The coffin lid didn't just open. It flew.

It crashed into a stand of white lilies, sending the vase shattering to the marble floor. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent hall.

"Seal it!" Hermina screamed. Her composure cracked. "It's escaping gas! Contamination risk!"

Two security guards lunged forward, their hands reaching for the wood.

Delphine sat up.

The air rushed into her lungs, cold and sweet. She gasped, loud and wet, like a drowning woman breaking the surface.

The room gasped back.

She saw them. The sea of black suits and designer dresses. The horrified faces of Manhattan's elite.

She looked at Hermina. Hermina was pale, her hand clutching her pearls.

"Oh, my poor Delphine!" Hermina wailed, stepping forward, her eyes hard as flint. "She's having a post-mortem spasm! Don't look!"

Delphine didn't look at Hermina. She looked at the ceiling. She tilted her head to the side, twitching.

"Hehehe."

The laugh bubbled out of her. She scrambled over the edge of the coffin, her limbs flailing. She hit the cold floor with her bare feet. Her knees buckled, and she let them. She crawled.

She moved like a broken doll, jerky and wrong.

A woman in the front row-Mrs. Vanderwall-shrieked and backed away, knocking over her chair.

Delphine turned her head sharply to look at her. She put a finger to her lips.

"Shh," she whispered, her eyes wide and unblinking. "The bad man is sleeping."

Hermina signaled the butler. A sharp, cutting motion across her throat.

The butler nodded. He motioned to three large men in black suits. They moved toward Delphine, a wall of muscle.

Delphine watched them come. She didn't run. Not yet.

When the first guard reached for her arm, she went boneless. She dropped to the floor, sliding through his grip like wet soap.

She wrapped her arms around his leg. She buried her face in his trousers.

"Don't eat me!" she screamed, her voice shrill. "The apples are poisoned! The bubbles bite!"

Hermina flinched. She knew what Delphine meant. The champagne.

"Cedric?"

The voice was frail, trembling.

Delphine looked up. Dame Beatrice Hays. Cedric's grandmother. She was clutching her chest, staring at the open coffin. "Is my grandson alive too?"

Delphine heard Cedric's name and she let out a piercing wail. She rolled on the floor, thrashing, kicking her legs.

"Dead! Dead! All fall down!" she chanted.

The guards hesitated. They were trained to handle drunks and paparazzi, not a grieving, resurrected, insane heiress. Liability was written all over their faces.

"Don't hurt her!" Hermina shouted, playing the role of the saint. "She's sick! Her mind is broken!"

She was giving them permission to grab Delphine.

Delphine saw the gap. Under the long table holding the hors d'oeuvres.

She scrambled on all fours, diving under the tablecloth. She kicked upward as she went. Trays of caviar and silver platters crashed to the floor.

Glass shattered. People screamed.

Flashes went off. The press. Hermina had invited the press to document her tragedy. Now they were documenting her nightmare.

"Cut the feed!" Hermina roared. "Confiscate all phones! Now!"

The lights died.

The hall plunged into gloom, lit only by the red glow of the exit signs.

Delphine crouched in the darkness, breathing hard, smelling the shrimp and the fear.

Game on.

The darkness was Delphine's friend.

She pressed her back against the table leg. She could hear the heavy boots of the security guards crunching on the broken glass.

"She's under the table," one of them whispered. "Grab her legs."

Delphine wasn't under the table anymore.

She had rolled out the other side the moment the lights died. She was crouching behind a velvet curtain near the window.

She remembered the self-defense classes she took at the clinic. The instructor was an ex-Marine with a limp. Chaos is a ladder, he used to say. Climb it.

She grabbed a handful of walnuts from a spilled bowl on the floor. She tossed them hard toward the left side of the room.

Clatter. Crack.

"Over there!" A guard lunged to the left.

Delphine moved right.

She kept her movements erratic. She hummed a broken tune, "London Bridge is falling down," stopping and starting, throwing her voice.

A guard loomed out of the shadows. He reached for her.

Delphine didn't pull away. She stepped into him. She hooked her foot behind his ankle and shoved his chest.

He went down hard, crashing into a tower of champagne glasses.

Crash! Boom!

"Yay!" Delphine clapped her hands, dancing a little jig in the dark. "Make it go boom!"

"Just sedate her! Now!" Hermina's voice was a screech in the dark.

Delphine saw the glint of steel. The butler was moving toward her, a syringe in his hand. He wasn't hesitating like the guards.

She needed a shield.

She saw Senator Miller standing frozen near a pillar.

She sprinted toward him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

"Daddy?" she sobbed, wiping her snot on his expensive suit. "Is that you? Did you bring the ponies?"

The Senator stiffened. "Delphine? My dear, please..."

The butler stopped. He couldn't stick a needle in Delphine while she was hugging a U.S. Senator.

Out of the corner of her eye, Delphine saw Beatrice moving toward the coffin. She was going to check on Cedric.

Hermina saw her too. She turned away from Delphine, moving to intercept the old woman.

No. Delphine needed Cedric found. She needed a witness.

She let go of the Senator. She dropped to all fours and galloped-actually galloped-toward the wall.

The butler lunged, the needle missing her neck by an inch.

She grabbed a heavy silver candelabra from a side table.

She didn't swing it at the butler. She swung it at the wall. Specifically, at the red box labeled 'FIRE'.

Smash.

The alarm shrieked. A deafening, pulsing wail that vibrated in her teeth.

And then, the hiss.

The sprinklers overhead burst to life.

Water, cold and relentless, poured down on them. It soaked the silk dresses, the wool suits, the expensive hairdos.

The room erupted into chaos. People were slipping, screaming, running for the doors.

Delphine stood in the rain, the water plastering her hair to her skull. She watched the makeup run down Hermina's face like black tears.

She stuck her tongue out at Hermina.

Then she pointed a shaking finger at the coffin.

Hermina looked like a wet rat. Her silk dress clung to her body, revealing the rigid shape of her corset.

She waved the guards away. They were useless in the stampede anyway.

She walked toward Delphine. She opened her arms. Her face twisted into a mask of tragic love.

"Oh, my poor baby!" she shouted over the alarm. "You are hallucinating! Come to Mommy!"

Delphine stood shivering. She let her shoulders slump. She looked at the floor.

Hermina got close. Too close.

She turned her body so the remaining guests couldn't see her right hand. The hand sliding a fresh syringe out of her sleeve.

"It will all be over soon," Hermina whispered.

Delphine stepped into her embrace. She hugged Hermina tight.

"I missed you," she whimpered.

She felt Hermina's muscles tense as she prepared to stab the needle into Delphine's side.

Delphine's left hand shot down and clamped onto Hermina's wrist. Her grip was iron.

Hermina gasped. She looked down at Delphine. Delphine's eyes weren't vacant anymore. They were clear. Cold.

Delphine leaned up to Hermina's ear.

"Mommy's bubbles bite," she whispered. "They make you go sleepy-bye."

Hermina's eyes widened in shock.

Delphine didn't give her time to process. She dug her thumb into the nerve cluster on the inside of Hermina's wrist. She twisted, using a technique she'd practiced a hundred times on a rubber dummy.

A sharp crack.

A sickening, wet click. Hermina dropped the syringe as her fingers went numb.

Hermina opened her mouth to scream.

"Mommy!" Delphine wailed, louder than Hermina's cry. "Don't let the monsters get me!"

She shoved Hermina away from her.

Hermina fell to her knees, clutching her useless hand. She was hyperventilating.

Delphine dropped next to her. She patted Hermina's wet cheek, digging her nails in slightly.

"Witch!" she shrieked, scrambling backward on her butt. "The witch bit me!"

She held up her arm. There was a red mark where she had pinched herself earlier.

The guests who hadn't fled stopped staring. They saw a grieving stepmother attacking a traumatized girl.

"Hermina!" Senator Miller yelled. "Control yourself!"

Hermina couldn't speak. She was rocking back and forth, the pain blinding her.

Beatrice was at the coffin. No one was stopping her now.

She reached in.

Delphine stopped breathing. She watched Beatrice's hand touch Cedric's face.

If he was dead, this was all for nothing. If he was dead, she was just a crazy widow who was about to go to jail.

Beatrice gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth.