Chapter 2: Sold off

I sat on that stone path until the warmth in my chest faded, and by the time the moon slid behind the trees, I had almost convinced myself that I had imagined the whole thing. Grief can do that to a person. It can make you hear your own name in an empty forest, and I had heard enough of the pack's laughter that night to know that I was in no state to trust my own ears.

I walked home before dawn and found my bedroom door open and my things thrown into the hallway. My clothes, my books, and my mother's old baking tins lay in a messy pile, and Vera stood over them with her arms folded.

"You will sleep in the storeroom from now on," she said. "A girl without a wolf has no use for a room with a window."

I did not argue, because I had learned a long time ago that arguing with Vera was like pouring water on a stone. I picked up my mother's tins one by one, carried them to the storeroom, and sat on the floor between the sacks of flour. For the next three days, I was fed once a day, spoken to by no one, and looked at by the pack like I was something that had gone bad in the fridge.

On the first night, I made a plan. I would save every piece of bread I was given, wait for a moonless night, and leave Ashen Creek for good. I did not know where I would go, but anywhere seemed better than a place where even the children crossed the road to avoid me.

On the second night, I heard my father and Vera arguing behind the kitchen door.

"It has to be before the next full moon," my father said, and his voice was strange, tight, like a man who was holding something heavy. "You promised me she would be safe."

"She will be exactly as safe as you pay for," Vera answered. "The debt is due, Marcus. Do you want to lose everything?"

I pressed my ear to the wall, but they lowered their voices after that, and I only caught a few words, something about a place in the north and a man who paid in cash. I should have known then. I think some part of me did know, but it is very hard to believe that your own father is capable of something until the day he does it.

On the third day, he came to the storeroom himself.

"Put on your good dress," he said. He stood at the door with his hat in his hands, the way he used to stand when my mother was sick. "I am taking you to see someone who might be able to help with your wolf."

My heart jumped, because hope is a stubborn thing, and even after everything, it jumped. "A healer?"

"Something like that."

He did not meet my eyes again for the whole drive. We went north in his old truck for nearly three hours, up a road I had never seen, until the trees grew thick and tall and the signal on his phone disappeared. When we finally stopped, it was in front of a huge stone lodge with no sign, no lights on the road, and a row of black cars parked in the dark like sleeping animals.

"This is not a healer's house," I said slowly.

"Liana."

"Papa, what is this place?"

He finally looked at me then, and his face was gray. He pressed something small and cold into my palm, and I looked down and saw my mother's silver locket, the one she had worn every day until she died. I had thought Vera threw it away years ago.

"Do not take it off," he said, so quietly I almost missed it. "No matter what happens tonight, do not ever take it off."

Before I could ask what he meant, two men in black suits opened my door.

I will never forget the next hour. They led me through a back corridor into a hall so dark that the only light came from candles along the walls, and the room was full of people in masks. Some had the sharp, polished look of rich wolves, and some looked like the kind of men my mother used to warn me about, but all of them turned their heads when I walked in. A stage stood at the far end, and on it stood a tall woman with a clipboard and a thin smile.

I understood then. It happened all at once, the way a glass breaks. I was not here to be healed. I was here to be sold.

"No," I said. I tried to turn, but the men held my arms, not roughly, but firmly enough that I could not move. "Papa! Papa, no, please, you cannot do this!"

My father stood at the back of the hall with his hands shaking and his eyes on the floor. A man in a gray mask handed him a pen, and he signed something without reading it.

"I owe them," he said, so low that I only knew what he was saying because I saw his lips move. "I am sorry. I am so sorry."

They pushed me up onto the stage.

The woman with the clipboard raised her voice. "Lot seven, ladies and gentlemen. Female, eighteen years old, wolfless, from a small northern pack. A healthy girl in good condition, who will make a fine servant, a fine breeder, or a fine anything you like."

Someone laughed. I felt my face go hot, and I stared at the back wall because it was the only thing I could bear to look at.

"We will start at fifty thousand."

Nobody moved.

"Forty thousand?"

A man near the front raised a lazy finger. "Thirty, and only because she has a pretty face."

"Thirty thousand, I have thirty. Do I hear forty?"

It went on like that, and each number was worse than the one before it. By the time it reached sixty thousand, I had stopped hearing the words and was only counting my own breaths, because I had decided I would not cry in front of these people. I had already cried in front of enough people that week. I could survive being cheap. I could survive anything if I kept my chin up.

"Sixty thousand going once," said the woman. "Going twice..."

"Ten million."

The voice came from the very back of the hall, low and calm, and it cut through the room like a blade through silk.

For a second, nothing moved. Then every mask in the room turned at the same time, and the woman on stage dropped her clipboard.

"I am sorry, sir," she stammered. "Did you say..."

"Ten million," the voice repeated, "and no one else will bid."

It was not a threat. It was said so softly and so simply that it did not need to be one. The men in the front row went pale, and one by one they lowered their hands. The rich wolves who had been laughing a moment ago suddenly looked very interested in the floor.

A man stepped out of the darkness.

He was tall, taller than anyone I had ever seen, in a black coat that fell to his knees, and he walked without hurrying, like the room belonged to him and he was only checking that it was still there. His hair was dark and his face was cold and beautiful in a way that made me think of a statue in a graveyard. When the candlelight touched his eyes, they flashed gold for half a second, and a whisper went through the crowd that I would only understand later.

"Alpha King Blackwood."

He did not look at the crowd. He did not look at the woman on stage or at my father, who had gone completely still at the back of the room. He came up the steps of the stage and stopped right in front of me, close enough that I could smell rain and cedar and something warm underneath it.

"Look at me," he said.

I did not want to. But there was something in the way he said it, not an order, more like a question he was very careful not to scare me with, and so I lifted my eyes.

For a moment, I thought I saw something move behind his gold ones, something that looked almost like relief, or like grief, or like a man who had been holding his breath for a very long time and had just been allowed to let it out.

"Hello, Liana," he said softly, and he said my name like he had said it a thousand times before. "Do not be afraid. I have been looking for you for eleven years."