This auction was serious business.
The gala attendees were enthusiastic and brutally competitive, and Theo was no exception. He bid on—and won—an art piece by a relative unknown early on, explaining to her in a low voice that he knew of the artist he’d bought and they’d likely take off in the next few years, so what he’d gotten was actually a steal. Plus, the money went to a good cause and he was also keeping up pretenses.
Who would suspect a bidder in the auction was secretly one of its entrants?
The façade Theo kept up appeared to work like a charm. Most of the people who’d stopped by their table really seemed to believe he didn’t work—that he was just a spoiled trust fund kid with a casual interest in art and philanthropy, and that was it. Things couldn’t be further from the truth.
After about an hour, the final listed piece sold, but instead of raising the lights, the auctioneer held his hands up. The crowd, some of whom had obviously been angling to leave and had already risen, paused at their tables in surprise. Others, the serious collectors who might have heard the rumors Theo’s lawyer had spread, leaned forward in anticipation, their excitement palpable.
Theo merely folded his hands pensively over his mouth. His face was unreadable, but he wasn’t fooling her: he fidgeted the way he always did when he was anxious, his leg bouncing up and down, one finger tapping at his lips.
He was afraid this piece would be a failure, the same way his last one had been.
“Now, everyone,” the auctioneer said, “you might have thoughtthe bidding was over, but we have one more special, surprise piece up for grabs by a local artist you may have heard of: Lightm4st3r.”
Whispers and murmurs swept through the ballroom like wind rushing through trees.
He gestured theatrically behind him, and two men wheeled a platform out from behind a partition at the back of the stage. Theo’s sculpture was covered with a tarp, but the only thing it did was conceal the shape of the piece. Whatever he’d made was well over six feet tall and sprawled almost as wide at the base.
“It’s a last-minute entry we received this morning, benefiting two very deserving foundations. Fifty percent of the proceeds from the sale will go to A Home For Juliette, an organization dedicated to improving the lives and living conditions of foster children across America. The other fifty percent are for Fostering Freedom, which provides college funding, tutoring, and support to foster students fresh out of the system who go on to pursue their undergraduate degrees.”
What?
Audrey whipped her head over to find Theo watching her closely, a tiny satisfied smile concealed beneath a seemingly pensive finger.
I love you, he mouthed.
This was for her.
This whole thing was for her.
If she was as determined to kill him tonight as he kept claiming, then he seemed even more dead set on making her cry.
And this time, he won.
Her lip quivered and she sniffed, one traitorous tear escaping the jail she’d tried to confine it to. Theo leaned over and swept it away with his thumb. “Don’t cry, Miss Adams,” he whispered. But that only made it worse. She choked back a sob, and Theo pressed akiss just below her ear before pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket and gently dabbing her cheeks with it. “The fun’s only just begun. You don’t want to miss what happens next.”
“The piece is a neon sculpture, so please be patient while we turn off the lights to show the work to its full effect.”
One by one, every bit of light aside from the signs illuminating the emergency exits was switched off, and the entire ballroom was plunged into darkness for a full minute, maybe even two. It was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop—but you would’ve been able to slice through the excitement with a knife, it was so tangible.
The piece was finally switched on and a collective gasp swept through the crowd.
The initial flash of color was so bright, it was as though a star had exploded before their eyes.
The audience fell silent as they took in what was before them, and Theo’s fingers grasped for hers. Audrey grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard, unable to pull her eyes away from the stage—because what he’d made was extraordinary.
Like all of Lightm4st3r’s pieces, it was an abstract neon sculpture molded around a metal frame. It was hard to describe what it was—not exactly shapeless or formless, and not at all haphazard, but definitely evocative.
What this one evoked was pain.
Breathtaking, devastating, all-encompassingpain.
It was the lines of it. There was something about its edges that tore at Audrey from the inside of her chest when she gazed at them, as if someone had taken a serrated knife with a hacking hand and tried to violently cleave her in two. It curved and twisted like a heart squeezed and lit aflame, its fire leaking and spilling and bleeding out along the floor in reaching, grasping, gasping tendrils, tortured and dying, fading into darkness at the iridescent, black-painted endscrawling away from the scene of an accident, leaching across asphalt like blood mixed with motor oil.
The hands that had shaped the structure were angry, hurt, desperate. The red neon forming the tall sides of it—swept as high up as Theo could get them on the scaffolding he’d constructed—looked like it had been made with a shaky, manic hand as it sliced its own wrist open, to bleed it dry, to splatter its lifeblood along the ground. It was raw. It was chaotic. It was brutal.
It was all those things, yes, but it was alsobeautiful.
