The gallery space was chaos wrapped in expensive lighting—crates stacked like drunk Jenga towers, bubble wrap exploding across the floor like someone had murdered a dozen giant condoms, and Celeste Dubois standing dead center of it all, fingers twitching toward the phantom pack of cigarettes she'd quit six months ago.
Three days until the opening. Three days until the auction that would either launch her or bury her in a market that ate unknowns for breakfast and spat out their bones with tasting notes of "derivative" and "overambitious."
Three days to prove a Miami girl with no last name pedigree deserved to breathe the same rarified air as people who'd been collecting since before she was born.
Except she wasn't unknown in LA anymore.
Not after Peter had spent the last week pulling strings like a sadistic puppeteer on Red Bull. Madison's father real-estate-mogul friends who collected art the way other people collected parking tickets.
