I'm on the floor, my white Giselle costume pooling around me like a shroud, and Anton is leaning over me with concern written across his face for the audience to see. But his eyes—his eyes are satisfied. Pleased. Like he's just finished creating something beautiful.
"An accident," he says loudly, projecting to the back row. "She lost her balance during the lift."
Liar.
Fucking liar.
But I can't speak past the pain. Can't do anything except curl around my shattered ankle while stagehands rush out and the curtain comes down and my career ends in front of two thousand people who think they just witnessed a tragic mistake.
They have no idea they just watched a murder.
I jolt awake in my gallery, heart pounding, the phantom pain shooting through my ankle like it always does after the nightmare.
Except it's not a nightmare. It's a memory.
The gallery is dark—of course it's dark, it's midnight. I closed six hours ago, sent my assistant home, locked the front door with the heavy deadbolt I installed myself. The space is mine now, all polished hardwood floors and track lighting and carefully curated Russian imperial art that rich people pay obscene amounts of money to own.
I built this. After the Mariinsky destroyed me, after the surgeries and the physical therapy and the slow, agonizing acceptance that I'd never dance professionally again, I built this gallery from nothing. Turned my family connections and art history degree into something real, something successful, somethingmine.
But at midnight, when Manhattan sleeps and the city noise fades to a distant hum, the gallery becomes something else.
It becomes my stage.
I change into my practice clothes—black leotard, pink tights worn thin at the knees, hair pulled back in the same tight bun I've worn since I was six years old. The security cameras are running, but I don't care. Let them watch. Let them see what I do when no one's supposed to be looking.
The pointe shoes are in my office, waiting. I keep them in the bottom drawer of my desk, wrapped in tissue paper like a secret. They're old—my last pair from the Mariinsky, the ones I wore the week before Giselle, before Anton, before everything ended.
They're also bloody.
Not from tonight. The blood is old, dried to rust-brown on the satin. My blood, from pushing too hard during a particularly brutal rehearsal two weeks before the performance. I should have replaced them. Should have broken in a new pair, given my feet time to heal.
But I was twenty-four and arrogant and sure that pain was just part of the process. That suffering made you stronger, better, more worthy of the principal dancer title I'd fought so hard to earn.
Now I know I was an idiot.
I slip the shoes on anyway, tying the ribbons with muscle memory that five years haven’t erased. The pain starts immediately—my ankle protesting, the old injury flaring to life. The doctors said I'd always have pain. That the break was too severe, too complicated, that even after three surgeries I should consider myself lucky to walk without a limp.
Lucky.
I rise to pointe in the center of my gallery, surrounded by million-dollar paintings and Fabergé eggs and the kind of beauty that exists behind glass, protected and perfect and dead.
Then I dance.
Not the choreography from that night. I can't—my body won't let me perform the movements that ended me. But I dance through the phantom pain, through the memory of falling, through the rage that lives in my chest like a second heartbeat.
I dance alone, the way I've danced every midnight for five years.
The way Anton made sure I'd dance for the rest of my life.
My ankle screams. I ignore it. My feet bleed into the shoes—fresh blood mixing with old. I ignore that too. This is my ritual, my exorcism, my way of proving that he didn't break all of me. Just the parts that mattered.
The gallery's security cameras capture everything. Tomorrow, when I review the footage like I always do, I'll see what I look like. A twenty-nine-year-old woman dancing alone in the dark, performing for an audience of expensive art and old ghosts.
I'll look broken.
Because I am.
I'm mid-pirouette when someone knocks on the front door.
