“I bet.”
The girl’s older brother had taken custody of the girl after an unfortunate accident killed their parents two years earlier. The boy was only twenty. He barely made enough money to scrape by but didn’t give up—between his college classes and his sister, Vera bet time was thin. She didn’t hold it against him when Nelli showed up missing something.
Anything could be fixed.
What was most important was that he got her there in the first damn place. Three days a week for three hours, Nelli and the other kids waiting for Vera in that studio were safe and warm and every single one of them were loved.
By her, anyway.
“All right,” she told the girl, “I’ll be out in a second. Your clothes will be waiting right here.”
“You’re the best, Vera.”
Those words, tossed over the girl’s shoulder as she raced down the changing room’s corridor, managed to make Vera smile. Even though it didn’t last long.
Vera hadn’t needed to remain tied to The Swan House after her final act on their stage left her with a shattered ankle, and a future without professional or competitive dance. In fact, her recovery—if only mentally—might have been easier had she put a decent bit of distance between herself and the company.
But even back then, she’d cared too much about the family she felt like she had made and the rest of the people within these walls. They must have cared a lot about her, too, considering the number of kids and dancers that made it a point to visit Vera every day of her recovery from the devastating injury. Each time, they asked when she was coming back.
Not if she would.
It wasn’t like she had needed the money; Vera came to Russia with a trust fund that already made her life far beyond comfortable. The Swan House had been beneficial to her bank account, too, once she debuted on their stage—and Feliks, that prick, well he certainly hadn’t offered to pay her a dime after everything had happened.
It wasn’t about the money because there wasn’t any.
Vera just couldn’t leave this place.
Even though it ruined her.
She couldn’t say goodbye.
A part of her wished she could understand the heavy sadness that left her with—a constant weight inside her chest that she couldn’t explain—but what good would understanding any of it do for her?
All these years later, Vera was still here.
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.
He certainly wasn’t instructing the ballerinas, and when the company had been at its prime doing a show a week before traveling the world for another year showing the same ballet outside of Russia, Feliks had done nothing more than soak up adoration and praise while raking in millions in the meantime.
He was the face for the public—handsome, still young at only thirty-five, and connected to all the right people in all the wrong ways.
A mouthpiece, really.
Feliks had little to no power otherwise.
Oh, Vaslav was sure the suka believed he had a higher purpose where The Swan House was concerned, even agreeing to become a part of his father’s criminal empire just to get his name on the deed.
But what good had it done?
According to the paperwork Vaslav found, that Nico told him it didn’t matter to the grander scheme, The Swan House had been bleeding money for nearly six years. The prestige it once held had slowly been dimming for years. Yes, they still produced world class ballerinas, but a lot of good it did when they were only making money headhunting them for other companies.
The personal loan Vaslav’s right-hand man offered to Feliks to save his precious house of ballet might not have technically been his money, but since he owned the soul of all vory within the confines of this godforsaken country ... anything they were owed was his.
Technicalities be damned.