Page 62 of The Last Dance

I thought about Parsons. I tried to imagine his face when he walked through that door and saw the camera lens covered, the loveseat out of place, the bed made with the corners tucked. I wondered if he would be angry. I wondered if he would try to hurt me, or if that was even the point.

I thought about Sasha, and for a second, the anger came back—white hot, a line of fire from collarbone to jaw. I thought about what she had said, what she had taken, and what I would do if she walked in with him. Would I scream? Would I beg?

No. I would not.

I grabbed a book off the shelf, a thick hardcover with a red dust jacket, and sat on the rug. I opened to a random page. The words swam at first, but I forced myself to read them. Every word was a bullet point, another notch on the clock, another tiny declaration of intent: I am not broken. I am not a pet. I am not what you want me to be.

I flipped the page. I kept flipping.

In the silence, I heard a sound, faint but distinct, from above: the creak of a floorboard, the scrape of a shoe, the hush of voices in a corridor. I did not look up. I did not move. I just counted the seconds, and waited for the next part to begin.

When the door finally opened, I was ready. It opened with a hiss of negative pressure, and for one wild second I was sure Vadim himself would step through, gun in hand, face set to “you have disappointed me, but I will still die for you.”

Instead, it was her.

Sasha. In a sheath dress so black it absorbed the overhead fluorescence, heels sharp enough to make a weapon of the floors, pearls at her throat like a string of perfect lies.

Behind her, Parsons.

Seeing her first—before the real threat—was a move straight out of the psychological warfare playbook.

I didn’t let them catch me off-guard. I scrambled backward to the headboard, bracing my shoulders hard enough to bruise, knees up, hands splayed in front of me as if ready to catch a punch or a bullet. My body was in full lockdown. Only my mouth moved.

Sasha took in the scene—the covered cameras, the re-positioned loveseat, me hunkered down with a hardcover for a shield—and did not so much as blink.

She radiated the blank, controlled cold of a woman who had spent all night rehearsing this confrontation and now found the actual performance beneath her.

She glanced at Parsons, then back at me, with the bored half-smile of an executioner reading from a pre-approved script. “Well,” she said, voice as clean as the vodka in Vadim’s office, “is this how you imagined your rescue?”

I shrugged, one shoulder. “Honestly, it’s better than some of the fanfiction I’ve read.”

She ignored it, eyes landing on the ankle cuff, then drifting up to my face. “You could have had everything, you know. He would have made you rich, let you live in his house, treated you like royalty. He would have given you a tidy sum of money and sent you on your way when he was done with you.” She looked at me, then at the chain. “But you always had to be the exception. The special case. You couldn’t just keep your mouth shut and know your place.”

Parsons was silent, standing just inside the threshold. His hands were empty, but his posture was that of a man who didn’t need a weapon. His pale blue eyes crawled over my skin, cataloguing. Measuring.

I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t about me,” I said. “You didn’t do this for Vadim. You did it for you. For the drama. For the little-girl fantasy of standing in a tower while two men kill each other over the right to be your jailer.” I kept my voice light, knowing it would drive her wild. “How’s that working out?”

She didn’t answer right away. When she did, her words were honeyed over glass. “It’s always the mouth with you. I do wonder, sometimes, what you’d be like with it shut. But I suppose we’ll never know, will we?”

I shrugged again, like I’d never heard the line before. “Vadim always liked it,” I said. “He said it kept things interesting.”

Her mouth twisted, only slightly. “Do you think he’ll still want you, after this?” Her gaze flicked to Parsons, who still had not moved. “Do you really think he’ll take you back?”

This is the move. This is the moment she wants: the chink, the break, the sign that I would rather die here than be discarded. She wanted me to believe that whatever happened next, I would emerge less.

I held her gaze. “He doesn’t have a choice,” I said. “It’s who he is. Even if he didn’t want me, he’d come just to make you bleed.”

She smiled, a slow curl, and shook her head. “So much confidence. So little to show for it.” She looked at Parsons again, like he was a butler here to serve. “Take as much time as you want. I’ll be upstairs. If you need anything, scream. The room is soundproof, but it’s fun to pretend.”

She turned, sauntered out, and let the door close behind her with a click softer than a cat’s footfall. The sound of the lock sliding home was louder, and infinitely more final.

Now it was just us.

I took stock: the chain, the bed, the distance between me and him. The hardcover book in my hands, the only weapon available, unless I could rip a piece of metal off the frame or get a finger under the fridge cord and improvise a garrote. There were two seconds before he moved, and I made every microsecond count.

Parsons did not lunge, did not raise his voice, did not announce himself like a monster in a movie. He simply closed the gap in four steady steps, all the while speaking in the soft, reasonable tone that had given me nightmares since my first Tuesday night at Velvet.

“You shouldn’t let her get to you,” he said, almost apologetic. “She’s suffered a great deal. Loss does that to a person. She needs someone to blame.”