Chapter 3 - The Broken Pedestal
The afternoons that followed settled into an astonishing, surreal routine that altered the rhythm of the Moretti estate. The men who guarded my perimeter stopped carrying their assault rifles in plain view whenever the white van approached the gates; they tucked their sidearms deep into their jackets, checked their language, and somehow managed to keep bowls of strawberry hard candies in the guardhouse.
Lily was a tyrant. She possessed none of the timid deference that children normally displayed around massive adults. If my posture slumped during a lift, she tapped my elbow with a plastic wand. If I moved too quickly while pushing her chair during the waltz sequence, she scolded me for "rushing the violins."
Yet beneath her fierce bravado, I began to see the fractures she tried so desperately to hide.
It was on our fourth rehearsal that the mask slipped. We had been working on a gentle pirouette where I held her right hand while guiding the back of her wheelchair in an unbroken, floating circle. The music swelled—Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers—and Lily raised her left arm into a graceful arch, her chin held high, her eyes fixed on the mirrored ceiling.
For three seconds, she was weightless. She wasn't an orphan in a wheelchair; she was the prima ballerina she dreamed of being every night in her narrow dormitory bed.
Then her hand slipped.
Her palm caught the metal rim of her wheel awkwardly, the chair jerked to an abrupt stop, and her small body tilted forward. I caught her before her face could hit the floorboards, my massive forearm sliding under her chest with the swift, reflexive speed of a hunter.
I lifted her back into the seat, holding her steady. "I have you, princess. You're fine."
She didn't answer. Her face had drained of all its bright color. She looked down at her legs, which rested limp and motionless on the rubber footrests, clad in her worn canvas sneakers.
Slowly, she reached down and struck her own thigh with her fist. A small, dull thud. Then another.
"Lily," I said, catching her wrist with two fingers. "Stop that."
"They're stupid," she whispered, her voice cracking for the first time since I had met her. The boisterous, demanding little girl vanished, leaving behind a terrified child sitting alone in an iron frame. "They don't do anything. The other girls in class can jump. They have pink satin slippers that make clicking sounds when they spin. My shoes just stay on the rubber. It's ugly."
My heart, an organ I had long considered calcified by decades of violence, twisted in my chest with such sudden, sharp ferocity that it physically ached.
I knelt on the floor beside her chair, letting my knees sink into the wood. I reached out, gently wrapping my hand around both of her sneakers.
"Listen to me, Lily Harper," I said, my voice steady, deep, and immovable as bedrock. "Do you know what makes a dancer?"
She shook her head, tears clinging to her thick lashes like dew on clover.
"It isn't shoes," I told her, looking straight into her sapphire eyes. "Shoes are just leather and ribbons. Any fool with money can buy satin slippers. Dancing doesn't live in your feet, princess. It lives here." I pressed the pad of my thumb against her small chest, right over her heart. "It lives in the rhythm that keeps beating when everything else is quiet. It lives in the courage to face an entire room of strangers and tell them who you are without saying a single word."
She sniffled, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her cardigan. "Really?"
"Really," I promised. "I've seen the greatest men in this city crumble because they lacked the heart you show every time you roll into this room. When you spin, Lily, you don't need to jump. You make the whole room move around you."
She stared at me for a long time, her lower lip trembling. Then she reached out, wrapped her small arms around my massive, scarred neck, and buried her face into my collarbone.
May you like
I froze for a fraction of a second, entirely unaccustomed to physical affection that didn't carry an agenda or a concealed blade. Then, slowly, with the clumsy reverence of a beast holding a robin, I brought my arms around her narrow back and held her against my chest until her breathing slowed.
Standing near the open doors of the ballroom, Marco stood watching in silence. When our eyes met over the little girl's head, there was no smirk on his face. There was only a quiet, solemn understanding that the man who ruled New York was no longer the only man living inside my skin.
