Prologue—Broken Steps
DYLAN LI sat on the worn and warped wooden floor in the fifth-story dance studio a little off the Loop in downtown Chicago. He hugged one knee to his chest and leaned against the mirrored wall behind him, watching Tabitha Marie Mikkelnokov dance the final scene of a student-written, student-produced contemporary version of Cinderella that she had choreographed.
She was sucking big balls at it too.
Normally Tabby was like a gymnast’s ribbon—her body moved through the air like silk. She was a tad too tall to make it in the big ballets, but the Aether Conservatory, the school Tabitha’s grandfather had put together with grit and most of his savings, had made it policy to take the dancers who worked hard, the ones who loved dance with all their soul, and to make allowances for things like standard height and even—on the odd occasion—ability. One of the best teachers at the Conservatory, Rudy, was a young man who would only ever perform with their adult education classes because his body was simply not that of a dancer, with tight sinews and slight congenital deformities that wouldn’t allow him the fluidity of movement a dancer needed.
Artur Mikkelnokov kept Rudy there because his heart was consumed with the dance, and he passed this passion on to his young students. They learned to love the joy and pain of it because Rudy did.
Tabby didn’t have such problems. Even with those extra inches, she could have performed in some of the top ballet troupes of the country, although she would not have gotten the lead because her partner would have needed to be nearly six foot three to stand even with her when she was en pointe. Aether was one of the first studios in the area to start considering how a dancer looked performing, how they made the audience feel, instead of how the dancer conformed to an almost impossible ideal of beauty.
Dylan—who stood shorter than her at five feet, seven inches tall—loved being partnered with her and loved watching her dance.
Except today, when an epileptic donkey would have been more graceful on the floor.
Dylan couldn’t take it anymore. “The actual fuck, Tabby,” he burst out in the middle of a plaintive violin solo.
Tabby whirled, coming down from a clumsy en pointe and almost stumbling to her knees. “Goddammit, Dylan!” she snarled. “I was trying to concentrate!”
Dylan leaned over to hit Pause on the sound system so the strains of plaintive violins stopped bouncing around Aether’s biggest practice room. “You were failing! The fuck is wrong with you? I’ve seen my housemates’ cats dance better!”
Tabby glared at him and then dropped her eyes. Dispiritedly, she padded across the platform to fall into a crisscross-applesauce sit-down at Dylan’s side.
“Sorry,” she said miserably, and then like she knew him—they’d been paired together since they were twelve years old—she leaned her head against his shoulder.
He looked at the top of her head, baffled. Her hair, toffee brown with tiny crinkles that were a result of her mother’s Russian ancestry and her father’s African-American family, sprang up from the usually merciless bun she pulled it back into and tickled his cheek.
“We’re doing this now?” he asked. Usually he’d be acerbic or teasing or even somewhat of an asshole, but this was Tabitha, and if he’d ever had a sister, he wouldn’t love his sister this much because she’d probably be too much like him. But Tabitha was earthy and honest, and she ignored seven-eighths of what came out of Dylan’s mouth and listened, instead, to the things he actually did.
He gave her tiny earrings every birthday—real gold or silver, real semiprecious stones—and she wore many of them in her ears every day. He never told her that he often stole them from the jewelry boxes of the girls who’d made fun of her in high school. His baby-thief training years, as it were. He would enjoy that little bit of irony all by himself.
“Yes,” she said, her voice clogged from tears she was obviously trying not to shed. “You are my emotional support animal, whether you want to be or not.”
He sighed and looped an arm around her shoulders. “Fine. Under duress.” He gave her a little squeeze, and she let out a laugh.
“Good emotional support animal,” she praised, and he dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” he asked softly.
“I can’t,” she said, and her voice broke.
He rocked her for a few moments and then asked, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No!” She laughed through her tears, which looked really hideous, in fact, but he preferred it to the hopeless sobbing. “You ass, I am not pregnant! Jesus. Why would you ask that?”
“Because I want to keep dancing with you,” he told her, because, duh! “And I was sort of hoping you weren’t knocked up. You can call me your emotional support animal all you want, but we both know I’m a selfish bitch, so you can’t be all that surprised.”
She sputtered, wiping her face on the loose T-shirt that hung over her leotard. “Dear God, Dylan Li. The things that come out of your mouth. Don’t!” She turned to him with horrified eyes; he’d been known to blurt out uncomfortable things about his sex life at the merest provocation. “Don’t even go there,” she told him sternly. “If I have to hear about some guy’s come that tasted like cinnamon gum, I will vomit. I don’t have to be pregnant to have standards.”
Dylan chuckled appreciatively, although, point of fact, there hadn’t been a guy or a hookup or whatever for a couple of months now. He refused to dwell on why that was because then he might have to put a name to….
He wasn’t going to do it.
“Well, fine,” he told Tabby, suddenly grateful she had problems for purely selfish reasons. “I won’t tell you about cinnamon come, but you will tell me why you’re dancing like shit. We go live with this show in three weeks, babycakes. You can’t afford to suck donkey balls now!”
She let out a shaky breath. “Except it might not,” she whispered, and Dylan’s heart froze.
“What?”
“Oh, Dylan. It’s awful. My grandfather might lose everything. His lease on the studio, his performance contracts, everything. It’s not fair! And there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing!”
Dylan took a few deep breaths and tried to center himself. “Aether Conservatory?” he asked, just to make sure. His parents traveled the globe, mostly looking after their financial interests in Hong Kong. Dylan had been left alone with nannies and housekeepers at a very young age. He tended to be destructive when bored or lonely, and only two things had kept him from flaming out in a big ball of drugs and id.
His best friend, Josh Salinger, was one of them, and dance—specifically dancing at Aether Conservatory—was the other.
“You will explain that,” he said to Tabitha, needing to hear the details.
The more she spilled, the longer she spoke, the more he realized that maybe the gods of chaos really were looking out for him.
Because Dylan Li, and his friendship with Josh Salinger, might be the only things to save the dance company that had saved his life.
Predatory Animal