Page 3 of Reverence

And maybe the past few years had been a touch darker, the luster of gold dulled by the string of failures the company’s productions had faced, but Juliette felt her crown and her throne were secure. So why was she shivering in the doorway of the studio, wrapped in Gabriel’s sweater, watching the Empress of Moscow with such trepidation?

A question for another time, perhaps. Juliette tightened the familiar-smelling wool around herself and allowed her mind to take in the ongoing rehearsal.

Saying that the Bolshoi company was very good was an understatement of grandiose proportions. The Soviet ballet wasmagnificent. That wasn’t a surprise, as the dancers were drilled from very early childhood. Their discipline and methods rivaled military schools. What was a surprise, however, was that the main star, the principal attraction of the entire company, looked and acted unlike anyone in the crowd surrounding her.

Juliette had expected to see perfect movement, skill, and precision. Those things would be par for the course. She hadn’t expected this level of vulnerability.

On the other hand, as Gabriel kept pointing out to her, maybe it wasn’t vulnerability at all. Perhaps Vyatka was simply arrogant and unpleasant, and Juliette was ascribing her own feelings to the Soviet prima.

She certainly often felt vulnerable in the crowd. They didn’t teach you in ballet boarding schools what happened when you attained your dreams. They didn’t teach you that once you became the star, people would be covetous of every aspect of your life. They didn’t teach you that everybody around you would have an agenda. They didn’t teach you to be aware that nobody was your friend once you reached these heights.

Betrayal made one distant, standoffish. And as Juliette’s eyes followed the Soviet prima around the room, observing the small mannerisms, the near disgust she showed every time anyone so much as came close to her, Juliette thought that perhaps Vyatka was, indeed, just arrogant. Nothing wrong with that.

And then, despite watching, despite paying attention to every move of the pale limbs in front of her, Juliette almost missed the jump.

While she had been woolgathering, the company had warmed up to move past the adagio stage, and Katarina Vyatka was performing grands jetés. A pin would have dropped with more sound. The big jumps, as they were known, were technically complex. The extension of the legs in a perfect split, the grace of the arms, and the famous landing. One of themost complicated parts of the movement—the landing—should be quiet. In Katarina Vyatka’s case, it was entirely soundless. Juliette’s breath caught in her chest. Next to her she could sense Gabriel’s jaw drop.

The boards trembled ever so slightly under Juliette’s own feet, but other than that, nothing. How was it even possible? Surely, the laws of physics… Her thoughts running haywire at what she was witnessing in the complete silence of the room, Juliette caught the ice-blue gaze on her as the Soviet prima was in mid-jump, and her heart stopped for just a moment. Something… Something in that look, in those eyes?—

“I’ll be damned, Jett!” Gabriel’s whisper contained so much hungover admiration, Juliette smiled. One thing about her partner, she’d never met a dancer less full of himself, so quick to praise those around him. “I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but she just might be better than you are at this, darlin’.”

Well, that was a bit much, even for him. But he wasn’t wrong. Juliette’s jumps were a standard-bearing feat in their industry, but even she could be heard on her first alighting.

Gabriel ducked, expecting her to smack him, but she could not tear her eyes off the scene in front of her. Vyatka was in full flight now, and the boards creaked slightly with every subsequent landing as her jumps gained speed and power.

It happened when Vyatka wrapped up her routine. Juliette was distracted, still tangled up in her thoughts, when the révérence was executed. The showy bowing sequence was one of the least important movements, one that was almost an afterthought, and yet it caught her eye. In fact, it slashed across her consciousness with the blunt force of a wrecking ball.

Wrong,was all she could think. Katarina Vyatka’s révérence was technically incorrect and quite obviously eliciting some amount of pain to the prima. The head was bowed at an unnatural angle, a flaw so stirringly obvious yet strangelyignored by everyone around them. Juliette tensed, her entire being demanding that she rush forward and correct the stance that was surely causing discomfort.

Damn, she looks in pain…

Gabriel’s hand squeezed her shoulder for just a second, dragging her back to reality. Belatedly, Juliette realized that she had not managed to keep her thoughts to herself and had broken the decree of never addressing the Empress of Moscow, who, now standing tall once again with no sign of any discomfort, was glaring at her with what looked to be hate in her cold, lifeless eyes.

2

OF RUINED BOWS & TRADED BLOWS

In the thundering silence that followed, Juliette felt as if she had been lifted to a scaffold. All eyes were on her, including the slicing ice-blue ones that held palpable weight. No wonder this woman never spoke. If she inflicted this much damage with her eyes alone, Juliette shuddered to imagine what she could do with words.

They held each other’s gaze for a second longer, Juliette putting all her courage on the line, biting her lip and raising a hand to her chest, desperate to atone for her hasty remark and a rather boneheaded mistake. One never commented on another dancer’s form or injury. It simply wasn’t done. What had possessed her to speculate about Vyatka’s pain out loud?

Juliette, however, knew what it was that had taken over her mind and, subsequently, her mouth. For years she had dedicated what little free time she had to working with injured dancers, correcting their form to ensure they’d bounce back to painless performances. And Katarina Vyatka’s form had been off. Juliette’s trained eye had caught the slight variation in the movement. She was perhaps the only individual in the room who could see it, but see it she did. A few degrees off perfection , the révérence had been spectacular, but Juliette could swear it hadbeen painful. Was it the desire to help? Or the hope to prove Katarina Vyatka had not been perfect?

What a notion!

Gabriel’s earlier remark about the Soviet prima being better than Juliette had her dander up, but surely not to this extent. Then it occurred to Juliette that despite being contemporaries for almost a decade, they had never been compared to each other. Not even in Moscow and Leningrad during Paris Opera Ballet tours. It was said that they were too different.

The instructor demanded the jumps be demonstrated again, and the dancers took their places with the prima setting up in the middle of the room. The piano soared, and so did Katarina Vyatka. As she aced another perfect landing, Juliette could feel her heart beat in rhythm with the movement, earlier embarrassment set aside.

Yes, they were indeed too different—in style, in deportment, in looks. And yet, her own chest was rising and falling as if they were jumping in parallel, Juliette knew the dancer she was watching more than matched her. After all, an empress was a couple of rungs above a princess.

She shivered again, suddenly feeling the cold sweat on her back. With one last look at the tall, magnificent figure, Juliette turned and stepped away from the rehearsal studio.

The draft was getting under her skin and so was this ballerina. Juliette’s mistake aside—and that was embarrassing enough to never want to face the Bolshoi prima—there was something about Vyatka, and the immense talent was only half of it. Sure, a rather obvious and impressive half, but…

The fear. That caged-animal look was so out of place on a woman who owned the world. Or at least her part of the world behind the Iron Curtain. Why did it tug at Juliette’s thoughts? Why was it making her curious? And was it curiosity? Orwas it something that Juliette refused to acknowledge as being anything but what it really was?

She shook her head. Sure, Juliette had always had an eye for beautiful women. And while this one was among the most beautiful she had ever seen, Juliette also had the brains to know when to leave well enough alone. Especially after her blunder. Katarina Vyatka came not just with her own red flag—an actual one—but with a political quagmire in the form of KGB agents following her every step.

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