Page 1 of Ruthless Knot

Prologue: Curtain Call For The Damned

~SERAPHINE~

The stage is mine.

It's always been mine, even when they tried to rip it from my bleeding fingers.

Even when they murdered my parents on a stage just like this one—execution-style, spotlight bright, their blood mixing with the rosin dust while I watched from the wings, powerless andsmall.

But I'm not small anymore.

The music starts—that slowed reverb track I've had on repeat for weeks, the one that crawls under my skin and makes a home in the hollow spaces where my heart used to live.

Summer Walker's voice filters through the speakers I rigged hours ago, each word stretched and distorted until it sounds like a ghost singing through water.

Oh, it's over...

My mismatched ballet shoes—one carnelian red like arterial spray, one dusty rose pink like the blush I used to wear when Istill cared about being pretty—press against the scuffed wooden stage.

The red one first.

Always the red one first, because beginnings should be written in blood.

I rise onto pointe.

Pain lances through my toes, sharp and grounding andperfect. The kind of pain that reminds me I'm still capable of feeling something beyond the rage that's become my baseline existence. My arms lift slowly, fingers extending into that perfect alignment Madame Chernova used to demand before I watched her die alongside my parents.

All the mess, over. All the stress, over...

The reverb stretches the words into a lament, and I move with them. A slow, controlled pirouette that would make my dead instructor weep if she could see me now—if she could see what her star pupil has become.

I spin faster.

The theater around me blurs into streaks of shadow and dying gold—peeling paint, moth-eaten curtains, empty seats stretching back into darkness. And the cages. God, thecages. Golden bird cages suspended from the ceiling on chains that creak with the weight of the bodies inside.

My gallery. My art. My fuck-you to everyone who thought they could break me.

Oh, no more crying in public...

The song's beat drops lower, that bass reverberating through the floorboards, and I drop with it. Grand plié, sinking toward the earth before exploding upward in a grand jeté that sends me soaring. For one crystalline moment, I'm flying—untouchable, free,alive.

Then I land.

One foot. Two. A chassé into a series of fouettés that blur the world into nothing but motion and rage and the ghost of who I used to be.

Thirty-two rotations.

The same number of times my father begged for mercy before they shot him in the head.

The same number of days I spent in the isolation chamber when I first arrived at this nightmare academy, carving tallies into my thigh just to remember I was stillhere.

The same number of reasons I have to make them all fuckingpay.

Our love bipolar, finally over...

Bipolar. That's what the academy shrinks call me. Bipolar, PTSD, attachment disorder, psychotic breaks—they have so many pretty labels for what happens when you watch your entire world get slaughtered and somehow survive it. When you become something new. Somethingferal.

My costume is a desecration of everything I used to worship.