Chapter One: Going, Going, Gone

"Lot Twenty-Three, you're up."

The handler shoved Belcalis through the curtain and just like that she was on the stage, lights blazing, two hundred men staring up at her like she was something placed in a shop window with a price tag already attached.

She did not flinch.

She had made herself a list on the drive over. She would not cry. She would not plead. She would not search the room for a friendly face because there were no friendly faces here. These men had come to buy. She had come to be bought. Those were the terms.

The auctioneer cleared his throat. "Lot Twenty-Three. Twenty-three years of age. Unmated. Certified omega bloodline, third generation." He paused. The murmuring that moved through the room told her exactly how much that last part mattered to them.

"We open at fifty thousand."

A paddle went up. Then three more.

Belcalis fixed her eyes on the back wall and breathed through her nose and thought about Iyana. Iyana in the hospital bed. Iyana who had grabbed her hand and said, "Please don't do anything stupid, Bel," not knowing what Belcalis had already decided. Iyana who deserved to see thirty.

The bidding hit ninety thousand.

"One hundred," from the left.

"One ten," from the right.

She let her eyes move across the room, one careful sweep, because she needed to know what she was dealing with. Suits. Money. The particular confidence of men who had never once been told no.

That was when she saw him.

He was at the back. Separated from everyone else by a ring of empty chairs nobody had dared to take, like the space around him had already been claimed along with everything else. He wasn't holding a paddle. He wasn't speaking. He had a glass in one hand and his eyes on her, and the eyes were pale silver, still and cold and completely, uncomfortably focused.

She looked away.

The bidding kept climbing. One forty. One sixty. One seventy-five. The room was getting louder the way rooms do when men start competing over something they all want. Belcalis had stopped tracking the numbers. They had gone abstract. The only thing that felt real was the prickling at the back of her neck — the awareness that the man at the back had not looked away once.

She felt something she did not have a name for. Something low and animal. Her wolf pressed forward inside her chest, recognising something her mind had not caught up to yet.

She told it to be quiet.

"Two hundred thousand."

The room stopped.

Not the bidding. The room. Like every person in it had inhaled at the same moment and forgotten how to exhale. The voice came from the back — low, unhurried, the voice of a man who had never once needed to raise it because everything always went his way eventually.

No one countered.

The auctioneer waited. Five seconds. Ten. The silence became its own answer.

"Sold." The gavel came down.

Belcalis stepped off the stage before the handler could reach her. She walked through the side curtain with her chin up and her steps steady and her heart doing something violent inside her ribs that she absolutely refused to acknowledge.

Behind the curtain she heard two men talking — low, urgent.

"Does he know what he just did?"

"He always knows."

"But she's just a girl. She has no idea who he is."

"She will."

Belcalis went still.

"The Lycan King hasn't bought a companion in forty-three years. So why now?"

Silence.

Then: "Maybe he found what he was looking for."

The floor felt suddenly unsteady. Belcalis pressed her palm flat against the wall and breathed and told herself it did not matter. She had done what she came to do. The money was coming. Iyana would live. That was the only thing that counted.

But she had felt it, the moment his silver eyes found her across that room, something had moved through her. Old. Certain. Deeper than fear.

She pushed off the wall and kept walking.

The door at the end of the corridor opened. A man in a black suit stepped through.

"Mr. Devereux will see you now," he said.

Belcalis straightened her spine.

She followed him into the room, and the door closed behind her, and the man at the window turned around, and the first thing she thought, the thought she could not stop, was that he was beautiful in a way that made her deeply, immediately suspicious.

The second thing she thought was that she was in far more trouble than she had planned for.

He looked at her like he had already decided something.

She looked back at him like she hadn't.

"Sit down," he said.

She walked straight past the chair.