“Troy and Ivan, you are safe, and can leave the stage,” said Brenna. “Anders—”

“Shut up!” Anders whirled on her, suddenly scowling, brows drawing toward his nose and mouth twisting into a sneer. Brenna took a half-step backward, looking as stunned as I felt. “You stupid bitch, shut up! You always liked Valerie! You probably told the judges to save her! But what, you couldn’t be bothered to save me at the same time?”

“Anders, calm down,” said Adrian. “We know you’re upset, but that’s no call for that sort of language.”

“Yeah, because we’re live on the air,” murmured Malena. She had appeared at my elbow, working her way through the crowd of stunned and staring dancers. Her eyes were fixed, like everyone else’s, on the stage. “Swearing gets us big FCC fines, and too much could get us put on a tape delay. Not good. Not the sort of thing that makes the sponsors happy. Did you hit him in the head backstage or something? Boy’s having some sort of meltdown.”

“Chernobyl is a go,” I whispered, turning back to the stage.

Anders switched the target of his rage from Brenna to Adrian, glaring daggers at the head judge. “I’m a better dancer than either of those assholes you just saved and you know it. You’re trying to cover your asses because you don’t want a tapper to win—you don’t want me to win. Good thing it doesn’t matter, huh? This show is nothing. You people are nothing.”

“Anders—” began Adrian.

“Shut up, Dad!” shouted Anders.

Silence descended over the theater, broken a split second later by Lindy’s hushed exclamation of, “Holy shit.”

Anders wasn’t finished. “You know, I let you convince me to pretend we weren’t related, because it ‘wouldn’t be fair’ if people knew I was your kid. No one would believe I was as good as I am, even though they’d see me dancing with their own eyes. You didn’t stick around to raise me, but you stuck your dick in my mom once, so I guess that means there’s no way I could have gotten here on my own merits. Right? I let you ignore me and talk down to me and treat me like garbage, and for what? So you can eliminate me when we’re right on the edge of getting everything we ever wanted? I was going to save your show once I had unspeakable power, you asshole. Your ratings have been sliding for the last two years. I was going to make you. But now you’re going to die with the rest.”

“Adrian, is this true?” demanded Brenna. “Is he really your son?”

“Way to focus on the scandal and not the implication of mass murder,” I said. I didn’t have a gun. My dress was too skimpy to conceal one, and the tango had required me to kick my legs around too much for me to have strapped anything big enough to matter to my legs. I reached behind myself and drew one of the throwing knives from under my bra.

Malena looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and amazement. “Do you go anywhere unarmed?”

“The bathroom sometimes, if I know I’m on a secure property,” I said. The knife was small enough to conceal in the palm of my hand. I held it there, tense and waiting for the moment when I’d need to let it go.

“Fuck you,” snarled Anders. He grabbed Lyra, who’d been standing in stunned silence throughout his outburst. She squeaked as he jerked her against his chest. “Fuck you all.”

“That is quite enough,” snapped Adrian. “You will stop that, right now. You will be silent, and you will get off of my stage. I am ashamed to call you my son. I refuse to call you my son. You’re never going to work in this town again.”

“Wow, Dad, way to embrace the cliché.” Anders slid a hand between Lyra and his chest. The gesture was surprisingly familiar. I knew it. Why did I know it? Why—

He pulled his hand back into the open. He was holding a knife, a wickedly curved thing that looked like it had been designed for use in a butcher’s shop.

Oh. That was why.

“Didn’t have to go this way,” said Anders, and jerked the knife across Lyra’s throat in a hard arc, severing her jugular and carotid veins in one continuous motion. Blood sprayed everywhere, splattering the stage. Lyra jerked like she’d been shocked, her hands going to the wound. There was nothing she could have done: the blood was coming too fast, and she couldn’t possibly stop it. She didn’t even have the chance to scream.

I screamed for her. I was already moving, my heels finding little purchase on the blood-slick stairs to the stage as I thundered toward Anders. My knife flew straight and true, catching him in the wrist. He swore and dropped his own knife. It landed in a pool of Lyra’s blood.