Auction Night Theft

The museum smells like lilies, money, and varnished lies. I arrive in black silk because if Greybridge wants spectacle, I can still weaponize dress code. Tessa enters separately through the catering hall disguised as a borrowed donor widow. Nico is in the surveillance van. The plan is simple enough to be terrible: use the auction chaos to steal the donor hard drive from Vivian's event office and map who still thinks they own the story.

Owen takes the stage first, talking about transitional integrity and the need for facts without frenzy. I barely hear him because Celia Weller has already left the floor with Vivian, exactly on cue, and Tessa is moving through the service corridor on my left.

I follow Celia just enough to keep sight and not enough to trigger memory. Event office. code pad. guard on the hall. I stall the guard with a donor-wife question about parking while Tessa slips inside through the catering door. Two minutes later the fire alarm blips once and dies, enough to pull the guard half a step away.

Tessa reappears carrying a silver auction tablet case that definitely weighs too much to hold only seating charts. She doesn't look at me when she passes. Good. Family resemblance is a risk tonight.

Then Celia turns. For one electrified second her eyes lock on mine, then on the half-open office door, then on the corridor camera above us. She knows something moved. She just does not know whether it was me, Tessa, or one of the many women she has taught herself to underestimate.

I smile at her with every campaign-wife muscle I still own. "Judge Weller," I say. "Such a moving cause."

She smiles back without pulse. "Only when the right people stay grateful."

Tessa reaches the service stairs. The lights cut for half a second. When they come back, the auctioneer is babbling apology at the podium and the silver tablet case is gone into the museum's bones.