The fact that I’m still standing is nothing short of miraculous.
Stella and Murphy stayed in close contact during my treatment. He insisted that they discharge me the moment I appeared even slightly stable because neither of us were safe there for long. When I found out he was arranging to take me to one of his factories, I was horrified. I thought I was about to enter a whole new nightmare, to become one of their human assets, to be sold as a slave to one of their clients.
But when we arrived in Oslo, Norway, the factory was inexplicably empty. Murphy had ordered it to be cleared out by his men in Oslo before we landed. I don’t even know how they accomplished such a thing. Oslo wasn’t their largest factory, but it was big enough to house dozens of girls in the basement.
It was horrifying to see the rows of cages in the wide-open rectangular space of the warehouse basement.
It was a prison.
The empty cages with metal bars, their doors now left open, reminded me of the box I lived in at Vigo’s home. My cage held me in with plexiglass, but the women who’d been kept here were trapped by iron bars. I panicked when I saw them with Stella and Kostya, but Stella was surprisingly kind and gentle with me.
She made a promise to me that I didn’t ask for and that I didn’t believe she had any way of keeping. She promised she could end the O’Sheas’ alliance with the four families. She promised that Murphy was a better man than even he knew. She told me that she intended to escape from him before, but seeing the realities of their sick work firsthand fueled her determination to change him.
It almost made me laugh when she said that, which was much needed at the time. I told her that men don’t change and she either had to love him as a monster or leave him.
She wasn’t convinced.
After a short visit from Murphy a week or so after that, Kostya and I were given burner cell phones, like the ones Kostya had given to me and Ezra when we were separated by Vigo and Nikolai. There were two contacts programmed in—one was Murphy and the other was one of his Oslo employees. That Oslo employee was ordered to ensure that Kostya and I didn’t leave the city. But he was also to ensure that we had what we needed to survive comfortably in this warehouse until Murphy could figure a way around letting us go back to normal life.
Whatever normal is.
The first thing I asked Murphy’s watchdog for was a laptop with internet access and new pointe shoes. Everything I asked for went through Murphy for approval. He approved the laptop, but he wouldn’t allow internet access in the warehouse—he was afraid he could be tracked there. But there was a little coffee shop I was allowed to go to once a week with Kostya and the Oslo employee as our escort.
The first time I got on the internet, I did a Google search for Ezra Bell. I didn’t know where he was, where my baby was, or whether they were okay. The first article that came up in the search was from over two years ago. It was a report that he was a dancer gone missing from a festival in Kyiv. I found his Instagram account, but nothing had been posted to it or updated since before he went missing.
I quickly realized that if he’s alive and out there somewhere, he’d be in hiding, too. He couldn’t have an online presence. The four families would find him and come after him, then they would kill him and take my son.
My heart split in two that day when I realized I had no way to find him. I was held hostage here in Oslo just as I was as a Mikhailov or Vittori slave. But what could I do? What choice did I have? I wouldn’t give up on finding him. I just knew it in my gut that he was alive, out there in the world somewhere.
And that hope he gave me—hope that I used to think was terribly naïve—was burning bright inside me. I was incapable of freezing myself in an icy exterior of protection because Ezra’s eternal sunshine still kept me warm.
So, I’d made Murphy a promise. I would stay there at the warehouse in Oslo. I wouldn’t put up a fuss. I’d remain in hiding and I wouldn’t try to run. I’d do all that if he promised me he would help me find Ezra. Murphy quickly realized that finding Ezra and giving me over to him would relinquish him of his and his wife’s responsibility in this mess. If he gave me to Ezra, it would look as though we’d done just what Murphy had told the board had happened—that we had escaped on our own.
He agreed to search for Ezra and told me he would let me go with him, so long as I accepted that he couldn’t keep me safe from the wrath of the four families if they found out we were alive and tracked us down.
I would happily choose to be on the run forever so long as I was running with Ezra. And so, I don’t have much to complain about at the moment because I’m alive and there’s hope.
Though I’m still captive in Oslo, I have Kostya to keep me company. I have an entire warehouse to myself. I’ve managed to make a nice little temporary home here. But the best part is that I have the space to dance—I was finally healthy enough to get back to it after a few months and it’s how I spend most of my days.
I finish slipping on my broken-in, scuffed-up pointe shoes, wrapping and tying the ribbon securely around my ankle. I rise from the concrete floor of the main level of the warehouse and tug down a bit on my cotton shorts to adjust them.
It’s late afternoon and the sun shines in from the row of square windows at the top of the high wall, near the ceiling. There are no ground-level windows, only the ones high up above, out of reach. The windows slice the orange sun glow so that it casts down across the concrete floor in stripes of alternating sunlight and gray stone.
I pull my long, dark hair up and away from the off-shoulder gray sweatshirt I have on, twisting and tying it into a messy bun on the top of my head. I place my wireless earbuds in my ears and bend down to my laptop on the floor, tapping play on the music I selected and turning the volume all the way up.
I only have one full-length mirror in the warehouse, which is to say that I don’t have any mirrors to watch myself dance. But it doesn’t matter to me now the way it used to. I don’t care so much now about my movements being perfect and precise. I only want to dance what I feel, like Ezra taught me. I rise to my toes and bring my arms up high above my head, then bring them down the sides of my body, lowering them slowly as my feet begin to move.
I spin on the top of my toes in a pirouette, twirling around over and over before stepping out of the turn gracefully. I listen to the mood of the music and I follow it. The way I dance now is a fusion of ballet and contemporary style, the best of my world and the best of Ezra’s. As I move, I find myself drifting, floating through movement with my eyes closed. Gradually, my movement morphs into the routine, our routine—the performance Ezra and I danced for Nikolai on stage in Nobility Hall.
As I move, I mark the leaps and lifts that required his hands on me. He would move me with such strength and effortless grace—each lift and spin that he would have been part of forces a bubble of sadness to rise in my chest. With the somber music playing through my earbuds, tears begin to fall.