Page 70 of The Last Dance

I slumped back against Vadim’s chest, and only then realized how hard I’d been holding my own hands. “It’s over,” I said, almost to myself. “It’s really over.”

“It is.”

The study held the quiet, the kind of silence you get after a thunderclap, not relief but the knowledge that you survived and the world had survived with you.

I didn’t want to move, but I forced myself to sit up, to shift in his lap so I could see his face. I felt the new bruise, hidden under the denim at my hip, and almost laughed at how little it mattered now.

I said, “If I’m starting spring term, I need two bodyguards. Trained, not just bouncers. Like Yuri, but not actually Yuri, because that would make me look like an asshole. I need a tracker, something I can wear or swallow. Or both. I need to learn to fight. Like really fight, not just the bullshit street stuff you taught me the first week. I want pepper spray, and I want a switchblade. Two, if you think I’ll lose the first one.”

Vadim’s hand found my hair, fisted it, turned my face to his, and he kissed me hard enough to stop the sentence cold. When he let go, he was smiling for real—none of the controlled, sociopath curve he used for meetings, but the kind that put a dimple under one eye and made the skin at the corner of his mouth pull tight.

He said, “It will be done.”

Yuri, who had been standing perfectly still by the door, gave a single nod and left, closing the study door behind him with a click so quiet it could have been a breath.

I didn’t get up from Vadim’s lap. I just sat there, for once letting myself have the weight of him, the certainty of his hand on my leg, the knowledge that, for now, no one was coming through the door and no one was going to drag me out by the throat.

On the television, the anchor repeated the phrase: “—predator, premeditated, years of planning—” and I thought about how you could be so many things to so many people at once, and how none of them would matter as much as being the person who got to decide the ending.

I thought about the room in the basement. I thought about the boy in the story, the one who never had to exist, because someone had thought far enough ahead to build an ending no one would ever see coming.

Vadim’s arm tightened around my waist. He said, low: “You are not to be taken again. Not ever.”

I believed him.

I let my head fall back, and let myself rest.

Just for a little while.

* * * *

The house had more rooms than you could ever justify, but only one had a brass pole bolted into the ceiling. It was the “dance studio,” which meant the connecting lounge off the master bedroom where Vadim had cleared out every stick of furniture and installed a surround-sound system that cost more than my last three years of rent combined.

He called it the “gym annex” when anyone else was in the house, but we both knew what it was for.

I spent fifteen minutes picking an outfit. Which was a lie—I’d bought the thing specifically for this night, and had been thinking about it since the day it arrived: mesh tank, white and see-through, and a pair of red lamé boy shorts with an elastic band that glittered under the fake candlelight. No shoes. Just the way he liked it.

I put in the plug first. Small, acrylic, slicked and comfortable. I’d gotten used to the weight of it, the way it made my stride change, the way it kept my body half-primed for what was going to happen.

I wore a slick of coconut oil along the insides of my thighs and ran the pad of my thumb along the edge of the mesh until the edge frayed, which is how I kept my hands from shaking.

I practiced, once, in the full-length mirror. The light caught the curve of my back and the point of my hip, both still dusted with traces of bruising, but the rest of me looked sharp. The color was coming back. The eyes were alive.

I smiled at my own reflection and told it, “Don’t fuck it up.”

Then I waited.

The moment I heard the bedroom door open—deliberate, not the soft hush of a man sneaking in, but the full, unapologetic slam of Vadim coming home—I started the music. It was something slow and predatory, all bass and muscle, the kind of song that didn’t have to be loud because the low end did all the work for it.

He appeared in the doorway a breath later, black suit still crisp, tie loose around the neck, and stopped dead.

I gave him a second to look.

He didn’t say my name. He didn’t say anything at all.

The first pass around the pole was just to remind him what it was like. At Velvet, I played to the whole room, modulated everything for maximum crowd engagement.

Here, the crowd was one person, and he didn’t want modulation; he wanted the whole thing, undiluted. I arched into the pole, wrapped a leg around, spun slow, just to show the lines, then walked back, hips low, back straight, every inch of me balanced on the axis of his gaze.