The spotlight cast the shadow of The Wolf in the Thorns onto the gypsum floor. Ayla wiped the sweat from her nose with her sleeve, her fingertips unconsciously tracing the cracks in the wolf's claw sculpture. Max paced nearby, his brass cane engraved with vines tapping a rhythmic click-clack against marble.
"That woman's column in Art Review Weekly has ten times the readers of your Instagram," he muttered, discreetly nodding toward the west wing. "But don't let her intimidate—she couldn't tell clay from ceramic if her highlights depended on it."
Ayla followed his gaze. The woman in champagne-toned trousers suit was examining a bronze vessel, her pearl earrings catching the light with each calculated tilt of her head. Her stilettos avoided every projected light zone on the floor like choreographed dance steps.
"Vivian Crawford." Max produced a crumpled invitation from his jacket. "Cave Ecology and the Entropy-Reduction Aesthetics of Contemporary Art—Christ, that title's drier than her hairline."
Ayla's grip tightened on her sculpting knife. The handle still carried traces of glowing blue pigment from last night's repairs to the wolf's eye crevices, now warming against her palm. When Vivian finally paused before her sculpture, the room's lily-of-the-valley perfume turned acrid.
"An... interesting attempt," Vivian tapped her pen against lips glossed to match her blood-red stilettos, "at materializing adolescent angst."
Ayla's nails dug crescents into her palms. She felt cold sweat trickling down her spine beneath the stiffened bodice of her dress. Max's cane "accidentally" collided with a display case, the glass vibration drowning her sharp inhale.
"Are you referring to comparing stalactite growth rates to wolf fur molting cycles?" Ayla grabbed the spotlight remote, suddenly bathing the wolf's crescent-marked iris in harsh white. "Like how your paper uses calcium carbonate deposition data to dismiss emotional resonance?"
The gallery plunged into silence. Vivian's earrings fractured the light into prismatic shards, and Ayla realized—those weren't pearls. The composite lenses glinted too precisely, their reflection aligning with the sculpture's eye under calculated angles.
"Art criticism isn't storytime, darling." Vivian's pen slashed a crimson X across the exhibit label. "True beauty is born from..." Her spider brooch glinted as she adjusted her lapel, "...absolute submission to nature's laws."
Max erupted in exaggerated coughs, his cane "slipping" to shatter the glass cover of a fire alarm. Amid the chaos, Ayla pulled up gallery security footage on her phone. Her stomach lurched—every camera had glitched for 0.3 seconds when Vivian entered.
Midnight oil fumes hung thick in the studio. Ayla uploaded stolen earring close-ups into 3D modeling software. At pixel-level magnification, the pearl's surface revealed hexagonal patterns. She dragged Lucas's silver leaf bookmark across the screen. The metal suddenly adhered to the wolf's digital iris model, emitting a high-pitched whine.
"Quantum resonator." Max materialized from shadows, thermal imaging camera revealing electromagnetic pulses radiating from the sculpture. "That harpy gave your work a CT scan."
Ayla tweezed a pearl fragment scavenged from Vivian's seat. When it touched the bookmark, holograms exploded midair—Neumann Group's triangular wolf emblem devoured by data streams, resolving into live footage of her mother's hospital room.
"Gala's tomorrow at seven." Max juggled an electromagnetic pulse device. "Wanna bet if the trophy holds poison or explosives?"
Ayla pressed the pearl shard into the sculpture's eye socket. As bioluminescent fluid seeped from the carvings, her raspy whisper cut the dark: "I'm betting her brooch hides the detonator."
Footsteps echoed in the hall. Moonlight stretched a voyeur's shadow across the door—their right hand missing the ring finger, gloved in leather identical to Lucas's.