Part I – Lagos, 2031 Chapter One: The First Time He Bought Her

The auction house smelled of fear and expensive cologne.

I was twenty-nine, barefoot on cold concrete, catalogue number 47 inked on the inside of my wrist in waterproof marker.

They had taken my name three days earlier.

They had not yet managed to take the rest.

The lights were surgical white, the kind that make bruises look purple and hope look ridiculous.

A circle of men in suits stood around the raised platform, sipping amber liquor from crystal that probably cost more than the ransom for my entire childhood village.

Some stared openly. Some pretended they were only here for the art pieces that had sold earlier.

None of them looked away when the handler shoved me forward.

I kept my chin high because it was the last thing they hadn’t priced yet.

The auctioneer’s voice was smooth, bored, rehearsed.

“Lot 47. Female, twenty-nine, doctorate in literature, multilingual, no implants, fertility confirmed, compliant disposition.”

He lied about the last part.

They always did.

Bidding started at two million new-dollars.

I stopped listening to the numbers.

Instead I counted heartbeats.

One for every year I had been free.

Twenty-nine.

Then the room went quiet.

A new voice, low, slightly accented, cut through the hush like a blade through silk.

“Ten million.”

Silence rippled outward.

Even the auctioneer blinked.

At the back of the room, leaning against a marble pillar as if he owned gravity itself, stood a man I had never seen before.

Charcoal suit, no tie, sleeves rolled once to reveal forearms corded with old scars.

Dark curls pushed back like he’d been running his hands through them.

Grey eyes fixed on me with an intensity that felt like being flayed open and read aloud.

The auctioneer recovered. “Ten million once—”

“Twenty,” the man said, never looking away from me.

A ripple of shock.

Someone laughed nervously.

Someone else whispered a name I didn’t catch.

“Fifty,” he said, voice flat, bored now, like he was ordering coffee.

The room exhaled.

No one else spoke.

The gavel fell.

Sold.

They dragged me off the platform, wrists zip-tied again, and marched me down a corridor that smelled of bleach and old blood.

I expected a holding cell.

Instead they pushed me into a private lounge with velvet couches and dim gold light.

He was already there, standing by the window, city lights bleeding across his face.

The door locked behind me with a soft click.

I found my voice. “Who the hell are you?”

He turned.

Up close the scars were worse—thin white lines across his knuckles, one cutting through his left eyebrow.

He looked thirty-four, maybe thirty-five, and exhausted in the way people look when sleep is a luxury they stopped believing in.

“Aleksandr,” he said. Russian vowels under Lagos heat. “And you’re Eden Vale.”

I flinched. They weren’t supposed to know my name.

He noticed.

Of course he did.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said quietly.

“Then why bid fifty million dollars?” My voice cracked on the last word. Fifty million. Enough to buy a small country. Enough to buy a lifetime of chains.

He reached into his jacket.

I stepped back instinctively.

He pulled out a small, folded piece of paper and held it out.

I didn’t take it.

He unfolded it himself.

It was a photograph.

Me, age seventeen, sunburned and laughing on a lighthouse balcony, arms around a boy with the same grey eyes now watching me like I was a ghost.

My knees almost gave out.

“Where did you get that?”

“From the lighthouse,” he said. “Summer 1998. You wrote ‘see you in December’ on the window. I kept the photo. I kept everything.”

I stared at him.

The shape of his mouth. The way he held his shoulders like the world was a weight he’d agreed to carry alone.

The tiny scar on his jaw I had kissed a thousand times thirty-three years ago when we were children who thought love was immortal.

“Aleksandr,” I whispered.

His eyes closed like I’d struck him.

“I looked for you,” he said, voice rough. “Every year. Every country. Every auction. I was too late for the first three. Not this time.”

I laughed, a broken sound. “You bought me.”

“I bought you out,” he corrected. “There’s a difference.”

He stepped closer, slowly, the way you approach a wounded animal that still has teeth.

He pulled a knife from his pocket (small, pearl-handled, the one his grandfather gave him the summer we turned the world off).

He cut the zip-ties.

My wrists bled where the plastic had bitten.

He didn’t touch me.

He simply held out the knife, handle first.

“Walk out the front door,” he said. “Car’s waiting. Passport, money, ticket to anywhere. You never have to see me again.”

I stared at the open door.

Freedom.

After three days of hell, freedom was twenty steps away.

I looked back at him.

He hadn’t moved.

Just stood there with storm-grey eyes and thirty-three years of apologies carved into his face.

I took the knife from his hand, closed it, and slipped it into my pocket.

Then I did the most dangerous thing I had ever done in my life.

I stepped forward and kissed him.

Salt and smoke and the taste of a summer that never really ended.

When I pulled back, his hands were shaking.

“I’m not leaving without you,” I said.

Something shattered behind his eyes (relief, terror, love so old it had teeth).

Outside, sirens began to wail.

Someone had noticed the sale was irregular.

He smiled then, the same crooked smile from 1998 that ruined me the first time.

“Then run,” he said, taking my hand.

We ran.

Through service corridors, past guards who suddenly looked the other way, into the Lagos night thick with rain and diesel and the smell of second chances.

Behind us the auction house burned (someone had lit it for insurance, or for us, or because some fires just know when it’s time).

We disappeared into the city before the sun came up.

He never collared me.

He never needed to.

I had already said yes.

And somewhere in the chaos, between gunshots and monsoon rain, I laughed (manic, alive, terrified) because the word we invented in a lighthouse when we were seventeen had just become the most expensive safe word in history.

Pomegranate.

He stopped running long enough to kiss me against a wall while the world caught fire behind us.

We never needed to say it.

Not once.

Not yet.