The music cut out.
Not faded. Cut. One second the room was all snarling bass and broken bells, the next there was only the sound of bare feet on wood and the ragged pull of breath.
Ami had been mid-spin, arms flung wide, when something inside the system simply… let go. The playlist died mid-beat. The sudden silence rang louder than any drop.
Alice came up gasping.
The body was still moving — hips loose, shoulders rolling, sweat cooling on skin — but the movement was no longer hers. It belonged to someone else now. Someone smaller. Someone who had never been allowed to dance like that.
Alice stumbled, caught the edge of the dresser, and stared at her own reflection in the dark window. Hair wild. Cheeks flushed. Shaved temples gleaming. She looked nothing like the polished girl on the posters.
Her lips parted.
And the memory arrived whole.
Not the recording session. Not the studio with its glass walls and Maman's approving nods.
The *stage*.
Hundreds of them. Arena after arena. The lights always the same — violet and gold, sweeping like slow poison. Twenty, thirty, fifty thousand voices singing along before she even reached the chorus. She remembered the weight of the microphone in her hand, the way the crowd swayed as one, the way their eyes glazed when she hit the bridge.
*Silk and venom… soft and slow…*
She had smiled while she sang it. That perfect, camera-trained smile. She had tilted her head exactly the way they taught her, let her voice curl around every line like it was candy.
*Feel the fever start to grow…*
She had believed it was just a song.
A sexy, dark little fantasy for the fans.
Maman had said so. Papa had said so.
Whenever she asked what the words really meant, Mircalla would slide in behind her eyes and whisper, *Don't ruin it, princess. Just look pretty and sing.*
So she sang.
Night after night she poured the venom into fifty thousand open mouths and called it entertainment.
Alice's knees gave out. She slid down the side of the dresser until she was sitting on the floor, back against the wood, legs splayed like a broken doll.
Her hands came up to cover her mouth, but the sob tore through anyway — raw, ugly, nothing like the crystalline voice the world paid to hear.
"I was… I was feeding it to them," she whispered. The words scraped her throat. "All those people. All those kids screaming my name. I was putting the poison inside them and I didn't even *know*."
Tears spilled hot and fast. She didn't try to stop them.
She remembered the bridge — the part where the lights would drop to a single blood-red spot and the entire arena would fall into a trance-like hush while she sang:
*Closer now… Don't resist… Every breath… A serpent's kiss…*
She had thought it was romantic.
They had made her the vector.
A small, broken sound escaped her — half laugh, half wail.
"I thought it was just a song…"
The body that had danced like it was finally free was now rocking slowly on the cold floor, arms wrapped tight around her ribs, shoulders shaking with the kind of grief that has no spotlight and no encore.
Alice cried for every stage she had ever stood on.
For every fan who had left the concert carrying something they would never name.
For the girl who had smiled and sparkled and never once been allowed to understand what she was selling.
And somewhere deep inside, Mia watched in silence, feeling every tear as if it were her own.