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Another squeeze of her fingers, and this time Katarina accompanied it by a gentle touch to her elbow, and still Juliette said nothing, hiding her eyes, focusing on drawing air in and out of her lungs.
Juliette didn’t need to be told in so many words what Katarina wanted her to do. She had taken a very public stand. So had Gabriel. It was Juliette’s turn. To do something, to say something. Hell, Gabriel had all but bellowed her name.
But how could Juliette speak when it was becoming abundantly clear that she had made a deal which doomed Francesca to save Katarina? How does one vocalize that she was about to plunge the second knife into Francesca’s back? Francesca, who had been nothing but kind and supportive and protective of her?
“Juliette?” Gabriel, still gasping, turned to her, his handsome, darling face, the face of her brother, of her only family for the last seven years, looking so earnestly at her. There was so much hope in those features. In those pained eyes.
Juliette straightened her shoulders. It was time to come clean.
“Gabriel, I…”
What was there really to say?
“Oh, Monsieur Flanagan, you fool. A gentleman, but a fool nonetheless. And oh, Mademoiselle Lucian-Sorel, how eloquent you are when you are throwing your erstwhile mentor to the wolves!” Lalande laughed and slowly clapped. One, two, three… The buzzing in Juliette’s ears intensified. She turned to Katarina, whose eyes were immense, full of that sorrow Juliette sometimes saw cross the cold blue and burn it into ash. Someone was speaking, but Juliette couldn’t hear it from the noise of her own conscience drowning out everything else around her.
She really could sympathize with Judas, poor bastard.
“Juliette…” This time, when Gabriel spoke, his voice held a note Juliette had never heard when he uttered her name. Contempt. Well, what did she expect?
The massive antique doors swung with a resoundingbang, slapping into the walls that held them, and then stayed open. In the halo of sunlight coming through the doorway stood a man, and Katarina’s hand went limp in Juliette’s.
“Welcome to Paris Opera Ballet!” Lalande all but ran to the newcomer. “How do you like your new office? I trust you will feel comfortable here.”
The man, tall and slim, stepped forward, the sun no longer bathing him in its glow. Juliette knew this face instantly. Next to her, Gabriel’s mouth dropped open. Francesca came closer to the door and laughed.
“I see I have been rather speedily replaced.”
“I hope you will wish me well, Cesca, dorogaya?”
The Russian term of endearment grated like nails on a chalkboard. The newcomer bowed over Francesca’s hand before she tugged it out of his long, slim, spidery-looking fingers.
“Never make assumptions where I am concerned.” She gave him the fakest of smiles. “I would wish you to hell if that also didn’t mean that I would wish my dancers there with you, and I’d never do that.”
The man laughed, the sound just as abrasive as his words, and moved farther into the room, the draft of Garnier following him, filling the air up with dust and dread. Next to Juliette, Katarina flinched before becoming absolutely still.
Lalande chose that moment to jump in front of the man and give him an awkward handshake, a hearty pump answered with a barely there, limp-fish palm.
“How gauche of me! How gauche of me. We are in the presence of genius and I have not introduced you. Please forgive me, I have assumed everyone in this room knows who you are. Surely they must.”
He executed a sorry excuse for a half pirouette before turning to the wide-open doors where quite a crowd had gathered.
“My dears, allow me to introduce your new Director of Paris Opera Ballet, Rodion Foltin.”
In her peripheral vision, Juliette caught Katarina biting her lip, her eyes still vacant. In the pouring sunlight, in the crowded room, among the deafening noise of gasps and shouts, Juliette watched a tiny droplet of blood from the bite trickle to the corner of the now oh-so-familiar mouth and tremble there for a moment before disappearing as Katarina licked her dry lips.
As omens went, this one was rather self-explanatory, even to the only non-superstitious ballerina in the room. And as reactions? Juliette wanted to put her fist through the wall and howl from the sheer impotence. She had done everything to keepKatarina safe, including backstabbing her own most precious friend. And judging by Katarina’s reaction to Foltin, it was all for naught. She didn’t look safe. She looked in agony. Juliette had lost her dearest people, and it was all in vain. She closed her eyes and allowed the world to fall apart around her.
20
OF CREATIVE REASONS & ICE CUBES
It fell apart rapidly. Just as Foltin established himself in five minutes flat in Francesca’s office—and Juliette’s brain refused to call it anything else—her world kept subsequently crumbling in tiny little pieces.
First, Gabriel stopped speaking to her. He did not curse her out, unlike Madame Rochefort. But he looked at her with those bright eyes of his and the disappointment in them was so stark, so completely foreign to his angelic countenance, it hurt her to even stand in front of him.
And so, Juliette didn’t. It was relatively easy, as it turned out. The one show they were both involved in,Swan Lake—the revolutionary production that was feted on the streets of Paris as the revival of rebellion in ballet and the push into modernism the stale old Palais Garnier needed—was paused after Francesca’s ouster. Paused indefinitely.
“Creative reasons,” Foltin explained to the company two days after turning Francesca’s Louis XVIII desk into kindling. Granted, the man had been a rubbish king, when all was said and done, but the principle of things remained. When Juliette asked him about the public property and historical value of the antique item he had so cavalierly disposed of, Foltin smiled.
