"Bury her in her ballet shoes," I tell Sergei. "The red ones from her last performance. And..."
I walk to the nursery, each step feeling like miles. The yellow walls are cheerful in the moonlight. The crib stands empty,waiting. The mobile with dancing bears turns slowly in the airflow from the vent.
The shoes are on the dresser. Pink satin, impossibly small, with tiny ribbons that would have wrapped around ankles that will never dance. I pick them up, and they weigh nothing.
"These too," I say, returning to the bedroom. "She wants the baby to have shoes for heaven."
Sergei doesn't question it. He knows better. He's seen me trace Elena's name in blood for the past hour. He knows I'm different now. Broken in a way that won't heal.
They take Elena away eventually, but I stay on the floor, tracing those five letters until dawn comes through the broken window. A promise. A prayer. A vow written in blood.
ELENA. My world. My loss. My reason for everything that comes next.
The reformers did this. Their weakness infected our organization, made us soft, made us vulnerable to whoever that voice belonged to.
But I'll find him. I'll find them all. And I'll show them what happens when you leave a man with nothing left to lose.
I stand finally, my body stiff from hours on the floor. The blood has dried on my hands, under my fingernails, in the lines of my palms. Good. Let it stain. Let it remind me.
"Sir?" Sergei returns, and behind him are the cleaners. They'll remove the blood, replace the carpet, fix the window. By tonight, it'll be like nothing happened here.
Except for the empty nursery. Except for the closet full of maternity clothes. Except for the man I'm about to become. A man who doesn't bend, doesn't break, doesn't feel.
"Leave one thing," I tell them, pointing to the spot where I've been tracing her name. "That stays."
They look at Sergei, who nods. They'll work around it, leaving that one section of bloody carpet like a shrine. Let it remind me every day of what weakness costs.
I'll keep that promise. From now on, we do things the old way. The brutal way. The way that keeps people alive. I'll become steel. Untouchable. Unreachable. I'll trace Elena's name on every surface when I'm thinking, planning, killing, like a signature.
Tonight, Maksim Petrov dies with his wife, and Steel is born.
And somewhere in this world, a young man who thinks he's an artist is about to learn what real art looks like—like vengeance wearing a three-piece suit and tracing a dead woman's name in blood.
Chapter one
The Fall
Sonya
The stage floor rushes up to meet me, and I know—Iknow—this is going to hurt.
Five years ago. Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg. Opening night of Giselle, and I'm about to become the cautionary tale every principal dancer whispers about in the wings.
Anton's hands grip my waist for the lift, his fingers digging in harder than they ever did in rehearsal. The audience is a sea of faces in the darkness beyond the lights—two thousand witnesses to what's about to happen, and not one of them will understand what they're really seeing.
"If I can't have you," he whispers against my ear, his breath hot and wrong, "no one will."
The choreography calls for him to catch me—to support me through the arabesque, to be the partner every ballerina trusts with her body, her career, her life.
Instead, he lets go.
I'm airborne for a heartbeat—weightless, perfect, suspended in the moment before everything shatters. Then gravity remembers I exist, and the stage floor meets my ankle with a sound like breaking branches.
The crack echoes through the theater.
I scream.
The pain is white-hot, immediate, absolute. My ankle bends in a direction ankles aren't supposed to bend, and somewhere in the audience, a woman gasps. The music stumbles. The conductor's baton falters.
