Chapter 5

The words had barely left my mouth before Ethan's hand came across my face.

My ears rang.

His expression was full of disgust. "Do you have to keep pushing her? What happened to you?"

It would've been almost funny, if my ears hadn't been ringing so badly I could barely make out what he was saying.

Yvonne didn't have to do anything.

All she had to do was sit in that wheelchair and cry, and these three men would march into battle for her without a second thought.

When she first came to work for me, Yvonne was practically glued to my side — twenty-four hours a day, diligent and eager.

Whenever I spent time with Ethan and the others, Yvonne was always there too.

The balance the four of us had built over the years began to crack.

My dance career was going well. Within a year, I was headlining solo tours.

That meant I spent more and more time away from the city.

Yvonne always found a reason to stay behind. She never came on tour with me.

I wasn't happy about her work ethic, but I let it go.

Then, little by little, I noticed the group chat the four of us had shared for years going quiet.

It didn't take long to figure out why.

Yvonne had started a separate group chat with all three of them. They were more active in that one than they'd ever been in ours.

I could accept Yvonne becoming part of our circle. What I couldn't accept was being the one pushed out of it.

Especially when one of those three people was my boyfriend.

I picked a fight with Ethan. Desperate and furious, I pulled a stupid stunt — fake blood, trying to scare him into paying attention.

When he saw through it, the look in his eyes was like looking at a stranger. "Funny. I never noticed how unhinged you were until now."

After that, Ethan and I fell into a cold war. I stopped talking to Sebastian and Caleb too.

Then came another tour. Yvonne refused to come, as always — but this time I didn't give her a choice. I made her come with me.

That rehearsal was when everything went wrong.

My opening number required me to descend on a wire harness from nearly fifty feet up.

When Yvonne helped me check the rigging, something felt off. I told her multiple times to tighten it.

She kept insisting it was fine.

The rest of the crew had left for their dinner break. It was just the two of us in the theater.

"Kayla, if you're scared, I'll go up with you," she offered, her voice sweet.

She strapped into a harness, but she never actually rose with me.

I went up alone.

At the top, the rigging gave way — exactly as I had feared.

The safety lock had come undone. I fell from that height — five stories up — and hit the stage.

I didn't die. But it felt like every bone in my body had come apart. My screams echoed through the entire theater.

Yvonne called a cab and dragged me into it, taking me to a hospital on the far end of the city.

The fall was severe. The delay made it worse. My legs couldn't be saved.

The amputation happened on my twenty-eighth birthday.

The only person with me that day was Yvonne.

She told me Ethan and the others were busy. That they couldn't make it.

I was devastated, but I was too far gone in grief to dwell on it.

Two days before I was discharged, Yvonne disappeared.

I came home on prosthetics, and the police were waiting for me.

Ethan, Sebastian, and Caleb had turned me in — together.

Their story: driven by jealousy, I had attempted to kill Yvonne. The attempt failed, but left her permanently disabled.

I was drowning in grief and had no way to prove anything. Before they took me away, I showed them the prosthetics one last time.

They weren't moved. They mocked me instead.

My head was spinning now. My vision was going white at the edges.

Blood loss. A body that had never really recovered.

I passed out on the spot.

As the darkness closed in, I heard Ethan's voice — lazy, contemptuous.