One: Anton has been planning this for five years.
Two: I'm not ready.
I reach for my phone, pull up Alexei's number. My cousin, the reformed Bratva king who married a computer genius and somehow convinced half of organized crime to go legitimate. He'll know what to do. He'll have resources, connections, people who can—
My thumb hovers over the call button.
Pride wars with fear, and in the end, pride wins.
I've spent five years building a life that's mine. Five years proving I'm more than a broken ballerina, more than the girl who fell, more than Anton's failed masterpiece. If I call Alexei now, if I admit that I can't handle this alone, then everything I've built means nothing.
I'll just be the damaged cousin who needed saving.
Again.
I put the phone down without calling.
Instead, I pick up the photograph and study Anton's handwriting. The letters are precise, controlled, each stroke deliberate. He always wrote like he danced—with obsessive attention to detail, with the certainty that he was creating something important.
Creating art.
That's what he called it that night. When the paramedics were loading me into the ambulance and the theater was in chaos and my career was bleeding away through my shattered ankle. He leaned close, close enough that only I could hear, and whispered: "You're my greatest work. Beautiful in your brokenness."
I was too shocked, too pain-drunk, too destroyed to respond.
But I remember.
I remember everything.
Lincoln Center awaits.
He wants me to come to him. Wants me to walk into whatever trap he's prepared, whatever performance he's choreographed. Wants me to be the good little ballerina who follows his lead, who lets him partner her one more time.
Wants me to trust him not to drop me again.
Not a chance in hell.
I slip the photograph back into the egg, close it carefully, and lock the whole thing in my office safe. Then I change out of my practice clothes, untie my bloody pointe shoes, and wash my feet in the gallery's small bathroom. The water runs pink.
It always does.
By the time I'm dressed in street clothes—jeans, a black sweater, boots that hide my limp—it's nearly two in the morning. The gallery is silent except for the hum of climate control and my own heartbeat.
I check every lock twice. Test every window. Review the security cameras to make sure the courier is really gone, that there's no one lurking in the shadows, waiting.
The footage shows me dancing. Shows me alone and broken and beautiful in the way Anton always said I was.
I delete it.
Then I walk upstairs to my apartment—the small one-bedroom space above the gallery that's mine and mine alone—and I can’t sleep.
Because Anton is in New York.
Because Act II is coming, whether I'm ready or not.
And because somewhere in this city, a man who once loved me enough to destroy me is preparing his next performance.
I just have to decide if I'm brave enough to face him.
