Prologue
The ballroom still thrummed with the clack of heels and the slide of suede, though its last inhabitants had vanished over an hour before. Applause and cheering from the final-night party echoed across the hallway. The tables were strewn with hairpins, empty water bottles, and sweaty towels tossed with exhilaration before another heat. The perfume of sunless tanner and hair spray drifted toward the apex of the ballroom’s ceiling, and it almost seemed that a few notes of a Viennese waltz still clung to the utilitarian white hotel tablecloths.
Rapid footsteps broke the waiting silence. Stilettos from theclickclick click, glimmering with crystals, a few of which scattered from the shoes with a brackish clatter as the heels struck the parquet of the ballroom floor. Heavy breathing, panting. “No!” A stumble as one heel of the red satin crystal-encrusted stilettos snapped. Sobbing.
Then another pair of footsteps, flats, fashionable. Something hard, with an edge that might draw blood. These footsteps were measured. No panic. No anxiety. Calculating.
The sobs intensified. “Please, please, please, no, I didn’t do anythi—”
A gurgle, a grimace, a thud. The wash of silk from a bone-white evening gown susurrated along the cold parquet floor. The scent of copper flooded the air.
A grunt, a vicious exhale, an audible sneer.
Then the ballroom closed upon itself again. The tables, the cloths, the chandeliers, the lights. All waiting for its new secret to be discovered.
Chapter One
Anita Goodman bounced on the tips of her sneaker-clad toes as she unlocked the door to her studio. Seven a.m. Just enough time, never enough time. Clean studio. Mail. Hopefully time for herself, just this once.
One by one, the sounds staccato and rhythmic, she flicked on the lights in her studio. Everything tidy, everything clean. Just as it should be, at least in her professional life.
Wait. Damn it.
Anita scrunched her face and rubbed at the smudge on the mirror that spanned the entire length of the main studio. She had just cleaned it last night. How did it get smudged when no one was there?Please don’t let it be rats.Moths didn’t smudge mirrors, did they?
Anita stepped back, admiring the sheen she had given to the mirror with the sleeve of her black, slouchy cardigan. Perfect again. Moths be damned.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket like an angry, demanding swarm of bees. For the eighth time already that morning. He wouldn’t stop until she answered.
She sighed with her entire body and slid the “accept” button. “Stop calling me.”
“Anita!” Even his accent sounded slimy. “How are you?”
“Busy. Stop calling me.”
Mikhail tutted over the phone, every sound he uttered jarring her last nerve. “Anita, please. We are adults. We can be civil.”
“Civil? Civil is not dumping me for Tatiana Lurshenko three weeks before Keystone, dickhead.” She put the call on speaker and tossed the phone onto the check-in desk. She needed to buy a damn punching bag. “What could you possibly want this early in the morning?”
“I know you’re up, Anita. You’ve probably been up for hours.”
“Yes. Because I have to do my own work and now yours, too.” Dickhead.Gadina.Anita could swear in about eight languages and wanted to use every last one in her arsenal. “Just tell me why the hell you needed to call me at seven a.m. Are you rubbing it in that I now can’t dance at Keystone?” Without a punching bag ready, she grabbed the broom and started speed-sweeping. She should have listened to Nigel. Never confuse a dance partnership for love.
Mikhail, that Ukrainiangadina, never swept the studio floor a single day they were together. Now that she was single again, she had the time and anger to keep everything tidy. At least in her professional life.
Oh God, he was still droning on about how breaking up was going to be better for her. She really should just hang up on him. See how he liked it. Breaking up with her by text? Was he eleven?
She swept the mail from underneath the slot in the door into a tidy pile, which she collected and dumped unceremoniously in her little office. Even all the way across the studio, she could hear his incessant prattle. She needed this to be over. She had wasted enough time on him and every man like him.
Her feet moved so quickly across the floor she might as well be running over broken glass. “Mikhail, just stop it. Tell me what it is you want so I can get back to my life. I am done. I have way too much to do today to deal with you.”
He drew in a dramatic breath, and she rolled her eyes before taking a sip from her “Rumba Walk Away” mug.
“Anita, you still have some of my things. I need them.”
She spat the coffee back into her mug in an accidental guffaw. “Like what?” She thought he had taken everything. Her dignity. The last three years of her life. Her business partnership with Patrick.
Wait, she didn’t mean that. She had had to let Patrick go.
