Page 78 of Reverence

Juliette smiled and remained silent. Some things she did learn from the best. Katarina and her silences disarmed better than any blow ever could. A second. Two. In her mind, Juliette spun into the first fouetté. She could do it with her eyes closed. In her sleep. Three seconds. She missed ballet so much. She missed her life. Her fingers tightened on the dark handle till they went white.

Foltin screeched and shook visibly, his eyes never leaving Juliette’s hand. She took another step. Would it really be this easy? Had it been this easy all along? The taste of regret was bittersweet. This man had been nothing but a scheming coward.

“What do you want? What do you want from me? You… you…” He trailed off, his voice rising to a high pitch of impending hysteria before trailing off, perhaps recognizing how unhinged he sounded. For a moment his loud, hiccupping breathing was the only sound in the elevator. Not even background classical music interrupted the wheezing inhalations. He sucked air greedily, as if Juliette was about to take it all away.

“Fine! Fine! Stop this. Press the damn button. You win. God dammit, you won this years ago. No matter how I cajoled, pleaded, begged?—”

“Threatened.” Juliette’s word jolted him out of his blubbering, and he finally raised his watery eyes to meet hers. He gulped loudly, and when Juliette thumped her cane on the tiled floor, he lifted his hands in surrender.

“Yes, yes. Did it do me any good? No. You broke your leg and she broke her heart and she still was never mine!”

All his limbs shook, all veneer of sophistication wiped away. “We were supposed to be married. In Moscow. She had agreed. She said yes, for God’s sake! She was to be my bride.”

The familiar sensation, the one Juliette had felt back in the secretary’s office listening to Foltin talk to Katarina, returned tenfold. The disgust. This man should’ve never been allowed anywhere near Katarina. Her name should never have left his mouth. He wasn’t worthy of breathing the same air she did.

“Did you browbeat her into that too?”

She was years too late, but when he nodded, hiding his eyes from her, Juliette knew that she was finally catching on.

“She was sleeping with Belova, I caught them. And she agreed! The scandal had been hidden then, and she was mine, we were unstoppable.”

The tragic Tatyana Belova, she who had fallen down the stairs and whose position as the lead of the company Katarina took. Tatyana Belova, whose name Juliette had heard in conjunction with Katarina’s forever. And for whose loss of a career Katarina had always been blamed. Even Gabriel had alluded to it on that fateful first day when Katarina drew Michel’s blood.

A memory resurfaced and tugged at the ends of Juliette’s consciousness. Something Katarina had said years ago, something Foltin spoke around, with innuendo and rancor. And this something was so important that Juliette, who so rarely dissembled, allowed herself to bluff.

“Back then, you insinuated that Katarina had tried to injure me, that everyone knew it was her because of the things she had done in Moscow. Because of Belova. And yet… Something tells me it was you who threw Belova off the stairs. What, Katarina didn’t forget her? Didn’t leave an old love in the past? So you took matters in your own hands.”

He stood a touch taller, his back still against the mirror of the elevator, and shook his head.

“You can’t prove it.”

Juliette smiled.

“Do I have to prove it?” He recoiled from her words, from the meaning behind them, the gesture obscene in its swiftness.

“You’re crazy. I’ll call the police!”

Juliette smiled wider.

“And tell them what? That a ballerina who can barely walk beat you up? A strapping man such as yourself? And would you even want to attract attention to yourself, a KGB, or whatever they’re calling it now, asset in America? Are the French aware of you, or are you still pulling the wool over Lalande’s eyes and his blinding ego?”

She had thrown that last assumption out as a wild guess, but his jowly face turning impossibly pastier told her everything she needed to know.

Foltin kept shaking his head, even as she lifted her cane, tossed it up, and caught it, holding it like a baseball bat.

The seventeenth fouetté always crept up on Juliette, her eyes focused and her feet working like clockwork, like an expensive mechanism, drilled by time, experience, talent. She was in the middle of the movement, all speed. Precision, and yet, mostly instinct.

And it was instinct that was guiding her. The one she was indulging. The instinct that meant spewing words, because if she set her true wish free, Katarina’s little bloodletting in the classroom at Garnier would look like a paper cut by comparison. Years lost to this worm. Years, careers, health, hearts…

Juliette clutched the cane harder. Foltin actually squealed.

“I should’ve done this seven years ago. I should’ve seen through all the lies, through all the intrigue, through all the games. I should’ve known that this was never about ballet.And always was about having Katarina. About owning her. Possessing her.”

Foltin’s head was still swaying, but now his lower lip was quivering as well.

“I should’ve confronted you that evening instead of running away. You see, I blamed you for ruining my life. You and Katarina. And all this time it was me. My fear, my inability to trust fully. I should’ve entered that fucking office of yours where you were threatening her, where you were blackmailing her, and I should’ve stood by her. And maybe I should’ve also slapped you silly. Granted, I had no cane back then to do much damage. I do now. Ironically, thanks in some tiny measure to you and your pathetic spy games.”

She took a small step closer to him, the wood warm and tantalizing in her hand. He shrank so far into the wall, he almost dissolved into it. What a coward. Bullies always were.

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