I freeze, one foot still en pointe, the other suspended in passé. My heart hammers. The gallery's been closed for six hours. Nobody should be here. NobodyknowsI'm here except—
The knock comes again. Louder. More insistent.
I lower my foot carefully, ignoring the spike of pain, and move toward the front windows. The street outside is dark except for the streetlights, and a black town car is idling at the curb. Not a cab. Something nicer. More expensive.
More dangerous.
A courier stands at my door, holding a package. He's wearing a uniform I don't recognize, and his face is professionally blank in the way that means he's being paid very well to not ask questions about midnight deliveries to closed art galleries.
I unlock the door but keep the chain on. "Can I help you?"
"Delivery for Sonya Morozova." He holds up the package. It's small, wrapped in brown paper, marked with red letters: URGENT - HAND DELIVERY ONLY.
Every instinct in me screams 'don't take it.'
I take it anyway.
"Sign here." He produces a tablet, and I scrawl my name across the screen with a finger that's suddenly unsteady. He nods once, pockets the tablet, and walks back to the town car without another word.
The car pulls away from the curb and disappears into Manhattan traffic.
I'm alone again, holding a package I didn't order, delivered at midnight by a courier who didn't ask why I was in my gallery wearing bloody pointe shoes.
I should call the police.
I should call Alexei—my cousin, my family's connection to the Bratva world I've spent five years trying to avoid.
Instead, I close the door, lock it, and carry the package to my office.
Inside the brown paper is a wooden box. Expensive. Hand-carved with a pattern I recognize—traditional Russian folk art, the kind that costs thousands of dollars and takes months to create.
Inside the box is a Fabergé egg.
Not one of mine. Not from my current exhibition. This is something else—older, rarer, worth more money than most people see in a lifetime. The craftsmanship is extraordinary, the detail obsessive. It sits in its velvet nest like a jeweled secret.
But it's what'sinsidethe egg that makes my blood freeze.
I open it with trembling fingers. The mechanism is smooth, perfectly engineered. Inside, nestled against more velvet, is a photograph.
Me. On stage. The night my ankle shattered.
I'm mid-fall in the photo, my face twisted in shock and pain, my body already collapsing toward the stage floor. The photographer caught the exact moment before impact—themoment when I was still whole, still a principal dancer, still someone with a future.
Beneath the photo is a note. Handwritten. In a script I recognize because I spent two years as his partner, two years watching him write choreography notes, performance critiques, and love letters I never wanted.
Ready for Act II? Lincoln Center awaits. - A
Anton.
Anton is in New York.
My past just found me, and it brought a Fabergé egg with a photograph and a promise of something worse than the fall that ended my career.
Act II.
In ballet, Act II of Giselle is when the Wilis appear—ghosts of betrayed women who dance men to death. When the dead rise from their graves and take revenge on the living.
I stare at the photograph, at my own frozen face caught in the moment before everything shattered, and realize two things:
