Page 167 of Lethal Torture
Knowing it’s an impossible dream only adds a bittersweet thrill to the already potent magic I’ve woven.
My limbs feel suddenly liquid, guided by some force outside myself.
Tonight isn’t about payback. It’s not about revenge or showing anyone in this room what my world is.
Tonight I’m just a woman who wants a man.
A man I know I should let go.
It’s a painful yearning that makes me dance like I never have in my life.
TetyaAna believed all young ladies should be trained in ballet. I took classes from a Russian instructor from early childhood. Those lessons were the only thing my father continued. Not because he had ambitions about me going intothe Bolshoi, but because he wanted his caged pet to be the most exotic of them all.
Dancing became my escape, the only place that was truly mine. I’ve never lost my love for the art of burlesque—nor the skills I honed over years of nightly performances.
I swing my legs over the moon and fall dramatically backward, relishing the gasp of the audience as they think I will tumble to the floor.
I don’t, of course.
I twine about the crescent moon as if I’m a serpent on a branch, my body an illusion designed to bewilder and beguile.
The art of burlesque is not stripping. It’s not pole dancing.
It’s a flirtation, a temptation.
That’s why my dress has intricate layers over exquisitely crafted lingerie. It’s why the Quartier is decorated tonight to recreate the atmosphere of Venetian Carnivale, and why my ornate hairstyle and mask are simultaneously alluring and slightly dangerous.
Burlesque is about sinful seduction. The suggestion rather than the explicit. It’s about making every person in the room want to tear away the illusion and get to the woman beneath. When I’m dancing, I’m no longer Zinaida Melikov, daughter of the Whip and calculated criminal psychopath.
When I dance burlesque, I’m the woman none of those labels could ever touch.
The midnight dance at the Winter Ball is about showing the audience just enough of that woman to have them panting for more. About whipping every person in the room into such a frenzy that by the time the Winter Queen takes her throne, the entire room is desperate to be let off the leash—and loose on each other. It’s what made the Quartier dark and exclusive from the start. A delicate, calculated balance, a deliberately dangerousatmosphere, that I train all my staff, male and female, to cultivate and control.
But in all the times I’ve controlled a room, never once have I lost control of myself.
Until tonight.
I know it the moment I drop upside down, then twine my way back onto the crescent moon. I feel it in the sensual brush of my fans against my skin and the growing heat between my legs. I sense it in the hushed silence of the audience and five hundred eyes glued to the slightest inch of bared skin I allow them to see.
But most of all, I know it because none of those eyes matter to me at all. The only gaze I can feel, the only eyes turning my body to sinuous potency and desire, to molten heat, are Luke’s.
Tonight I’m notallowingthe audience forbidden, tantalizing glimpses behind my mask.
Luke is stripping that mask away, layer by layer, with nothing more than his silent, unmoving presence and unseen eyes.
And the fact that I can’t see his reaction clearly only makes the thrill even greater.
I slide from the crescent to the platform atop the stairs, where several support dancers, male and female, await. My whip is built into my costume, and unraveling it also removes one of the filmy layers. I ply the whip with exquisite devastation, plucking the dress from one dancer to leave her covered by only fans, removing the shirt of another to reveal his torso. I allow the leather to trail my own body, flicking off a patch of cloth here, a bow there. Each sudden removal is underpinned by slow, sensual movement, so the audience is kept on constant edge, never entirely certain when the next reveal or tease will come.
By the time I’m standing on the bottom step, the support dancers are close to naked, but still tantalizingly concealed.
Only strategically placed fans cover my lingerie. The room is holding its collective breath—and I’m trying to keep it together.
I’ve never been so aware of the sexual tension in a crowd. I’ve certainly never been turned on by it before.
But Luke is standing exactly as he was at the start of my dance. As ever, he hasn’t moved at all. The comms in my ear are completely silent.
For all I know, he is completely unaffected by the entire thing.
