Prologue
The vernissage was her triumph. Her last.
The “L’Art et L’Âme” gallery hummed, a low vibration, like a harp string stretched taut, seconds from snapping—anxiety masked as anticipation. The air was thick, almost tangible: Veuve Clicquot hissing with bubbles of vanity; expensive perfumes—clouds of Chanel No. 5, heavy trails of Tom Ford, sharp hits of oud—twisting into a suffocating cocoon. And above it all, the scent of success, thin as gunpowder before the shot. It always smelled the same: tanned leather from new shoes and the printer’s ink on fresh euros.
Olivia Duran glided through this crowd—bankers with waxy faces polished by Botox to an inhuman sheen; collectors with hungry eyes and nervous fingers instinctively reaching for frames; art critics whose jaws simultaneously ground canapés and reputations. She moved with the measured grace of a ballerina in a minefield—the proprietress, whose control over this small world was absolute.
Every detail was subjugated. The sculptures stood with the precision of surgical instruments. The Sancerre breathed at a perfect eight degrees. The light—warm velvet on the walls, an icy blade on the metal—sculpted drama from the shadows.
She wasn't just the owner. She was the main exhibit. A flawless installation titled, Olivia Duran, Thirty-Four, Absolute Success.
Cold perfection.
And she didn't know that in twenty minutes—or was it an eternity?—a hammer would strike that perfection. Methodically. Ruthlessly. With the quiet triumph of an expert discovering a masterful fake beneath a layer of varnish.
He appeared from nowhere. Or rather, from her blind spot—that space to her right and rear where the brain stops registering threats.
Amidst the colorful, animated crowd, he was an island of absolute stillness. A sculpture of flesh. His impeccably tailored dark suit—not black, but something deeper: the color of wet asphalt, of a starless midnight—seemed less like clothing and more like a second skin, stretched taut over danger.
He held no glass. He wasn't speaking. He wasn't pretending to study the art.
He simply stood by her centerpiece—an abstract sculpture of intertwined chromed-metal ribbons titled Echo—and looked.
Not at the sculpture.
At his reflection in it.
Olivia caught him with her peripheral vision—that special radar a gallerist develops to distinguish a serious buyer from a tourist. This man radiated money. Old money, the kind that didn't announce itself. Dangerous money.
