Chapter 5 #3
But telling them that would require a cruelty I reserve for people who’ve earned it.
The girls laugh and giggle, clustering together to negotiate the performance order with the particular brand of competitive politeness that young Omegas employ when they’re simultaneously cooperating and jockeying for advantage.
Miss Renard watches them with an expression I recognize—the specific exhaustion of someone who cares about her students but has been ground down by the system they exist within until caring feels less like a virtue and more like an endurance sport.
Her eyes, sharp and assessing, scan the warmup area with the efficiency of a woman who has been evaluating talent for longer than most of these girls have been alive.
Her gaze lands on me.
Stays.
I’m mid-stretch when I feel it—that particular weight of attention that comes from someone who is looking at you with intent rather than passing curiosity.
My arms are extended overhead, fingertips reaching for the rigging as my obliques elongate along my left side.
I don’t pause. Don’t acknowledge the assessment.
Simply continue the motion with the fluid precision of a body that has been trained to perform under observation without letting observation affect the performance.
“Victoria?”
I pause mid-stretch.
Not dramatically—with the controlled stillness of a mechanism receiving new input.
My arms lower to my sides, and I give Miss Renard the expressionless stare that has become my default interface with the world—the blank, unreadable surface that reveals nothing, invites nothing, and communicates with the eloquence of a closed door that the person behind it has no intention of opening.
“Why don’t you kick-start this?”
The giggles from the younger Omegas are immediate.
“Oh please, she’s basically a marionette working with invisible strings.”
“Zero expression. Zero personality. It’s like watching a mannequin do a plié.”
“At least mannequins don’t show up looking like they lost a fight with a garbage disposal.”
More laughter. Light, casual, the kind that doesn’t even register as cruelty to the people producing it because they’ve never had to learn the difference between humor and harm.
I don’t say anything.
The words pass through the void the way light passes through water—distorted, diminished, arriving at whatever’s left of my emotional core with so little force that the impact barely registers.
Marionette. Zero expression. Mannequin. Descriptions I’ve heard in various configurations from various mouths for years, each one confirming that the mask I’ve constructed is working exactly as intended.
If they think I’m empty, they won’t look for what’s underneath.
If they think I’m nothing, they won’t realize I’m everything they should be afraid of.
I sigh—a small, controlled exhale that carries the weight of five years of mornings exactly like this one, different insults, same auditorium, same constellation of young faces who haven’t yet learned that the woman they’re mocking could dismantle their social hierarchies with a single phone call to the right people in the right shadows.
I work on getting up.
Slowly. The motion is deliberate, not because I’m performing difficulty but because my body genuinely requires a measured approach to vertical transition today.
The stab wound protests as my abdominal muscles engage, the numbed area flaring with a sensation that’s more pressure than pain but still demands acknowledgment.
My left leg—the one with reduced sensation from the hip to the knee, the leg that taps when I’m nervous, the leg that never fully recovered from the fall—accepts weight with a microsecond delay that I compensate for automatically, shifting my center of gravity to the right before straightening fully.
I nod.
That’s it. A single nod, economical, devoid of enthusiasm or reluctance or any other emotional modifier that might give these people something to interpret. Agreement without investment. Compliance without surrender.
Miss Renard’s expression softens by a fraction—a change so subtle that only someone who has spent years reading microexpressions as a survival skill would catch it.
“Thank you, Victoria.” The words carry genuine warmth, which is either a kindness or a manipulation, and five years in Savage Knot have made me incapable of telling the difference without extensive analysis. “What song shall I play?”
I think about it.
The consideration takes approximately three seconds, during which my brain cycles through its catalogue of music with the efficiency of a search engine querying a database.
Hundreds of songs, each one filed by tempo, emotional register, and choreographic compatibility.
Most of them are classical—the traditional ballet repertoire that I trained on as a child, before the cliff, before the fall, before the version of Victoria who danced to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev was pushed off a precipice and replaced by something harder and less inclined toward beauty for beauty’s sake.
But the song that surfaces isn’t classical.
It’s the one I heard last night.
While fighting for my life.
The memory is absurd in its specificity: me, bleeding from a fresh stab wound, pinned against a concrete wall by an Alpha twice my weight, my left hand pressing a makeshift tourniquet against my ribs while my right hand—my right hand—pulled my phone from my jacket pocket and opened the music identification app because a song was playing from a speaker in the fight ring that I needed to know the name of immediately despite the fact that I was actively trying not to die.
Priorities.
Mine are objectively unhinged.
But the song was beautiful, and beautiful things deserve to be named, even when you’re hemorrhaging.
“Durand Bernarr,” I say, my voice carrying the flat, uninflected tone that the younger Omegas interpret as emptiness but is actually just efficiency. “‘Completed.’”
Miss Renard nods with the particular approval of a teacher who recognizes an unexpected but interesting choice.
“Excellent. I’ll set that up.” She pauses, gesturing toward the wings. “Get into costume if you wish.”
I look down at myself.
The black leather bodysuit fits like a second skin—matte, flexible, cut to allow full range of motion while maintaining the dark, minimal aesthetic that constitutes my entire approach to personal presentation.
Beneath it, dark sparkling stockings catch the auditorium’s thin light and fragment it into tiny, scattered points of shimmer that move when I move, creating the impression of something alive beneath the surface. Like stars trapped under skin.
This is the costume.
This is always the costume.
Black armor and hidden light.
I don’t see the need to change. What I’m wearing is as close to a performance outfit as anything in my limited wardrobe, and the idea of walking to the changing room, peeling off layers, and reassembling myself in something different requires a level of investment in other people’s expectations that I simply cannot manufacture today.
What I do is this:
I pull my hair up.
My fingers work through the dark blue strands with practiced efficiency, gathering the length into a ponytail that sits high on my crown.
The motion lifts the hair away from my neck and shoulders, and the auditorium’s eastern light catches the pale blue highlights threaded through the darker base and sets them alight—a shimmer of color that transforms the otherwise somber palette into something arresting.
The soft blonde threads catch differently, warmer, like veins of gold running through lapis lazuli.
Under stage lights, the effect would be dramatic.
Under these thin columns of natural light, it’s merely beautiful.
Which is more than this auditorium usually gets.
I touch up the few strands that frame my face, tucking them behind my ears where they’ll stay until the movement of the dance displaces them. Then I walk to my bag by the barre and extract the box.
The ballet shoes.
Blush pink velvet. Parisian craftsmanship.
Ribbons that cascade like liquid silk. The shoes that Hawthorne Kennedy somehow acquired from an atelier on the Rue de Rivoli without leaving Savage Knot’s territory, through means I haven’t fully deciphered and suspect I never will because the man guards his methods the way I guard my emotions—thoroughly, aggressively, and with an unwillingness to explain that borders on pathological.
I sit on the edge of the stage and slide them on.
The fit is exact. Not approximate—exact.
The box cups my toes with the specific contour of a shoe made from measurements rather than standard sizing, the shank supporting my arch at precisely the angle that distributes weight evenly across the metatarsal heads.
The velvet exterior is warm against my skin, and the interior—lined with something soft and breathable that I’ll need to examine more closely later—conforms to the unique geography of my feet as though it was waiting for them.
I tie the ribbons.
Slowly. With the reverence the craftsmanship deserves.
Each ribbon wraps around my ankle in the traditional pattern—over the arch, around the back, crossing at the front, secured with a knot that is tucked beneath the inner wrap where it won’t shift during movement.
The satin is cool against my skin, the edges smooth, the tension perfect.
I admire them quietly.
Not with the wide-eyed wonder of this morning—the involuntary brightening, the trembling hands, the eye contact with Hawk that I couldn’t break.
This is the private version. The version that happens when no one is looking and I can let the appreciation settle into my chest without armoring it against vulnerability.
The shoes are beautiful. They are the most beautiful things I own.
And they were given to me by a man who noticed I needed them before I found the words to say so.