that caught the light whenever he gestured, which was often. He stood at the glass window of the control room, coffee in hand, and watched his band take their places on the studio floor. The Monarchs were his pride, his polished house band, and he had built them the way other men built companies: carefully, expensively, and with his name stamped firmly on every decision.
"Again from the top," he said, his voice carrying easily through the speakers. "And this time, Dylan, I want the chorus bigger. Bigger. The audience should feel it in their chests."
Dylan Pierce, twenty-two and confident in the easy way of someone who had been told he was talented since he was a teenager, nodded and adjusted his microphone. The session players settled behind him, drums, bass, keyboards, guitars, all gleaming and in tune. When they played, the sound was impressive. It filled the studio and pressed against the glass. The rhythm was tight, the harmonies were clean, and every ending landed exactly where it had been planned to land. Sloane smiled. This was what he sold, and he sold it well.
He had founded Sloane Music Group years earlier, after a career of spotting talent and turning it into something the public would buy. He knew stages and spotlights, contracts and cameras, and he knew, or believed he knew, what audiences wanted. They wanted polish. They wanted confidence. They wanted a show that looked expensive and sounded effortless. The Monarchs gave them all of that, and Sloane had taught them to deliver it night after night without a crack showing.
Between takes, he gathered the band around him, the way a coach gathers a team before a final. "Listen," he said, pacing slowly, his hands moving as he talked. "The Sloane Summer Showcase is not just another concert. It is the event of the season. One million dollars to the winning act, judged head-to-head, in front of a packed hall and a live audience that will be watching every note. And this year, as every year, the Monarchs will win it. Not because I say so, but because no one else on that stage can touch us."
The band exchanged glances. Some nodded. Dylan kept his expression neutral, professional, but he listened carefully, the way he always did when Sloane spoke about winning as if it were a fact rather than a hope.
"People think music is about feeling," Sloane went on, warming to his theme. "Feeling is fine, but feeling does not fill a hall. Precision fills a hall. Presentation fills a hall. A band that has rehearsed until it cannot make a mistake, a singer who knows exactly where to stand and when to smile, that is what wins. Street players and amateurs can strum on a corner and collect coins. They cannot beat my band. Not on a real stage, not in front of real judges, not in a million years."
He laughed, a short, satisfied laugh, and the room laughed with him, though not everyone laughed for the same reason. Dylan smiled politely and looked down at his set list, thinking, as he sometimes did, that Sloane loved the sound of his own certainty a little too much.
Sloane walked to the window and looked out over the Atlanta skyline, where the afternoon light was turning the glass towers gold. "The showcase will be at Meridian Hall," he said. "A beautiful room. The cameras will be there. The press will be there. When the Monarchs take that stage, the audience will know they are watching the best. That is not arrogance. That is the truth of hard work and good taste, and I have built my whole career on it."
He turned back to the band and clapped his hands once. "One more run," he said. "Clean, loud, and perfect. Let me hear the ending like you mean it."
They played again, and again the sound was strong and polished, rising and falling in all the right places. Sloane closed his eyes for a moment and nodded along, satisfied. In his mind, the showcase was already decided. The Monarchs would perform, the crowd would roar, the judges would nod, and the million dollars would stay exactly where it belonged, with the act he had built himself.
He did not know, as he stood in that gleaming studio, that a nineteen-year-old girl with a worn violin had just finished playing at a farmers market across town, or that a music teacher had stopped to listen to her, or that a hallway conversation in a few days would turn his confident boast into a public wager. He only knew that he was the king of his showcase, and kings, in his experience, did not lose.