Chapter 4

The dance hall smelled like rosin, beeswax candles, and nerves — a very specific combination Zoe had come to associate with impending humiliation.

She stood backstage in her stiff new practice slippers, watching the other girls warm up through the gap in the curtain. They moved like they'd been born already knowing the steps, spines effortlessly straight, chins tilted at exactly the right angle of aristocratic boredom. Zoe, by contrast, felt like a newborn deer that had been handed a pair of pointe shoes and told to make it look elegant.

"I'm going to fall," she whispered, mostly to herself. "I'm going to fall in front of the entire district and it's going to be etched into local legend forever. 'The Duke's Daughter Who Fell.' They'll write ballads."

"You're not going to fall," said a familiar voice from the doorway.

Chris leaned against the frame in his good jacket — the navy one his mother only let him wear for occasions — holding a paper cone of roasted chestnuts he had very clearly smuggled in against every rule the dance mistress had posted backstage.

"You've practiced the box step for two weeks straight," he said, crossing over to press the warm cone into her hands. "You could do it half-asleep."

"I could also fall half-asleep. Sleep-falling is a very real and underappreciated danger."

Chris huffed a laugh, and for a second the knot in Zoe's stomach loosened. "For luck," he said, nodding at the chestnuts. "Or bribery. Consider it whichever gets you through the next ten minutes."

"You're not even allowed backstage."

"I know. I bribed the usher with the other half of these."

When her name was finally called, Zoe stepped out onto the polished floor with her spine locked straight and her chin held high, exactly the way her tutor had drilled into her for two solid weeks. The orchestra struck up the opening bars. Her feet moved — plié, step, turn — and against every prediction she'd made backstage, she didn't fall.

Halfway through the sequence, as she landed a turn cleanly, a soft ripple of applause moved through the watching parents. It was warm. Encouraging. Entirely harmless.

And yet something in Zoe's body flinched — hard, involuntary, a full-body flare of alarm that had nothing to do with the dance at all. For one disorienting half-second, the polite applause in her ears twisted into something else entirely: a sharper sound, something like a door slamming shut too fast, or a chair scraping violently back across stone.

Her foot faltered. She recovered within a heartbeat, folding the stumble into the choreography so smoothly that not a single person in the audience noticed.

Not a single person except Chris.

He was watching from the wings, chestnuts forgotten in his hand, and for just a moment his easy smile cracked — replaced by something taut and worried — before he caught himself and clapped along with everyone else, his applause a beat too eager, like he was trying to cover for her.

When the recital ended and she found him again by the side door, he didn't ask what had happened. He just handed her another chestnut, still faintly warm.

"You looked like you were flying," he said.

"Told you," Zoe said, forcing the shake out of her voice and replacing it with a grin. "Sleep-falling is dangerous. I nearly did it standing up."

Chris laughed, and the moment passed, folded away like a page turned too quickly to read properly.

But that night, lying in bed with the chestnut shells still in her coat pocket, Zoe pressed a hand flat against her chest and stared at the ceiling for a long time, trying to understand why something as small and kind as applause had made her want, so suddenly and so completely, to cry.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***