14

My muscles answered him before my mind did. I stepped closer, and the light shifted enough for me to see her. Fear rolled off her, but beneath it, that pulse of raw energy that made Sorvane coil tighter.

“These,” the auctioneer was saying, “are the lesser lot, fresh, inexperienced. They won’t give you refined pleasure yet, but they’ll train.” 

She was on her knees when they grabbed her. Fingers closed around her arm, rough and impatient, and yanked her forward. She tried to rise, failed, was shoved again. 

The movement was violent and careless, and her foot slipped at the edge of the stage. I heard it, the sharp scrape of skin and fabric against wood, just before her ankle twisted uselessly beneath her. Balance left her completely. 

She tipped forward, hands flailing too late, her body spilling over the lip of the stage, toward the stone... toward me.

I caught her as she fell.

The weight hit my arms suddenly, lighter than expected, her body folding instinctively inward as my hands closed around her waist to stop the impact. 

She gasped and her breath burst against my throat, hot and panicked, as if she hadn’t realized she was breathing until that moment.

Her fingers curled into the front of my coat, not gripping, not pushing away, just clinging, reflexive and terrified. I felt the tremor run through her, small and fast, like she was trying to make herself disappear inside her own skin.

She wouldn’t look at me.

Her head ducked immediately, red hair falling forward to hide her face, shoulders drawing tight with humiliation and fear as the room seemed to close in around us. 

Warmth bled through the thin fabric into my palms, real and undeniable, and something deep inside me inhaled as if it had been starved.

For a moment, the noise faded. The crowd. The lights. The stage behind us.

“Mine,” I breathed, the word leaving me before I could decide whether it fucking should.

**

Melany's POV

There were two lessons taught in the Black Moon pack. The first was that witches were poisonous, and I could agree with that. The second was that the king was the cruelest being to ever walk the earth. With that, I could agree as well.

In the years I spent in Nora’s brothel, I saw wolves walk in and take girls as if they were nothing. They did not ask. They did not bargain. They did not respect. 

Humans, at least, had the decency to pay for a night. Wolves did not bother with that. Since they won the Great War three hundred years ago, wolves had become absolute. 

Back in the Black Moon pack, I had been too busy washing clothes and keeping my head down to understand what that truly meant. It was only after I came to the capital of Atheon that I realized the truth: Wolves owned the world, and the king owned them.

I was an ordinary human now. A girl who could be sold to scrub floors or auctioned to sell her body. There was no lupine blood in me, no witchcraft either. 

And if there is one thing I hated, it's the Werewolves.

Once, one of the girls at the brothel told me that when the werewolves came, years ago, they turned everyone into slaves. If you were lucky, you were sold as one. A house slave. A war slave. Sometimes a girl was called lucky if a wolf claimed her and she became one of them. The worst fate of all, she said, was to be sold for bodies instead of labor.

I was brought to Nora’s house at the end of my seventeenth year. Not as merchandise, but as labor. From the beginning, I was put to work. Scrubbing floors. Washing clothes. Carrying water. Learning how to disappear into corners and make myself useful without being seen. 

Nora said I was being trained, though no one ever explained for what. I asked more than once to stay that way. To be sent to a household, maybe, where work was all that was expected of me. Somewhere I could clean and sleep and be left alone. 

No one listened. 

They watched me differently as the years passed. Their eyes lingered longer. Their voices changed when they spoke about my future. 

I resisted in the only ways I could. I kept my head down, my mouth closed, my body stiff and unresponsive. I did not smile. I did not soften. I made myself inconvenient. It earned me hunger... long days without food. Short nights without rest. Whispers about my attitude, about how difficult I was to train. 

But it also bought me time. 

Most girls were sent to auction as soon as they turned eighteen. Especially the ones meant to be sold for bodies instead of labor. I wasn’t taken until I was twenty-three. Nora called it patience, I called it luck.

When we arrived at the auction house, they did not waste time pretending we were people. Hands grabbed us immediately. Arms were seized, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise as they shoved us apart, counting with their eyes instead of their mouths.

“Those ones to the left,” a man barked. “The rest there.”

We were split like livestock.

One of them laughed and clapped his hands. “The whores can strip. All the way.”

Some girls froze. Others moved too fast, fear making them obedient before they even thought about it. Fabric hit the floor in soft, shameful sounds.

I felt a hand clamp around my upper arm, squeezing until my fingers went numb. I gasped, more from shock than pain, and was shoved forward without explanation.

They spoke about us loudly, casually, as if we were deaf. 

The girls chosen first were arranged carefully. Posed. Adjusted. Told where to stand, how to look. They were the ones shaped to please, trained to perform, polished until nothing human showed through.

Then there was us.

Girls who had been scrubbed clean and worked hard but never taught what to do with our bodies. Girls who still flinched at sudden touch. Girls who had only learned obedience in theory, not in practice.

Someone beside me whispered my name. Her voice shook so badly I barely recognized it. Another girl murmured a prayer under her breath.

I kept my eyes on the floor.

I had been told for years that my purpose was to serve, but standing there, divided and handled and judged, I understood the truth.

“The first group can go to the stage!” barked Nora, the madam responsible for delivering us to the stage. 

The prized merchandise obeyed instantly, peeling off their dresses, and stepped forward onto the stage. And we, the virgins, stayed behind.

A man stopped in front of me. He was close enough that I could smell him. Close enough that his shadow swallowed mine. “Dress off,” he said, impatient.

I did not move.

My fingers curled into the fabric at my sides instead, knuckles tightening until they hurt. My heart hammered so hard I felt it in my throat. 

I shook my head once, small, instinctive.

His hand shot out and caught my chin, forcing my face up. “do not make me take it off for you,” he said quietly. “And do not make me fuck you here. You’d still go on that stage. That’s how they like them.” He smiled. “Broken.”

My stomach turned.

I let go of the dress.

My hands moved slowly, clumsy and stiff, like they no longer belonged to me. I pulled the fabric up over my head, arms crossing awkwardly as if that could somehow hide me. The dress slid down and pooled at my feet, useless.

I stood there in my underwear.

The air felt colder instantly, crawling over my skin. I crossed my arms without thinking, shoulders folding inward, trying to make myself smaller. My face burned. I couldn’t lift my head. I couldn’t breathe properly.

I heard someone nearby whisper a shaky breath. Another girl sniffed, trying not to cry.

The man stepped back, satisfied.

I stared at the floor, eyes blurring, telling myself not to shake. Telling myself not to fall apart. My body felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with skin and everything to do with being seen.

I wasn’t naked.

I was stripped.

I wondered if my life would have been better in the pack. If I had kept my head down, washing dishes and saying nothing. Or if I had accepted Dominic as Alpha. Maybe I would be dead now, and maybe that would have been better than standing here. 

That witch said Nora would help me. 

And in a way, she did.