I nod, murmur thank-yous, accept their hugs with the same polite distance I've kept for years. They're kind. They're talented. But none of them really knows me.
None of them know my family name. None of them know what awaits me outside this building.
I slip into my dressing room and close the door, leaning against it for a long moment before I move to the mirror.
My reflection stares back—pale skin, dark hair slicked into a severe bun, eyes the color of a winter sky. I look composed. A mask I’ve been perfecting for years.
I look like my mother.
The thought makes me miss her terribly, but I try not to let myself think of her until I’m back in my tiny apartment with my two other roommates. Luckily, our schedules never match up,and I barely see them besides as ships in the night, just passing by on our way to our next audition or our next show.
I miss her more than anything on nights like tonight. I wish she could see that I followed in her footsteps. I hope she’d be proud.
"Posture is power,” she'd say. "If you stand tall, no one can see you're afraid."
I've been standing tall ever since.
She died when I was fourteen. Kidney failure stemmed from a past childhood disease that robbed her body. Her years as a ballerina and bearing two children didn’t help matters, and she was sickly most of my life, but never without a smile. No matter how many specialists my father hired, or how much he threw at trying different treatments, her body just didn’t respond the way the doctors hoped.
I start removing my stage makeup, wiping away the false lashes, the sculpted cheekbones, the red lips. Underneath, I am smaller. Quieter. More afraid than I'll ever let anyone see.
A sharp knock interrupts my thoughts.
"Come in," I call, expecting one of the other dancers.
But it's not.
It's my father.
He's dressed in a charcoal suit, perfectly tailored, his silver hair combed back in the same severe style he's worn for as long as I can remember. He's a handsome man—cold, controlled, commanding, with the same grey-blue eyes that both my brother Luka and I inherited. The kind of man people instinctively step aside for.
Ironically, it was those cold grey eyes that my mother said she caught staring at her while she performed on a New York stage as a young prima ballerina. She caught those same eyes returning for two straight weeks before my father finally knocked on her dressing room with roses and a proposal.
She didn’t know at the time that my father’s family influenced New York and the performing arts scene. She had no idea that she was falling in love with the soon-to-be head of one of the biggest organized crime families in Russia, though I think she was so smitten with my father that she wouldn’t have done anything differently. She called it “love at first sight”.
She claimed he was a different man before my grandfather’s stroke, only two years later. He was softer—sweeter… more patient. Then again, he was always with her.
He became more distant with Luka and me after her death.
I stand slowly, smoothing my hands over my robe.
"Papa."
"Katerina." His voice is clipped, formal. He steps inside and closes the door behind him, his gaze sweeping over me with the same clinical assessment he'd give a business acquisition. His hands folded one over the other behind him. "Your performance was adequate."
Adequate.
I've just danced the role of my career, and he calls it adequate.
He would never have called my mother “adequate”.
I swallow the bitterness and nod. "Thank you."
"We need to talk."
Of course we do.
He doesn't sit. Doesn't soften. Just stands there, hands clasped behind his back, and delivers the blow I've been dreading for months.
