Calore Dance Academy// Red Queen AU

Chapter 41

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Something in me breaks.

My teardrops beat away at me like water at a dam until all my will, convictions, and promises to myself are gone. And once that dam breaks, the water has nowhere to go but out.

I sob, and my entire body rattles from the force of it. It's uncontrollable, something that only worsens as I try to control myself and realize that I can't. Like so many others in this room, I can't get enough oxygen into my aching lungs. My breaths are anything but even, gulps of air down my throat and heavings out of my chest, inhales and exhales through the hem of my dress that I've brought to my nose and mouth.

But regardless of how many times I try, I can never put the fabric over my eyes, where salt and water make a mess of mascara that isn't proof of it.

I can't willingly bring myself to return to that darkness again, when the gunshots went off and the people began screaming. When I felt irrevocably suffocated and alone and powerless and afraid. Manhattan gleams hazily through my watery eyes. The details might blur, but the lights remain, keeping me from the dark. I focus on that.

Maven's shoulder presses up against mine, and his finger's twitch, wanting to reach out but not knowing how. Somewhere in the midst of shaking, I kicked off my heels and tucked my legs into the skirts of my dress. I'm leaning over myself into a hem that I clutch too desperately, throwing my posture to hell. But when all I hear and see are replicas of myself, my hysterical sobbing and half-fetal position aren't much to be ashamed of.

My partner won't touch me. Not after I flinched under his cool touch to my shoulder and stupidly told him don't. I can't handle it, can't handle him or the idea that he or I deserve it. So instead, he sits next to me without a word, still gazing towards Midtown through the glass as he silently begs me to let him in. But we did this together. We both knew about it, both let it happen. Maven helped it happen. That day in Central Park, he gave Farley blueprints, offered her up all sorts of information about his father's building.

I have to remind myself that he didn't know any better than me.

"Hey."

Cal's voice, quiet at his brother's side, drifts through the air.

The moment that he threw Farley to the ground flashes through my mind a dozen times.

The moment his eyes broke at his mother's name flashes two dozen.

"Hey," Maven returns to his brother. His voice is hoarse.

At Maven's side, Cal takes a seat on the leather arm of the couch. Along with his tux jacket, his bowtie is gone, and the top two buttons of his white dress shirt are undone. He's rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, and his hair, once combed and gelled, looks as though he's run his hands through it a few too many times. After a moment, a glance that reveals what the girl that he waltzed with has become, Cal angles his broad shoulders away, towards the plain wall at our left. The back of his shirt is damp with sweat.

That small motion, the privacy he's offering me by turning away, is awful in its own way.

"Are you okay?" Cal asks Maven.

"I was in one of the elevators," Maven replies. Both of them are quiet, as though I won't hear them if they whisper. I pretend not to. "I didn't see any of it."