Page 116

I just dropped on purpose, and the floor never came.

And somewhere in the rhythm of it, the rising and the falling and the catching, something in me begins to come apart in a way that has nothing to do with the burn in my muscles.

I have spent my entire life relying on exactly one person.

Myself.

I learned young and brutally that anyone who promised to catch me was simply lining up the angle to let me drop—my husband caught me at the altar and dropped me onto the corpses of my family the very next dawn; Dorian caught me out of the wreckage and dropped me the instant a prettier distraction wandered by.

The lesson was carved into me with a deep enough blade that I stopped offering my weight to anyone at all. You cannot be dropped if you never let go of the pole. It became the architecture of my whole survival:trust nothing, hold everything, catch yourself.

But Lucien has never once let me fall.

The realization arrives whole and unsettling, and the mastermind in me, who misses nothing, is forced to admit she’s been missing this for weeks.

He didn’t start tonight. He caught my finances before a single creditor could circle. He caught my spiraling mind with nothing but a hand around mine in a garage, dropping the noise to a murmur. Every reckless, self-destructive, deliberately-too-far thing I have hurled myself at since the day we met, certain no one would be there to break the impact—he was already there.

Already moving. Already reaching.

Beneath all that glacial control, beneath the obsession he wears like a tailored coat, there is a certainty so absolute it frightens me more than any threat ever has:this man will be there.

Always. Every time.

Whether I ask or not, whether I deserve it or not, whether I’m falling on purpose to test the floor or falling by accident because I pushed too hard—he will catch me. The lesson stopped being about dance somewhere around the third catch. It’s about the one thing I have never, in all my brilliant ruined life, been able to do.

Trust.

And the terror of it isn’t that he’ll fail me.

It’s that he won’t. Failure I know how to survive—I have built an entire self out of surviving it. But a man who keeps his word, who catches me every single time until I forget to brace for the floor, who makes safety into a habit my body starts to trust without my permission—that is the one weapon I have no defense against.

If I let myself rely on it, truly rely on it, and it ever vanished—if the catching ever stopped—there would be no version of me left that knew how to land alone. He isn’t just teaching me to fall. He’s teaching me to need him.

And the most dangerous part, the part that should have me reaching for a blade and an exit, is that I am letting him.

Maybe he feels the shift in me, the way he feels everything.

He crosses to the sound system, and after a moment a song unspools into the empty studio—something slow and low and without words, all warm strings and a heartbeat of bass—and he dims the house lights another notch until the whole space goes amber and intimate, shadows pooling soft in the corners.

Then he does the most extraordinary thing I have ever watched him do.

He stops being my psychiatrist.

I watch it happen in real time, the way you’d watch a man set down a weight he’s carried so long he’s forgotten the shape of his own shoulders without it. The clinical remove, the cataloguing gaze, the perpetual three-moves-ahead assessment—he lays it all down, deliberately, and what crosses the floor toward me is simply a man.

Not the doctor who studied me through a file.

Not the planner running contingencies. Just Lucien, with his sleeves rolled and his eyes warm and his hand extended, askingme to dance for no reason other than that he wants to hold me while music plays.

I take his hand.

He draws me in, one palm settling at the small of my back, and we move together beneath the dim lights in something slower and more honest than any choreography.

There is no audience. No committee. No ex-husband beyond the arches, no clock ticking down, no role for either of us to perform.

For the length of one song in a closed studio, neither of us is pretending to be anything at all—and the rarity of that, the sheer impossible rarity of two people like us standing unmasked in the same square of light, makes my chest ache with something perilously close to peace.

It occurs to me, swaying in his arms, that I have never once danced with a man for the simple pleasure of it.