“That’s the thing.” She drops the gloss back into her purse, zipping it with finality. “No matter how you feel, no matter what’s going on behind the walls of your house, that’s what it represents to everyone else.” She meets my eyes in the mirror, steady. “I recommend you embrace it.”
I nod.
She turns, pleated skirt swinging high across the backs of herthighs, short enough to almost reveal the curve of her butt. “Oh, I almost forgot.” Her smile softens, genuine this time. “Your wedding dress really was gorgeous.”
The compliment startles me. “Thank you.”
She pauses at the door, fingers on the push-bar, and gives me a look that isn’t quite pity. “It’ll get easier, Arianette. I promise.”
The door swings shut. The restroom falls quiet except for that dripping faucet and the low hum of the vents overhead.
The ball of dread in my stomach hasn’t shrunk, but for the first time since the fire, it feels… looser. Like maybe, just maybe, there’s room to breathe inside the collar after all.
I hope she’s right.
The studio smells exactlythe way it always has: rosin, sweat, and the faint ghost of cedar from the barre. The mirrors are fogged at the edges from twenty bodies breathing hard. Madame Duval claps once, loud as a gunshot, and we fall into fifth.
I’m in the front line today, closest to the piano, near the wall of seats that rises like dark bleachers.
He’s there.
Hunter.
Damon isn’t with him; he left me with Hunter at the fountain and rushed off to his next class. My other Baron has his hood up, arms folded on the railing, chin resting on his forearm. He watches closely, like I’m something he’s studying in one of his books. Like I belong to him. Like everytenduand every breath is a private performance he paid for in blood and vows.
Madame doesn’t acknowledge him; none of the girls do, although it’s obvious they sense him. They’ve learned not to look too long at the men who wait for us–the royal house girls. This may be what Story meant about reputation and power.
“New phrase,” Madame says in her smoke-and-bourbon voice. “Glissade, jeté entrelacé, double tour en l’air, land in his arms, but todayno partner. You throw yourselves. You catch yourselves. Show me you don’t need anyone.”
She wants defiance. She always wants defiance.
The pianist attacks the keys. I attack the floor.
Dance has lived in my bones since I was small enough to stand on a coffee table in lace-trimmed socks while Uncle Owen’s friends drank cognac and applauded like I was a prima ballerina instead of a bruised little girl. Back then, the music was the only thing allowed to touch me without asking.
Today, everything touches.
The new piercing is swollen and hot, rubbing raw with every landing, everycambré, every time my legs open into second for a soaringjeté. I’m slick before we’re ten minutes in, the seam of my leotard soaked, the metal kissing nerves that have no business being this awake in public. My nipples are just as bad; the healed bars through them feel heavier than usual, aching against the stretchy fabric every time my chest lifts on an inhale.
Damon knew what he was doing. I think about him with every jolt in my nerves.
I throw the double tour and spot Hunter in the mirror instead of the wall. His eyes don’t blink. He’s perfectly still, predator-quiet, and the knowledge that he can see the tremor in my thighs, the flush riding high on my chest, makes the next eightfouettésvicious.
I finish the phrase shaking, sweat cooling too fast in the draft from the vents. After Christy rolls her ankle, Madame claps us out early, and the room empties in a rustle of towels and whispered gossip.
I can’t follow them to the dressing room. I take a deep breath and go the other direction, ducking behind the curtain. I make it three steps into the backstage corridor before I hear footsteps behind me.
Hunter steps through and pulls the door shut behind him, cutting the light to a thin red line from the EXIT sign. The corridor shrinks to nothing but cinderblock, dust, and the low thrum of the building’s old pipes.
He doesn’t speak at first. He just looks at me: chest heaving, lipsswollen from my own teeth, leotard clinging wetly to every place it shouldn’t. My thighs are trembling so hard the seams of my tights whisper.
“You’re shaking,” he says, voice so low that I can’t tell if he’s curious or confused. “What’s wrong?”
I swallow. “The piercing. It’s… agitating.”
He takes one step closer, then another, until I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes. “It’s too fresh.”
To touch. To get relief. “I know.”
