Page 28

Pole work should be the bane of my existence. It’s the single thing on this earth that can swallow me whole for hours and spit me back out without a shred of resentment, and a woman who counts control as her only currency ought to despise anything with that much power over her attention.

I don’t. I never have.

It’s the one surrender I permit myself.

And the very best part is that I have music.

It’s one of the few luxuries this cell permits—a small earned speaker I keep dutifully charged, and a modest hoard of discs, a curated set of songs cleared by some committee that clearly never listened past the first thirty seconds of any of them.

I don’t notice the exact moment I cross the room and thumb the speaker awake. I don’t notice when I peel myself out of the pink jumpsuit either, until I’m standing in nothing but a bra and a scrap of underwear I’m suddenly grateful I bothered with this morning, because I am not in the mood to gift the wall-cameras a show today. Today isn’t for them.

The music spills out low and dark and sinful, that slow narcotic build that swells beneath your sternum and pulls—all dim-lit, after-hours seduction, the kind of sound that makes a body remember it has hips.

Magnetic. Sin set to a beat.

It fills the cell, and it fills me, and the corner of the world I’ve been afraid to touch becomes the only thing in it.

I test the steel first, the way you greet an old lover you’re not sure still wants you. A casual circle, one hand light on the metal, my body swinging lazy around its axis, feeling the cool kiss of itagainst my palm and the give of the floor under the ball of my foot.

Then I stop being careful.

I dive. I go up—ballsy, greedy, all in—and my body remembers everything my mind swore it had forgotten. The climb. The grip switch at the top. The slow inverted spiral down, ankles locked, the world turning gentle circles around me.

Moves I haven’t pulled in years come unspooling out of my muscles like they’d only been waiting politely for me to ask.

I spin until the cell smears into ribbons of light.

I climb until my shoulders sing.

Sweat blooms at my spine and slides between my shoulder blades and makes the steel both treacherous and perfect, and I lean into the risk of that, into the acrobatic edges where one bad grip means a real fall, because the danger is the point, the danger is the whole gorgeous point—it wires me up bright and electric and alive.

And for a little while I am not what they say I am.

Up here, mid-spin, the cell stops being a cell. The reinforced glass and the mag-locks and the little glass eyes in the ceiling all dissolve into smeared light, and the only laws left are the ones my own body writes—grip and release, tension and surrender, the long elastic moment at the apex of a trick where I belong to nothing, not gravity, not the state, not the men who think they own the air I breathe.

My scent thickens with the effort, strawberries and warm sugar blooming off my damp skin and crowding the small room until I’m breathing myself, drunk on my own perfume and the dark pull of the music and the simple animal joy of a body permitted, for once, to do exactly what it was made for.

I’m not a patient.

Not a criminal folded into a cell.

Not the grand prize on her plinth or the lunatic in the file or the goddess the Alpha wing crosses itself against. I’m a wild animal loosed across the open field of some impossible private oasis, running flat-out under a sky no one built to contain me, and there is no schedule, no count, no glass, no leash.

Just the orbit of the steel, the dark pull of the music, and the clean honest burn of my own body doing the one thing it was always best at.

Here’s the secret folded inside the freedom, the one I let myself look at only when I’m spinning too fast for anyone to read my face: I am not the fool I perform.

I never have been.

I could take this fortress apart in a handful of moves if the whim ever truly took me. Could play this whole watching, counting, scenting institution into checkmate so fast the board wouldn’t have time to understand it had lost.

The patience is a choice.

The madness is a costume.

And the only reason the king still stands is that I haven’t yet decided what I want more than the game.

I’m so far gone—so deep inside the music and the motion and the dangerous clarity of my own thoughts—that I don’t hear the cell door at all.