Savage Vandal (82 Street Vandals #1) - Heather Long Page 0,8
name at the office. You’ll have a good table, near the front. The food isn’t half bad, and I owe you for the burger.”
Then I pivoted on my bad heel and nearly ruined the whole thing by stumbling. Only discipline kept me on my feet and marching up the stairs toward the doors. Marta clucked at me, but I fucking ignored her. Particularly because there was a tech with stormy gray eyes standing not two feet from the doors out front, smoking. Only he wasn’t looking at me but glaring down at Kestrel.
I spared one look over my shoulder. Kestrel wore an unreadable expression, but he didn’t move from his spot until I was inside the doors, just like he promised. I swore he glanced at me and gave me a little salute, but maybe it was wishful thinking.
“Stupid girl, what did you do to your face?” Marta demanded, and I rolled my eyes and stalked away from her. I’d need to ice my ankle, which meant I was going to have to diva my way out of the warmups with Eric.
From the walk on air to the dance of the statue, Eric and I executed our steps with flawless precision. The audience seemed mesmerized by the passion of our performance. Loathing and violence were very passionate emotions, I supposed. We rotated the numbers we performed with each tour stop. There were more than a dozen that Eric and I could do together. But that was only the first half of the show.
So whether I was the statue in the park come to life as a gift from the gods, as I’d been tonight, or the girl dancing aloft carried on the wings of her lover’s admiration—excuse me while I gag—we delivered what the people who paid so much longed to see. I’d resisted throughout the first act and after each costume change from looking to see if Kestrel had accepted my invitation.
But at the midpoint, with the chorus on the stage delivering a rousing performance designed to titillate and give the audience time to finish their dinners and order their desserts before the second act started, I had time. The second act that was wholly mine. I’d fought for that when the tour began. I didn’t want Eric in the silks with me.
If I had to perform with him on the stage, fine. I’d let him throw me around, dig his fingers in, crack my bones. I would trust him to catch me if I had to, flinging my body without a care, because whether I hit the floor or landed in his arms, the hurt would be the same.
But the air? That was mine.
Eric had been furious. But the show’s backers had agreed to my request, because it also extended the show for me to do the full act by myself and I made them a lot of money. Power, as my mother often reminded me, should be wielded like a scalpel. Cut where it did the most good.
If I fell on the stage, I’d survive it.
If Eric knocked me from the air, I might not.
I’d take the power where I could.
The luck of tonight’s dance card had me performing alone for the last five minutes, a solo en pointe as I leapt from ‘flower’ to ‘flower,’ a fairy whose wings had been clipped. I could let go when it was only me and the music. The world, its people, and my problems melted away, and there was only a state of being. Ecstasy maybe. Or some kind of trancelike state.
I didn’t have a name for it, but this was where my soul lived. The one time my body, my mind, and my soul could exist in absolute harmony. When I folded down into the last flower and the petals closed over me, a stunned kind of silence filled the whole room, even as the music faded away.
I counted the seconds of silence.
At five, the audience erupted into spontaneous applause, whistles, and calls.
Five seconds of awe.
Five seconds where they were so utterly linked to me, the emotion overwhelmed them. The tears in my eyes burned a little as the stage swallowed the flowers and the petals opened so I could extricate myself.
The stagehand was right there, a hand out to me, though I’d only taken it a couple of times. I did tonight because my ankle throbbed in absolute fury, but for those few minutes on stage, I had even managed to forget the pain.