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I feel free.
I lose myself in the performance, closing my eyes briefly as I spin and turn and leap off the floor. I remember how it feels, a hundred happy memories flashing through my mind as I go far away from this house, this place.
I remember the first performance I watched with my mother, the way I craved to be one of the dancers on the stage, the yearning I felt for what I knew in that instant, young as I was, was what I was meant to be. I remember the first class I ever took, the way it felt to learn to dance, like the piece of a puzzle clicking into place.
There was so much, between then and now. So many long nights, so much practice, teaching my body to bend and give in ways that others couldn’t, enduring demanding teachers and jealous students, learning to keep my own counsel and trust no one too closely, a lesson I’d learned all my life anyway, growing up in the family I did. Fearing the moment it would be taken away from me, all the way up until the moment that I’d stood my ground and fought my father for the future I wanted. My entire life has been this, until it wasn’t any longer, and dancing–even here, like this–feels like coming home to myself.
I don’t want it to end. I have no idea what comes after this, and I don’t want to think about it. There was always an inevitable end. I’d thought I might have escaped it, when my father died. I’d thought I might flee, find a new place to dance, another way to feed the love of it, another way to be who I was. Who Iam.
But it was inescapable. Mikhail has shown me that. And I can’t help but feel, with a heavily sinking heart that threatens to cement my feet to the ground, that this will be the last time I dance.
That I will never feel this again.
The only satisfaction I have, as the music comes to a close, is the stunned look on his face as he stands watching me, as if what he just watched was something he’s never seen before, and believes he never will again.
I stayen pointeas I turn towards him, and as I keep my gaze fixed on his, slowly, I bend my knees into a sarcastic curtsy, never breaking eye contact.
“Was that worth the price of admission?”
Mikhail moves then. He strides towards me, that loose, easy stride that I remember from the club, that tells me he’s pleased. There’s a gleam in his eyes that frightens me, and I freeze in place as he comes closer, feeling like a deer caught in headlights.
“You’re everything I hoped for and more,” he murmurs as he comes up close to me, his body nearly brushing mine, his lips a breath away. His hand reaches behind my head, closing around the bun, tugging my head back a little. “And I have what I want, now.”
“What’s that?” I breathe the words, feeling my heart hammer in my chest, my pulse rising in my throat as my stomach twists. I feel the room closing in around me, making me feel sick with a fear that I don’t want him to see.
“You are,” he breathes, his eyes wide with something almost approaching awe, “undeniably Natalia Obelensky.” His hand tightens in my hair, his gaze narrowing, that wicked gleam still in his eyes. “Tell me again,” he dares, a cruel smirk at the corners of his mouth. “Tell me that you aren’t her.”
Something rises up inside of me, a bitter, resentful urge to refuse to give him what he wants one final time. I know how he hates being lied to. I know how angry it will make him. And yet, I want to slice him open and rub salt in the wound, to torment him the way he’s tormented me, to refuse him one last time.
What will be the point, after whatever comes next?
“I told you,” I whisper, my eyes fixed on his with a gleam of their own, as I fight back one final time. “My name is Ekaterina.”
Mikhail’s handsome face twists into something ugly and furious, his hand wrenching my hair out of the bun that I’d tied it up in, letting it spill down my back. He twists it around his fist, so close to the scalp that I cry out in pain, and he starts to drag me out of the room.
My first instinct is to fight. How could it not be? I have no idea where he’s taking me, what he’s planned, and I know he’s angry. My eyes well with tears at the burning in my scalp, as I start to dig in my heels, try to wrench away from him–and then I stop.
What reason do I have to fight?
My last hope is that seeing me dance was enough to deepen his obsession with me to the point that he won’t be able to damage me, hurt me irreparably, or kill me. That it will continue to string him along until I can think of some plan for escape, some way to get free of all of this. But I don’t think it will stop whatever he has planned for me now.
I let him take me wherever it is that he plans to, trying to keep up to lessen the pain in my scalp, but it’s difficult. I can’t walk normally in pointe shoes, and they slip and slide over the floor as I scrabble for purchase.
“Mikhail!” I gasp out, but he ignores me.
He shoves open a door, and I see that he’s dragging me into one of the bathrooms. I grab for the sink as he pulls me inside, trying to catch a moment’s respite, but he hauls me all the way up to the tub, picking me up easily and depositing me inside.
Fear claws at my gut. “What are you doing?” I gasp, trying to catch my breath. I have a sudden vision of him filling the tub and drowning me, a fear that I’d miscalculated, that that one last defiance was one too many. That me dancing was the last thing he wanted before he put an end to me.
Somehow, the idea that I’ll never know what spurred his obsession, what I did to make him want to kill me, feels like one of the worst parts of all of this. Dying is bad enough, but dying without knowing why feels like adding insult to injury.
If he’d only taken me from the club, if he hadn’t known my real identity and been so obsessed with it, I might have thought there really was no reason. That he was just someone who’d seen a dancer and become obsessed with her, to the point of murder. He wouldn’t have been the first man to do so.
But there has to be a reason why he wantedNatalia. Why his obsession was pinpointed on me specifically, and my family.
Now I might never know why.
“Mikhail!” I hate the pleading note in my voice, but I say it anyway, trying to cut through the fog of his anger to get him to hear me, to tell me what’s happening.
