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The Friday nights that bled into Saturday mornings, the lights and the noise and the bills folded into my waistband until I could barely move. The worship. The praise. The intoxicating power of a room full of people who came to watch me defy gravity and went home having seen something holy. It wasn’t the pole my husband left me to, the auction-block desperation of a woman with no other way to eat—this was the other thing, the thing underneath the survival.

The art.

The reason I climbed that first time and felt, despite everything, like a goddess instead of a commodity. The pole gave me back to myself in pieces even as the world tried to spend me, and standing here now, in the gold light, I feel those pieces stir and reach for the ceiling.

My eyes sting.

I blink it furiously away, because Vex does not weep at the smell of chalk, and there are witnesses.

But the memories come anyway, unbidden and vivid, the way scent always drags the past up by the collar. I remember the first studio that took me in, back when I had nothing—no name worth using, no money, no family left aboveground, just a dancer’s body and a fury that needed somewhere to go.

Remember the calluses splitting and healing tougher.

I remember the night I held my first proper invert and felt, for the span of three seconds upside down in the dark, like I had clawed back a single inch of myself from everyone who’d ever taken pieces.

The pole was the one thing nobody gave me and nobody could un-give.

They could pay to watch. They could never own the watching. And in a life defined by being owned—wife, asset, patient, prize—that distinction was the closest thing to sovereignty I everheld. No wonder my whole nervous system is lighting up like a switchboard.

I’m standing in the ruins of my own cathedral, and someone has lit the candles again.

“Well,” drawls a voice from across the studio, rich and amused. “I know that look. That’s the look of someone who’s flown before.”

I turn—and my brain stops working entirely.

Because I know that face.

I have studied that face.

Leaning against the front desk with the loose, catlike ease of a man who owns every room he’s ever stood in is a living legend, a retired competition champion whose performances I dissected frame by frame in the small hours of a hundred sleepless nights, rewinding grainy footage until I could trace the exact mechanics of a move that shouldn’t be physically possible. He taught me half of what I know without ever knowing I existed. He is, to the strange church of my obsession, something close to a saint.

And the mastermind, the strategist, the psychotic queen who dismantled an institution from inside a padded cell—she evaporates completely, and what’s left is a starstruck girl with no composure whatsoever.

“You—” I point at him, undignified. “You’re—oh my god. The Meridian routine. The two-thousand-and-fourteen worlds, the one with the blind drop into the Ayesha catch that the judges said was impossible until you landed it three times in a row—I have that memorized. I taught myself the entry off your footage. I rewound the dismount so many times I wore out the file.” The words tumble out faster than I can dam them, a flood of routines and timestamps and reverent specificity, and somewhere in the back of my skull a small horrified voice notes that I am gushing, that I have not gushed at anything since I was a child, and that I appear to be entirely unable to stop. “The inverted layout inyour final season. The way you held the deadlift for a full eight counts. Do you know what that did to me? Do you know how many tendons I sacrificed trying to replicate it?”

He laughs, delighted and unhurried, and the sound is warm as honey.

“Oh, I like her,” he says—to Lucien, I realize, who is standing just behind me with an expression I can’t quite read. “She’s got the disease. The good kind. The kind you can’t cure.”

It’s a strange and dizzying thing, meeting a god.

I have spent so long being the most dangerous, most studied, most watched thing in every room that I’d forgotten what it feels like to be the one doing the worshipping—to stand in front of someone whose work shaped you and have nothing to offer but gratitude.

There’s a vulnerability in it I would normally never permit, the fan’s open-throated reverence, and yet here it pours out of me uncensored, because the part of me that loved this art was never the part that learned to lie.

She predates all my masks.

She is, perhaps, the oldest honest thing I own, and she has been starving in the dark for years, and the sight of those chrome poles has set her loose to feast.

It’s only then, with the fan-fever ebbing enough to let the strategist crawl back into her chair, that the obvious question surfaces and I blurt it without a shred of tact.

“Wait. What did you do?” He arches a brow, and I gesture at the whole improbable building, the studio in a town like this. “You’re here. In a place built for people like me. Which means you did something. Something criminal, or something that got you labeled the kind of insane they file away and forget. A man doesn’t go from world stages to a clemency town without a body in the story somewhere.”

Lucien makes a small sound that might be a sigh.

The owner only grins wider, entirely unoffended—charmed, even.

“Sharp little thing,” he says. “And not wrong.” He doesn’t flinch from it, doesn’t hedge, and I respect him instantly for the lack of theater. He tells me how he came to be here—the broad strokes, the way you tell a story you’ve made peace with, an old wound worn smooth into anecdote—and the details aren’t mine to keep, but they confirm what I already knew the moment I saw the steel under all that grace. We are the same species, he and I. The kind that survives by becoming dangerous. “Difference is,” he finishes, with a glint, “I’ve got clemency in my back pocket. Earned it, banked it. I’m just… waiting. For the right moment to spend it.” His grin turns sly. “And the right Omega foolish enough to wrap themselves around a heart as cold as mine. Haven’t met them yet. But I’m patient.” He winks at me, and I decide on the spot that I adore him.