ROOFTOP ESCAPE
Iscampered up the stairwell leading to the rooftop of the club, stumbling blindly and tripping over my own feet on the way. It had been easy enough to find the rooftop, which was definitely off limits. I was alone. I had made my escape. The angry tears pooling in the corners of my eyes fell free, trailing hot lines down my face. Tonight, I had twisted myself into something unrecognizable to be palatable, to be accepted. And it still hadn’t been enough. I hadn’t been enough.
I had been so preoccupied, ruminating about what would happen when I met Seff’s father for the first time. Viscount Erik de Barras loomed large in our lives. So I was careful with every decision leading up to tonight, to ensure I appeared demure and modest. I made sure that I didn’t say anything offensive. I took extra care to defer to Seff on all things that might upset or offend his father. But it hadn’t made a lick of difference. I appeared as a shadow of myself, and I was still deemed unworthy. Too much. My body was too much. My dreams and ambitions were too much. I was supposed to stay small. I was not supposed towant.To desire. If I had stayed at that table for one moment longer, listening to the viscount’s diatribe, I would have exploded, my emotions getting the better of me as usual. So I fled. And here Iwas, chilled to the bone in the early March air, trying not to lose it completely.
I took a few deep, calming breaths as I stared out over the city. Montmartre’s flat rooftop was four stories high, built at the top of a rolling hill. It offered a spectacular view of Lutesse. A half-moon hung low in the sky, reflecting off the limestone facades that characterized most Lutessian buildings, casting a glow on the slate-grey roof tiles across the way. The River Sequana, which bisected the city, glittered in the distance. The narrow cobbled streets, lined with wrought-iron lampposts, sparkled under the inky sky. In the serene evening air, it was hard to be upset about anything. But as angry tears blurred my vision, stinging as my heavy kohl liner ran into my eyes, I remembered exactly why I had come up here.
I couldn’t fight the tears that fell when I was frustrated and angry. And I knew that they made me look weak and foolish, but tonight I didn’t care. I was so far beyond caring, that I didn’t even bother to make sure I kept the one oath I had made in my twenty-four years. No one was here. No one could hear me. And my mother had been dead for fifteen years; what was I still holding onto this for anyway? Doing the “right thing” had gotten me nowhere. Doing what I wassupposed to dowas the reason I was having a meltdown on the rooftop of a nightclub. So, fuck it. I did the only thing I could think of to soothe myself. The only thing I loved more than dancing. I sang.
“Think of me…” I trilled, softly at first, but as I became confident that I was alone, the words came out stronger.
The memory flashed in my mind as I sang.
“Promise me, Seraphina, promise me,” my mother had gasped, taking shallow breaths into her wasted lungs. “You have to promise me you won’t sing for anyone but your father. No one else must hear your voice. Promise me.”
I was nine. She was dying. And I had no idea why she made me swear it, but she did. I had kept that promise for fifteen years. No one had ever heard me sing. Only my father. When he was killed in the war, my audience of one shrank to an audience of zero. I was bereft. An orphan, forbidden to do the one thing I loved more than anything in the world. But I should be safe tonight, on this rooftop, with no one but the moon to hear my solitary plea.
I grew bolder and took a stab at the coloratura toward the end of the piece; my voice lifted and crashed back down, culminating in a crescendo that clashed and tumbled, leaping through the crisp night air. By the end, I was performing to a non-existent crowd, hands raised toward the streets below, imagining myself standing centre stage in the opera house. If I listened closely, I could almost hear the crowd whooping and cheering.
“Brava.”
A deep male voice, real, not imagined, resonated behind me. I whipped my head around, bringing my arms back to my sides. Shit. Someone was here. And in one moment, the promise I had kept for all those years smashed into a million shards, unable to be pieced back together again.
The man leaned against a tower of stacked crates, off to the side and hidden from the light. Had he been here first, or did he come up the stairs to find me in the middle of performing to no one? I should have done a better job checking when I barged onto the rooftop, but I had been so flustered. Embarrassment flooded through me, heating my face, leaving a high-pitched ringing in my ears.
“Oh my God. I’m—I’m so sorry. You weren’t supposed to hear that,” I choked out.
“Why not? That was incredible. Your voice is…” His own voice rumbled, deep and soft, with a lilting accent—he wasn’tfrom Lutesse. He seemed unable to finish his sentence as he stepped closer, the light from the streets below and the moon above throwing him into sharp relief. He was tall, at least a foot taller than me, with impossibly broad shoulders. He wore a crisp white coat with two lines of buttons down the front—a chef’s coat. No doubt he worked in the Montmartre kitchens. His dark hair followed the current trend for men’s haircuts: shaved close at the sides and longer at the top, with thick tendrils falling over his forehead, swooping above fathomless eyes.
“I shouldn’t be up here, I just… I needed a minute… away from… all that.” I eyed the door to the stairwell, shifting back and forth, deciding whether to make a run for it or not.
“I know what you mean. That club is chaotic, especially the kitchens.” The man gestured to his jacket. It was pristine and cut close to a powerful body, the sleeves rolled and cuffed, exposing his muscled forearms. He took one measured step closer. Holy hell, he was gorgeous. It was impossible not to stare at his face—angular features, with an aquiline nose and sharp cheekbones. But when he turned into the light, exposing the left side of his face, I had to stop myself from gasping.
Swirling scars, angry and raised, covered the entire top left quadrant of his face, cutting through a dark brow and framing his eye. The scars whorled down past his ear to the side of his neck, disappearing under the collar of his jacket. My chest squeezed. What kind of pain had he endured? The scars were brutal, and yet somehow beautiful at the same time, and my fingers tingled, inexplicably itching to trace the shape of them.
“Do you sing professionally?” His words snapped me out of my daze. I had been ogling him. Which was somehow even more embarrassing than being caught singing an aria to no one.
“No, no. I’m a ballerina at the Lutesse City Opera. I don’t sing. Well… not in front of people anyway.” I shrugged,stumbling over my words as this stranger laid my soul bare on the rooftop. I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear forever.
“I hate to break it to you, love, but what you just did… was singing… in front of people,” he teased, winking as his full lips tilted into a crooked smile. My embarrassment shifted to annoyance.
“I saw you downstairs, in the club, with the viscount,” the stranger added, changing the subject, brushing against the exact nerve that would get under my skin. Well, at least thatdistracted me from the sheer mortification of singing in front of another person for the first time in my life.
“Yes. I’m… I’m courting his son,” I snapped, tone more defiant than I intended.
The stranger’s beautiful mouth twisted into a sneer.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” He had eavesdropped on my singing, intruding on my own very private and very personal meltdown, causing me to unknowingly break the oath I made to my dying mother, and now he was going to stand there and judge me?
“Oh, nothing. Nothing. I just thought you could do better than that dryshite. As a beautiful, prestigious ballerina in the Lutesse City Opera who also performs exclusive arias on nightclub rooftops.” He blinked twice, giving a half-smile that sent shivers down my spine. I was blandly pretty at best. But he had called me beautiful. Something sparked low in my stomach. I stomped it out, ignoring the obvious attempt at flattery.
“What do you know about anything?” My voice betrayed my annoyance. He may have been the most attractive man I’d ever seen in my life, but he was also, without a doubt, the most obnoxious.
He gave a chuckle that skittered along my bones, my irritation rising at the way my body reacted to him. I was alreadyteetering on the edge after everything that had happened in the club. I was one comment away from snapping.
“You should sing,” he stated, a pleading tone to his voice, “in front of people. You have a gift. And while you’re at it, ditch that swaggering son of the viscount. You’re better than him,” he said with a wink. And there it was. The one more comment.
“I am perfectly happy with my life, thank you very much!” Okay, so that was not entirely true, but I was in a fighting mood. “I was not looking for a man’s advice, I came here to be alone!” The rage I had suppressed with Seff and his father, the viscount, rushed to the surface. This stranger made me want to stamp my foot like a petulant child. I had no desire to tamp down my anger with him.
