It wasn't quite real. It seemed like a dream, a brilliant and beautiful dream with swirls of colors and enchanting music and the thrill of being beautiful. She'd never looked so lovely, it seemed, or laughed so readily. Ilona was the jewel of the Bolshoi Ballet, in her third leading role of the season, Ekaterina be damned, and they were celebrating. First the dress shop, to get her something nicer than the mostly-homemade things she had, then the opera (Carmen, and it was so much more wonderful than she'd imagined).
She didn't mind, tonight, the whispers that followed them. Few people recognized her, but the rumors spread. Ilona Sergievsky, she's the daughter of that chess player who defected, on the arm of a KGB agent? Some words were proper, some were crude, but tonight it didn't matter. Tonight, she was beautiful, and special, and treasured, and she loved ever moment of it. Nothing mattered but the fact that she would dance Cinderella, and Juliet after that.
There was dinner, after the opera, in a quiet little restaurant they'd been to before. He held her hand across the table and she didn't even mind, smiling at him and losing herself briefly in the memory of the first night they'd come here, when she'd slipped just a little and he'd brought her someplace quiet so she could relax. Tonight, though, they whispered and laughed and drank too much champagne, and Ilona forgot for a while that she hated him, and that he'd ruined her father. Then they left, and he hesitated, and asked in a voice that seemed almost shy if she'd like to come back to his home for drinks. And even though it was a very obvious line, and she knew what would probably happen, her blood was warm and bubbly, so she smiled and acquiesced and followed him.
They made love, that night, and that's when the dream and the fairy tale ended. He was gentle, yes, and kind, but after he'd fallen asleep with his arm round her waist, she slipped out of bed. Naked, she felt too exposed, so she grabbed what she could find - the dress shirt he'd worn, too big but enough to cover her - and locked herself in the bathroom.
And she cried.
She cried because she was confused. She cried because she felt she had betrayed her papa, the dearest person in her world. She cried because it had hurt, and she hadn't expected it to. But the reason she cried most she couldn't put words to. It just felt that she had lost something, given something away that she could never have back, and suddenly she wanted it back, more than she'd ever wanted anything else.
After a time, she stopped crying. She blew her nose, washed her face, and reemerged from the bathroom into the bedroom that had suddenly become so familiar by sheer virtue of the fact that she had lost something important there. She took off the oversized dress shirt, slipped back under Alexander's arm.
She didn't sleep that night.