CHAPTER TWO: THE AUCTION

"Lot Number Thirteen. The last surviving daughter of the Moretti family."

The voice came from somewhere far away, muffled through metal and static. I didn't understand it yet. I only knew that the ground beneath me was moving, that chains rattled somewhere near my ankles, and that my skull throbbed like it had been split open and stitched back together wrong.

I forced my eyes open.

Dim emergency lighting cast everything in sick amber. The walls around me were corrugated steel, the floor cold beneath my bare legs, and the truck rocked hard over what felt like unpaved road, throwing me against something soft and warm that flinched away from me with a whimper.

I sat up too fast. The world spun, then settled.

My dress was still there, or what remained of it. White silk turned rust-brown, torn at the hem, the veil gone entirely. My wrists were ringed with bruises where hands had gripped too hard. I remembered fragments, disjointed and sharp as broken glass. My father's shoulder blooming red. Adrian's smile with teeth in it. Lorenzo's voice, warm as always, delivering the words that ended my life as I knew it.

The Devil King will pay a fortune for her.

My hand went to my throat, then to my finger, searching for the ring Adrian had placed there only hours ago. It was gone. Of course it was gone. Someone had stripped it off me while I was unconscious, and that small theft undid something in me that the gunfire hadn't managed to touch. I pressed my palm against my mouth and let myself shake, just for a moment, just long enough to grieve the girl who had woken up that morning believing she was safe.

Then I made myself stop.

Grief was a luxury. I couldn't afford it yet.

"You're awake," a small voice said beside me.

I turned. A girl, maybe sixteen, huddled against the wall with her knees drawn to her chest. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her school uniform stained with something I didn't want to name.

"Are you... are you really the Moretti princess?" she whispered. "Everyone's been saying it. They said the whole family fell tonight."

"Don't," another voice hissed from the shadows, sharper, older. A woman, maybe forty, with a split lip and steel in her gaze. "Don't say her name.

Don't say anyone's name. Names are currency down here, and you don't hand out currency for free."

"Where are we going?" I asked her.

She looked at me like I'd asked something both foolish and unbearably sad. "You don't know?"

"Tell me."

"An auction." She said it flatly, like she'd made peace with the word long before I arrived. "They don't buy slaves anymore, not officially. They buy lives. Some of us will scrub floors in some rich man's house until we're too old to be useful. Some of us will disappear into places nobody comes back from." Her eyes flicked over my ruined dress, my bruised wrists, and something like pity crossed her face. "And some of us are worth more than the rest. You, I'd guess, fall into that category."

"What happens to the ones who are worth more?"

Nobody answered right away.

Finally, an old man near the back spoke, his voice a dry rasp. "Pray someone ordinary buys you.

Pray for a rich fool who wants a pretty wife or a servant girl who cries at night." He lifted his eyes to mine, and there was real fear in them, the kind that had nothing to do with the chains. "Pray it isn't the Devil King."

"Who?"

Nobody answered that either. The truck hit a pothole hard enough to throw us all sideways, and by the time we'd untangled ourselves, the subject had closed like a door slamming shut.

The doors opened to blinding light.

I threw my arm over my eyes, and hands closed around my elbows, dragging me down off the truck bed and onto pavement that bit into my bare feet like ice. When my vision adjusted, I understood why everyone had gone quiet.

We were somewhere that shouldn't exist.

A courtyard ringed by black iron gates, beyond them a mansion lit gold from every window, and lining the drive, more luxury cars than I'd seen in my entire life, sleek and dark and gleaming under the moon. Guards in black masks stood at even intervals, guns visible at their hips, and beyond them, men and women in evening wear drifted toward the entrance like this was any other gala.

They marched us through a side entrance, down a corridor of black marble so polished I could see my own bloodstained reflection in it. The old world I'd known, chandeliers and champagne and orchids, had been rebuilt here into something far crueler. Beautiful and rotten in equal measure.

They put us in cages.

Not cells. Cages, wire mesh, humiliatingly small, lined along a corridor just off the main hall where the buyers could inspect us before the bidding began. I sat with my knees pulled to my chest and my back against cold metal and refused to let myself cry in front of strangers.

The auction had already started somewhere beyond the wall. I could hear it. A gavel. A number called out. A pause. Another number. Then the gavel again, final, and somewhere down the corridor, someone screamed.

They pulled a boy no older than twelve from the cage across from mine. He fought, sobbing, until a guard struck him hard enough that he stopped moving altogether and had to be carried out. A woman two cages down begged in a language I didn't recognize, over and over, the same phrase, until her voice gave out entirely. Someone was sold within seconds of appearing on stage.

Someone else stood there for a full minute of silence before a guard dragged them off, unsold, into a door I didn't want to think about.

I watched all of it and felt something inside me go very still and very cold.

Then the auctioneer's voice rang out, closer now, directly beyond my cage.

"Lot Number Thirteen. The last surviving daughter of the Moretti family."

Every head in that corridor turned toward me.

They dragged me onto the stage under lights so bright I couldn't see past the first row of buyers. I could feel them though, dozens of eyes crawling over my ruined dress, my bare feet, my face.

"Kneel," the auctioneer said, not even looking at me, already flipping through his notes.

I stayed standing.

A guard's hand closed on my shoulder and shoved me down onto the marble. Pain shot up through my knees. I planted my palms flat and pushed myself back up.

"Kneel," the auctioneer repeated, an edge in his voice now.

I looked past him instead, out at the crowd, at every stranger who'd paid to watch girls sold like livestock, and I lifted my chin.

The guard struck me. My cheek exploded with heat and my vision blurred, and I tasted blood where my teeth had cut the inside of my lip. I staggered but didn't fall.

I did not kneel.

The room had gone quiet, the kind of quiet that has weight to it. I stared out at the buyers, one by one, refusing to look away first, refusing to give them the satisfaction of watching the Moretti heir break in front of them. Somewhere in that silence, I understood I was making a choice. They could buy my body. They would never buy the rest of me.

Then the silence changed.

It didn't happen all at once. It moved through the room like a current, buyers rising from their seats, bodyguards straightening against the walls, conversations dying mid-sentence. The auctioneer's pen stopped moving. Even the girl selling champagne near the back froze with the bottle still tilted in her hand.

Footsteps. Slow, unhurried, echoing off marble that had gone utterly silent to receive them.

I turned toward the sound because everyone else had, and that was when I understood, before I ever saw his face, that the man walking toward the front of that room was the reason people whispered a name like a curse.

He didn't look at the buyers who half-rose to greet him. He didn't look at the guards who straightened like soldiers at his approach. He moved through that room the way a blade moves through silk, without resistance, without acknowledgment, as if the entire building existed simply to get out of his way.

He was tall, dressed in black that fit like it had been made for no other body but his, and even from a distance I could see the stillness in him, a calm that had nothing to do with peace. His face gave away nothing. Not interest. Not cruelty. Not even boredom. He looked, I thought, like a man watching insects, mildly aware they existed and utterly indifferent to their fate.

He took a seat in the front row. Every buyer near him instinctively widened the gap between their chairs and his.

"Sixteen million," said a man in a gray suit near the front, breaking the silence, his eyes crawling over me like I was something already purchased.

"She's beautiful enough to justify it."

"Eighteen," countered another, older, with a cane he didn't need resting against his knee. "Moretti blood runs dangerous. She'll make a fine trophy for anyone smart enough to leash her."

"Twenty," a third voice called, and I hated every one of them equally, hated the way they talked about me like furniture, hated that my life had become a number climbing steadily higher under bright lights.

Dante said nothing.

He hadn't moved since he sat down. He watched the stage with an expression I couldn't read, not desire, not curiosity, nothing I could name at all, while the number kept climbing around him.

Twenty-two. Twenty-five. Someone shouted thirty and the room actually gasped.

Then Dante lifted his paddle.

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't say a number. He simply lifted the paddle an inch off his knee, held it there for exactly as long as it took every other bidder in that room to see it, and set it back down.

Nobody bid again.

The silence that followed was worse than any number that had come before it. Men who'd been shouting figures over each other a moment ago now sat perfectly still, eyes fixed anywhere but on the man in black. The auctioneer's hand trembled slightly as he lifted the gavel.

"Sold," he said, and his voice cracked on the word,

"to Mr. Vitale."

The gavel came down.

Every head in the room turned toward him, the way sunflowers turn toward light, except this light burned instead of warmed. I stood frozen on that stage, my cheek still throbbing, my dress still stiff with my father's blood, and for the first time since the chandelier exploded above the string quartet, I let myself look directly at the man who now owned me.

He was already looking back.