Chapter 1
Indigo
3 Years Later
The lights in the Velvet Room didn't just hit me—they worshipped me.
Gold beams sliced across my sweat-slick skin like they were trying to carve their names into my flesh. The heat of them kissed every curve, every dip, every place where flesh met bone. I could feel them dragging down my spine, pooling in the hollow of my throat, settling between my breasts like they'd found a home there.
When I stepped onto that stage, the heartbeat of the room shifted to match mine.
Every single soul in there started breathing on my count.
I had it like that.
I'd built a reputation in this city brick by brick, dollar by dollar, dance by motherfucking dance. I wasn't just a girl on a pole. I was a masterpiece in motion—a fantasy wrapped in mahogany skin and enough rhinestones to blind a hater. My body was architecture. My movement was poetry. My existence on that stage was a middle finger to every man who'd ever tried to own me.
I stood there for a heartbeat. Letting them look. Letting them ache. Letting them see exactly what they'd never touch.
Then I went to work.
The chrome pole was cold against my palms. I liked the shock of it—the way it woke up every nerve in my fingers, my arms, my shoulders. I climbed like it was a ladder to heaven, hand over hand, my muscles rippling with precision I'd bled for. The air got thinner at the top. The lights got brighter. The music got louder, bass thrumming through my bones like a second heartbeat.
I hooked a knee. Let the world spin.
The faces below blurred into nothing but greed—open mouths, hungry eyes, hands reaching for something they'd never catch. I spun until I couldn't tell where I ended and the room began.
Then I dropped.
Fifteen feet of freefall. Wind rushing past my ears. My heart in my throat. The stage rushing up to meet me like a lover I hadn't seen in years.
I stopped a literal inch from the floor.
My thighs screamed. My core locked. My body remembered every hour of training, every fall, every bruise that bloomed purple and blue across my skin like a roadmap of my own determination.
I landed in a split so sharp it could've cut the floor.
My eyes locked on the front row. I watched their jaws hit the table one by one, like dominoes made of desperation.
They were hypnotized. Entranced. Reduced.
Turned the fuck on.
I smiled.
I wasn't Indigo anymore.
I wasn't "Little Bird."
The girl Malachai once owned had died three years ago in a parking lot, bleeding out on gravel while her husband's enemies closed in. I buried her myself. No funeral. No flowers. Just the slow, deliberate work of becoming someone else.
In this zip code, I was the Midnight Ballerina.
I sucked in a deep breath of smoke-heavy air and laughed out loud as the storm hit.
Hundreds and fifties fluttered through the air like blue-and-green confetti, sticking to my damp skin, catching in my hair, settling between my breasts like offerings at an altar I'd built for myself. I moved through the paper rain, arched my back until my hair brushed the stage, and felt the power of being exactly who I knew I was.
Not who he wanted me to be.