Glitter (Glitter Duology #1)(40)

TO CALL ME homely when I was fourteen would have been a compliment. I’d grown so quickly I could scarcely put one foot in front of the other without falling to my knobby knees. Add to that my rather unsightly case of acne and a nose that already strained the word dignified, and I was the epitome of the woes of puberty.

I was normal.

Which would have been fine if my father hadn’t just inherited his position at court. Suddenly, the possibility of not merely a good marriage, but a grand or even royal one, turned my mother into a person I’d never known. Before my coming out, she took me to several dentists, surgeons, and dermatologists in Paris. She also secretly enrolled me in private lessons with Giovanni di Parma. An instructor of prima ballerinas, he was skeptical but intrigued when my mother approached him to teach me, essentially, Elegance: The Advanced Course.

But it ended up being so much more than that. He taught me what my newfound beauty and grace were. And what they weren’t.

“These are your tools,” he said to me one day after I broke down and told him the whole plot. “Your mother can’t use them if you do not allow her to. She can force you to appear a certain way, to acquire these graces and skills, but if the desire to entrap this King doesn’t come from within, it will provoke a passing base instinct in him, no more.”

And he was right. I looked the way my mother expected, carried myself with the grace and poise Giovanni had given me, but though my mother threw me in the King’s path at every opportunity, I never endeavored to win him. And he hardly noticed me.

Until that night when he had no choice.

Since then, the false perfection my mother bought me, the trained grace worked into me so strenuously that it appears utterly natural, have become my armor. As the King’s affianced, I’ve been prematurely thrust into an arena of social predators, and it’s helpful that, between my height and my carefully learned poise, I do seem older. The truth is that the court of King Wyndham trades mainly in favor, esteem, and beauty. All of which I have in abundance, thanks to my sociopathic mother, who thinks I’m her lever. I hate it as much as I depend on it, and if I’m honest, I often wish I were bucktoothed and awkward again.

It’s precisely ten to three when we arrive at a lovely building in the Rue de la Garenne. The words Giovanni’s School of Ballet for Fine Entertainment are etched, in French, into a marble fa?ade, and the sight brings to the surface emotions I’ve been stifling for months.

A security troll, surely assigned by the King to spy on me, opens the car door and extends a hand. Giovanni himself awaits at the entrance—a lean man with a typical dancer’s build, three centimeters shorter than me. He flashes a smile before bowing formally and kissing my gloved fingertips.

I glance at my chaperon. “Knock to fetch me back at four. Not a minute sooner, or later.” Without waiting for a response, I precede Giovanni into the studio.

Pretense collapses with the closing of the door.

“Darling!” Giovanni cries.

I toss back my veil as he pulls me close, and I squeeze his neck so hard I wonder if I might be hurting him—but I can’t make myself let go.

“I’ve missed you, little faerie,” Giovanni says, gripping my hands in his. Despite his having been born and raised in Italy, his English is impeccable—I doubt there’s a European language he doesn’t speak—but unmistakably accented. He hesitates. “A faerie Queen now?” he asks, peering at my face as though he could stare into me. His consideration never fails. Unlike nearly everyone else in the world, he doesn’t assume congratulations are in order; he asks.

He’s always been that way. He saw through my mother almost immediately. Lessons became a haven of sorts after that. I could confide my troubles, and he’d tell me tales of his days on the road with traveling dance companies. It was a whole other world, there in that little dance studio. Not that the work was easy. Giovanni’s not one to slack in his responsibilities, and he demanded perfection. I often went home with aching muscles, only to wake even sorer the following day.

But when my mother asked if I was ready, Giovanni continued to tell her no, even when I was. As a fringe benefit, the extra practice carried me beyond mere proficiency, all the way to the supposedly natural elegance for which I’ve earned a reputation at court.

It was the least of what he gave me.

I blink furiously against sudden tears, and my Lens responds with the time.

I have five minutes.

“Giovanni, I’ve come to you because I trust you more than anyone else in this city. No, in the entire world.” Sad how true that is.

His soft blue eyes sober. “What can I do for you? Your com was most…general,” he says with a gentle smile.

“Pretend you’re giving me further instruction in grace and poise.”

“But you don’t need—”

“And do not ask questions when I come to you.” I press on before I can lose my nerve.

He pauses. Looks me up and down. I’m in a black robe à la Piémontaise today, simply cut. Subtle, if there is such a thing in Baroque fashion. Not severe enough to indicate mourning—not with my daring décolletage and dark green satin trim—but plain enough that Giovanni will deduce that I’m attempting to blend in. “How often will you be coming?”

“We’ll have a standing weekly appointment on the day of your choosing.” And though I know he’d be willing to do it for nothing, I add, “Your standard fee will be deposited, as before.”