Page 25 of Devoted

CHAPTER7

Penelope

Three more days pass.I’m walking almost limp-free, but I still haven’t done any dance moves. I’ve been on the couch, and I only do my walks to keep from stiffening up—and to conceal what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been researching the shit out of Cannon.

Some things you can’t just fouetté out of. There’s no grand adage that’s going to resolve it. You just have to finish the number.

Cannon’s words keep pinging through my mind. If he’d said pirouette instead of fouetté, I wouldn’t have noticed. I would’ve thought he was making a condescending comment about my dance life versus real life. Then he tacked on grand adage. I was young when I took ballet and young when Father demanded I stop with ballet. I didn’t have enough experience to learn the steps, but I recall learning those terms. They aren’t everyday words. They aren’t words that someone outside the field would know.

I used the tablet he gave me for books and games and hit the internet. I started my search with a general perusal of his name. Cannon Lannister.

It took forever to sift through the hits his last name brought up. Having the same last name as the main characters of one of the most popular and well-known TV shows, not to mention the book series, isn’t conducive to a fast search.

Cannon’s name isn’t unique, but it’s unusual. I didn’t find any articles or old social media profiles. I dig through my brain. When I first saw him, when he was doing surveillance work for Jacobi and London, and I thought he was familiar.

He hasn’t lied to me that I know of, but he also omits facts he doesn’t want people to know. And he’ll purposely mislead them, like with his clothing. In his home, this cabin, I haven’t seen a single oversized colorful shirt or a pair of cargo shorts.

I asked him if I’d seen him before, and he said we never met. So, I may have seen him.

There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place it. The lifts and carries he’s done could be tactics he learned in the military. But his impeccable posture that’s only gotten better since he shed the baggy clothing? And the warm-ups he wears around the cabin? And the critical eye he watched my dancers with? So different from the awe of Elsa. Both my dance classes and my competitive training were new to her.

Was Cannon involved in dance?

No. Absurd.

Is it? I want to brush it off, assume he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to express the feeling of the dance, much less possess the technical skill. He’s a tough guy. I bristle over stereotypes of dance guys. I can’t do the same to Cannon.

But Cannon mentioned a career before he joined the military. A lot of dancers are young professionals as teens.

My searches come up with nothing. I start doing general dance searches around the LA area. Nothing turns up.

I can’t ask him. I have several times before and he’s evaded the telling—which should tell me it’s none of my damn business. But I’m cooped up with him; I can’t escape the feeling it’s important. I just don’t know how.

Humoring myself about dance, I try to figure out where I would’ve seen him. I might’ve been young when I was in ballet, but I used to live and breathe videos. I dreamed of going to a ballet academy. I wanted to stay there with other like-minded kids and be nurtured in my passion instead of hearing my parents argue over it. I’d wake up to practice all day and fit school between lessons.

And then it was over. Another controversy in the ballet world made Father put his foot down. I’m not shoving my daughter in front of pervert producers, and I’m not letting her get pimped out by some greedy school director!

Mother relented. She didn’t want me to be a child actress, and she respected that Father didn’t want my body to be at the mercy of those in power. And that was how my competitive ballroom dance career started. I could still dance, but I didn’t have to go away to get better, and I wouldn’t be under anyone’s complete control.

To this day, I disagree with their decision. There are tons of reputable schools with scads of great references. But I can’t go back and change their minds.

I widen my search, looking for prominent male ballet dancers under the age of twenty, and find the controversy that pushed Father over the top. It was practically in our backyard. A San Diego dance academy shut its doors after it was reported the director, Dasha Petrov, was giving investors access to some of the young female dancers for extra donations while also embezzling from those investors. She and the other pedophiles went to jail.

Those poor kids. I cruised through the case, my stomach churning. No wonder Father had feared dropping me off at a school hours away from home.

Then I saw it.

A familiar profile in the thumbnail of an online news article. I knew this male ballet dancer, this young dancer with his arms curved in front of him, his lines clean and long.

He was en pointe, one of the many open adopters of dancing en pointe as a guy. There’d been so many articles about his skill and what he could do for male dancers in the ballet world. I watched videos and interviews, marveling over how serious he could be while also laughing with the reporters.

The boy’s name was Erik C. Petrov.

His dirty-blond hair was kept short, but slicked back. The boy danced classical ballet with modern flair. His skill for the technical aspects matched his competitiveness, thus his insistence to learn pointe.

He was a rock star to a girl like me. He’s Cannon.

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