to die.
She sighed inwardly, watching the middle-aged man old enough to be her father walking toward her in the auction room after winning his bid. The dark ambiance amplified by the strobes of light didn’t hide either his good looks or his dripping wealth. Well, he had to be wealthy to get a foot in the auction door, and his looks didn’t mean a thing. She’d been with worse. More importantly, she knew better than most how the worst monsters lurked beneath a pretty face. They came below to this hellhole to live out their most detestable fantasies, ripped and shredded and went back to their facades above of being upstanding, moral citizens with wives and families and picket fences. She hated those kind the most. It was easier to deal with a monster who was a monster upfront and not a snake in the grass.
The man’s eyes took in her form on display in the translucent robe, going from her neck down her ample breasts down to her waxed mound down to her painted toes, and even after so many times, she barely controlled her flinch at the lecherous perusal.
She knew why they bid on her. She was a rarity, an exotic natural redheaded delight in a sea of blondes and brunettes, and she was attractive. She brought in good fucking money at every bid, which was exactly why the organizers kept putting her up on the stage and the idiots kept risking their lives. They all thought they’d be the one to get away with it, blinded by their power and arrogance.
They were wrong. For six years, they had been wrong, every single one of them, and there were over a dozen corpses to speak for it.
Before she could fall into her thoughts, she schooled her expression to the one of serene calmness that her early handlers had taught her.
“You are soft, inviting. Look pretty, lower your chin, and stay silent.”
The man—she was calling him Fifteen in her head since he was the fifteenth man to buy her at the auction—stepped close to her, taking a lock of her long, wavy hair in his hands.
Oh, he shouldn’t have touched the hair.
She didn’t voice the thought.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked with a smooth grin, the lasciviousness in his eyes naked enough for her to know exactly what he was thinking.
“Lyla,” she spoke quietly, exactly at the volume she had been trained to talk at.
Every girl got trained in a way that suited their looks to make them seem most appealing. For Lyla, everything was supposed to be soft, docile, meek—her voice, her mannerisms, her demeanor. She had to give off sexy siren and sweet submissive vibes all at once.
One of her only friends, Malini, had been trained exactly in the opposite way. She was bold and forward. She’d been told to behave wildly, to make a man want to tame her. A small sliver of amusement spiraled through her at the thought. The trainers had it all wrong. It was all an act they did. Malini was the gentlest, sweetest soul. Lyla could not remember the number of times she had sought out her care when the other girl had soothed her in ways she imagined mothers or sisters soothed their loved ones—with light touches and soft words and enough love to make her want to see another day. But she hadn’t seen her friend in a few months, and when she’d asked around, one of the handlers told her a man had taken her for a long contract. That could mean years before she saw her again, if she ever saw her at all.
“And how old are you?” The buyer’s words broke through her thoughts, making her focus again. She knew exactly what men like him wanted, and even though she was twenty-four, she said, “Eighteen.”
The man smiled. Fucking asshole. Although he at least tried to cloak his monstrosity, she had seen too many adults rip through innocence to believe in decency anymore.
The man touched her breast unabashedly and she stayed still, her hands fisting at her sides as she let him test the weight of them.
He wasn’t just going to die, he was going to die.
She held her breath, her eyes roving over the dark corners of the room, unable to see the silhouette of the devil in the shadows, one who was both the bane and the blessing of her cursed existence. As the hand pawed her, she let her mind drift to the first time she’d seen him at the auction six years ago, the second time she had seen him ever. She remembered the surprise she’d felt, mainly because she hadn’t thought she would find him again, and she’d felt hope that he would bid on her. She had wanted him to be the one to choose her. He hadn’t. He’d stayed in his corner and simply watched as another man won her and took her to the hotel a block away from the auction house.
That had been the first night she’d felt the spray of blood on her face, a bullet-hole gaping through the head of the man who’d been about to undress her. She had frozen on the spot, her eyes going out the window to the silhouette of a man moving in the building opposite, and she had known it was him.
Lyla watched the shadowed corners as Fifteen in the present leaned down to kiss the side of her neck while tugging at her breasts openly in auction room. The corners were empty but that meant nothing. She knew better now.
He was watching. He was always watching.
She’d learned that the second time she’d been auctioned, and the two men who took her home for a week both found themselves strangled with a barbed wire on the first night while she’d used the bathroom. She’d come out to see him placing a black eternal rose on the countertop, along with a set of clothes she could change into, his mismatched eyes locking with hers before he’d left. The rose, the prettiest thing she had ever seen, all black and frozen in time, had been the first gift she remembered receiving, the clothes the softest fabric to touch her skin. She had taken them both with her.
It had happened again the third time in a sex club, and the fourth, and the fifth, and again and again until she and the rest of the organizers knew—anyone who bid on her died. Yet, she brought in big money so she was put on the stage again and again, and he was there every time to take them out.
It had taken her a while to understand it was most likely game for him. A man who cared wouldn’t have left her standing there naked, ready to be bought.
And yet, she stood there, worthless, discarded, unclaimed.
She shuddered as the black hole in her mind opened, beckoning her, calling her to fall into it and forget everything else, let everything about her existence be crushed out until nothing remained of herself.
The man’s tongue touched her neck, and revulsion settled in the pit of her stomach, her hatred of her body intensifying as the black hole got closer and she hurtled toward it. Fifteen wouldn’t care if she was catatonic, he wouldn’t care if she wasn’t there as long as her body was. But it had been years since someone had completely used her and she couldn’t understand how this middle-aged monster got so close.
Where was he?
“Sir, you have to clear the balance before you can sample.” The voice from the side, one of the auctioneers, cut through. The groping man straightened, giving her a moment of relief to collect herself.
Lyla took a step back, inhaling to control the spiral her thoughts were going toward, knowing she would lose herself if she went in, but it was a struggle to resist.
The man handed a wad of cash to the auctioneer, and Lyla surveyed the club again, trying to see if the devil was there.
He wasn’t.
Swallowing down the bitter disappointment, she tried to come up with a way she could get out of the night mostly intact.
“Let’s go, sweetheart.” Fifteen settled his arm around her waist and she looked at the wedding band on his finger, wondering if his wife knew he was out with the intention of fucking a girl half his age. But it was none of her business. They dug their graves, and she felt no remorse when they fell into it.
As they made their way outside, her heart began to pound.
Outside.
She loved the outside.
But she didn’t see it, not much. Growing up, her childhood and teenage years had been spent in special training houses. Some had been underground, some above, but they had always been confined within, her bed in the basement with the other kids. Now, she lived in a dormitory of other girls, in a complex that was large and heavily protected, but they weren’t allowed to go outside without reason and escort. That was one of the only reasons she looked forward to the auction, because if someone won her, she would get some respite for a moment outside, feel the wind and see the sky, if only for a brief moment.
The man led her out the backdoor of the club into the alley that opened into the parking lot.
“Stay here while I get my car,” Fifteen instructed her. “I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you try to run, do I?”
She shook her head. She knew what they did to those who ran. Her only other friend had run away when they’d been children, and she knew to this day they were hunting her. The Syndicate, the organization who owned all the slaves, did not let anyone escape. She had run one time too, and she’d been caught. And she had experienced first-hand what they did to those who ran.
Shoving the memory away, she stayed where she was. At her easy acquiescence, he smiled and left.
Standing alone at the edge of the alley behind the building, Lyla turned her neck up for the glimpse of the night sky, her heart heavy at seeing nothing but the dark. She knew the stars weren’t visible in the city some nights, she’d just hoped they would be. It had been too long since she had seen them, and too little in her short but hard life. But there was nothing tonight, no moon, no stars, just endless black littered by gray smoke and clouds.
She wondered some days what the point of her existence even was, on days when the future looked as the sky did—bleak, hopeless, endless. But then she reminded herself of the one thing that kept her going, the search for one little answer that made her wake up every morning and brave the day.
Suddenly, the hair on the back of her neck rose.
It was his scent that reached her first, a scent she’d only inhaled a few times in all the years he’d watched her, a scent that had imprinted itself in her mind. She’d only been so close to him a few times, and she didn’t know exactly what he smelled like because she hadn’t scented many nice things in her life, but it was distinct and male, and it was him.
She knew he was behind her. She could feel his breath on the top of her head, feel the heat of his larger body at her back, feel her dormant senses flaring to life as they always did in contact with him. And having him at her back always made her feel both chased and cherished, the dichotomy of emotions difficult for her to comprehend herself.
God, she hated him, she hated her response to him, hated that she wanted to hate him deeper but couldn’t, and she hated that he knew it and didn’t care one bit.
She stayed still, not breaking the silence with a single word. She had asked him the question a few times, and each time he had fucked with her mind, and left her confused, frustrated, and angry. She just held onto the anger now, as she had for many years. Anger was good. Anger made her feel. Anger reminded her that she was still alive.
“Did you enjoy his touch?”
The voice, his voice, came quietly from behind her. If death had a voice, it would be his. Again, she didn’t know what his voice was similar to, because she didn’t have anything to compare it to. But she knew she’d heard the voices of many men in her life, and his was, without a doubt, the most dangerous of them all.
It reminded her of a vague story she remembered someone telling her, a memory that was faded and probably from before she got into this life—the story of a man playing pipes and making all the rodents in town follow him, right off the edge of a cliff to their deaths, happily and merrily as they danced along. He had that kind of a voice—deep, alluring, seductive, a voice that could lead people obliviously to a cliff and to their own demise, making them enjoy it while they remained blind. A dangerous, dangerous voice on a dangerous, dangerous man. The voice of death beckoning the mortals to test their mortality.
It was just her luck that she had found him, of all people, that fateful night years ago.
She kept silent, refusing to follow to his tune.
“I asked you a question, flamma,” he reminded her again.
So did I, she wanted to say.
She didn’t know why he called her that. She was sure he knew her name, and was even more certain it was as close to a term of endearment as a man like him could get. In the beginning, when he’d called her that, it had filled her with hope and made her feel a sense of belonging. As the hope dwindled, she knew it meant nothing. It grated on her. She wasn’t his anything. A man like him wasn’t endeared to anything.
She grit her teeth, her jaw locking in place, the urge to turn around and look at him acute in her body. But she knew his games, and she knew the best thing she could do was not play along. He wanted her reactions and withholding them gave her the power, at least momentarily.
‘You will never hear my voice again. Go to fucking hell!’
The memory danced across her mind, the last time she had been alone with him, her failed attempts of getting answers from him having led to an angry promise. Up until now, she was proud of not having uttered a word to him.
A silver car came to a stop in front of the alley.
Taking a deep breath, ignoring the man at her back who was clearly hidden since there was no reaction from Fifteen, the man who had purchased her for the night, she walked to the car. Getting into the passenger seat, she strapped herself in, hating her translucent robe and the way Fifteen looked at her. They all looked at her but no one saw her, none except the man who watched her like it was his religion.
She turned to look out the window where he stood, barely making out the silhouette of his body. A lighter came to life in his hand, momentarily making him visible. She watched as he played with the lighter, before looking up, their gazes locking as the car began to move.
“Can’t wait to fuck you tonight, sweetheart,” the monster at her side chuckled.
She held her tongue, resisting the urge to tell him the only penetration tonight would be a bullet in his body.
