Page 76 of Beautiful Savage
I tap my phone. The music starts. Not the approved children's song. My conservatory solo, the piece that got me dismissed for being "inappropriately sensual." Stravinsky-adjacent, modern with bone in it, the kind of music that makes good Christians uncomfortable.
I dance.
My muscles burn with the sweet ache of full extension for the first time in seven years. Chest open, arms long, legs reaching. Every muscle remembers what it was built for, remembers moving like this for Gunner while he watched with hungry eyes that promised to devour me whole.
I dance the story I couldn't tell with words. The basement, the recognition, the choice to want despite the cost. Each movement claims space that Pristine never offered, each extension a rejection of the smallness I've been performing.
At minute three, Jarrod stands. He walks out without looking back, stomping across the grass. His mother follows, her hand on his arm like she's steadying him or herself. Three others leave with them, the hardware store family who'd been saving his grandmother's ring.
The rest stay frozen. Some watch with hands pressed to their mouths like they're holding in screams or prayers. Some look to Nicolas for cues on how to respond.
Papa doesn't move. His face holds the same quiet pride it held seven years ago, watching his daughter become herself despite the cost. He sees what the others can't. This isn't destruction. It's construction. Putting myself back together in front of everyone.
The dance ends. I hold the final position in the bandshell's center, sweat making my leotard cling to every curve I've been hiding.
No applause comes. The audience doesn't know what they've witnessed. A breakdown, a breakthrough, a confession, a declaration of war.
I don't bow. Bowing would ask for their approval, and I'm done asking.
I pick up my speaker and walk off the stage, past Miss Macie's unreadable face, across the grass to the truck.
Papa is waiting beside it. He presses the keys into my palm and squeezes my hand once, hard, his good hand strong as ever. "Go," he says. "The soldiers will take me home." His eyes are wet and proud at the same time. My feet carry me steady and sure, the earth solid beneath me for the first time in years.
I drive away without looking back.
The county road stretches south out of Pristine, the route I've driven since I was sixteen. Past the old swimming lake where I learned to hold my breath. Past the spot where I got my acceptance letter to the conservatory, crying with joy at a futurethat would reject me. Past every marker of the life I've been living while my real life waited in Miami's shadows.
I'm sweating in the leotard, the fabric clinging to my breasts, my thighs, outlining everything Pristine pretended not to see. The wrap skirt lies abandoned on the passenger seat like the costume it always was.
My body floats in that post-performance space dancers know. Empty and full at once, endorphins making the world blur soft at the edges. Adrenaline crashes through me in waves. I've done what I came to do. Danced the wild thing on Pristine's bandshell. Shown them exactly who they've been trying to contain. Jarrod walked out. Papa stayed. The town saw exactly who I am. Not the careful teacher but the woman who was claimed by Miami's underworld and liked it.
At mile ten, near the county line, I pull into a turnout. Kill the engine. Sit in the afternoon heat with cicadas screaming in the pines, their sound like applause from the only audience that matters.
Gunner.
29 - Gunner
The Suburban’s headlights cut through pre-dawn darkness as I drive, and I force my thoughts away from Daphne. I’ll go and claim her soon, but not yet. First, I end the man who put that bruise on her jaw.
My thumb finds the phone without looking:Phase 2 going. Move on Camille.
Logan's response lands in thirty seconds:Copy. Camille extraction team moving at 0400.
While I drive toward Hallstein, Logan and Wren will pull Camille from that house of horrors. Another woman saved while I go to destroy the man who's hurt too many.
The two-hour drive south becomes torture. Her vanilla scent clings to the truck's interior, making my chest tight. I crack the window but the humid Florida air just makes it worse, reminds me of her skin after dancing, that sheen of sweat I wanted to taste. My body screams its deficit: twenty hours awake since yesterday morning, hands trembling slightly on the wheel, vision threatening to gray at the edges. The headache behind my right eye pulses with each heartbeat.
I override it all. For her.
Hallstein's warehouse appears in the industrial corridor at five thirty-five, and all I see is Daphne tied to that chair, bruised because I let her go home. Because I thought distance would protect her. My jaw clenches until my teeth ache.
I find the cut in the fence that Peytone left for me, wide enough for a man my size. Still, I have to squeeze throughthe gap before sprinting across the cracked asphalt. The gate operator never sees death coming. My suppressed shot drops him at forty feet. I drag his body into shadows and keep moving.
The roving patrol's flashlight beam swings through darkness, advertising his position. I ghost through blind spots I mapped out last night, moving in dead zones between cameras, apart from one brief stretch I can't avoid. When my knife opens his throat at the receiving dock, arterial spray hitting concrete, I see Daphne's face in that basement.
The security room operator watches feeds showing nothing. I've been a ghost in his cameras, even with the stretch of live footage—Emilio Rosetti made sure of that, hacking into the system from New York. The side door opens without a sound. My arm slides around the guard's throat, and he's unconscious in six seconds. I lower him carefully. No need for excess. Save the rage for the one who deserves it.
Three men down in eight minutes.
