Page 6 of The Beast of Moscow

She figured ... it must be where she wanted to be. If not, she certainly hoped it was where she should be.

*

“Let’s wrap it up, call that a day,” Vera told the class of thirty kids. Only a handful were boys with the larger majority being girls. Instantly, the second she told the group that the class was over, a chorus of voices chased her to the stereo where she turned it off and disconnected it from the Bluetooth on her phone.

“Aww, can we try that again?” asked Sonya, the oldest of the group at twelve. The scholarships offered by The Swan House looked fondly upon the kids who trained in their free program if the talent and effort was there. Spots were extremely limited, though, but Sonya was one of those kids she knew the instructors were watching. “That last set of steps—can I run through it again?”

“You did it perfectly,” she told the girl.

“Yeah, but—”

“Vera, will you dance for us before we go?” piqued Nelli, her voice rising above the other kids who all wanted to be heard as parents started to come to the doorway of the studio, waving them back to leave.

The moment the girl voiced the idea, every other kid who didn’t want to finish up with the class decided to add their agreement with Nelli’s choice.

“I don’t know,” Vera said.

“Please?”

“I only have my sneakers.”

“So?”

Nelli even put her hands on her hips when she added for the other kids, “You let me practice in sneakers.”

“Once,” she returned fast, laughing.

“Please, Vera?”

How could she say no to that?

She danced so infrequently—steady practice only led to pain, and likely, further reinjuring her ankle. Even teaching, she wore sneakers because she didn’t have the support she needed in pointe shoes. Not even satin slippers with a grip on the bottom would do the job.

Vera tried everything, but the reality was that she danced for love, now. Only occasionally, never with much seriousness involved, and always because she wanted to.

Nothing else was possible.

“Is she going to dance?” Vera heard a parent ask from somewhere behind her shoulder.

“I think so,” another kid called back.

Vera only sighed.

Especially when the kids asked again, “Please, Vera?”

Honestly—who would say no?

3.

The last thing a man in Moscow wanted to find in his office at dinner time hours was Vaslav Pashkov. A man like him should be anywhere else at this time of day—wining and dining a woman, maybe, or handling business to rake in another few hundred million to pad his many bank accounts.

A person certainly wouldn’t want to find the Russian crime boss already sitting behind their desk the second they walked into the room, but that was exactly what greeted Feliks in his office at The Swan House. Except the man was too busy arguing with the female close at his back to notice the bigger threat waiting for him.

The woman—if she was even that, because Vaslav thought she couldn’t be older than eighteen—was erratic, and her waving arms only added to the venom in her Russian that she spewed at the man.

“You promised me—you said it was mine!”

Her black leggings and backless leotard gave away that she was a dancer, but the fact she still had her pointe shoes on made Vaslav think she was probably higher in the company. Especially if she had a direct line to Feliks who did nothing more for the ballet house than handle money and sign paperwork.