Chapter 4 - Alanis
The cable tie bit into her wrists with every movement, but Alanis tried not to dwell on it, especially since she needed to focus.
She was backstage, if you could call it that. It was a sectioned-off area behind a particleboard partition, lit by two bare bulbs, smelling of concrete and musky too. Seven other women were in here with her.
She had gotten herself into this through a sequence of decisions that had looked reckless from the outside and were, she believed, the most strategic choices available to her.
The Lumen's intelligence on this network was good but incomplete—they knew the operation existed, but what they needed was someone who had seen it from the inside.
The holding conditions, the handler protocols, the buyer profiles, the chain of custody from acquisition to handoff.
The kind of details you could only get by being in it.
So, she'd gotten in it.
Two days ago, she'd let herself be found in exactly the kind of situation the network's acquisition people were looking for—a woman alone, late, in a neighborhood the Lumen's mapping had identified as an active collection zone.
She'd made it easy without making it obvious, and she'd woken up in a holding facility with zip ties on her wrists and a concrete floor under her back.
The coordinator was the man she'd clocked within the first hour of being in the holding facility—mid-forties with a little pouch.
He moved around, assessed, and issued corrections in a low voice to the handlers.
He was not the top, though. She'd seen enough organizational structures to know that a man this visible at the venue level was management, but they still needed him.
Alanis watched him long enough to note the slight drag in his left leg, probably from an old injury, and the way he touched the inside of his right wrist when he was thinking, suggested he wore something there.
She'd had forty-eight hours in that facility, and she'd used all of them.
She knew the holding conditions: women kept in groups, minimal interaction from handlers, and fed once daily at irregular intervals.
She knew the transfer protocol: numbered, processed in batches, moved by van with blacked-out windows on a route that took approximately forty minutes.
She had the number of women she'd seen across the full holding facility—sixteen in total, of which seven were here with her now, and she had the profile of every handler she'd had direct contact with, which was enough to build something on.
The auction itself, she'd thought, was the last piece. She was right. She just hadn't anticipated the specific shape the last piece would take.
Through the gap between the particleboard partition and the ceiling, Alanis could hear the event running. The auctioneer's voice was professionally flat, calibrated to sound transactional.
The crowd response was muted and periodic—numbers called out, a murmur, silence, the sharp sound of a gavel.
Alanis kept her breathing even, her back straight, and her eyes on the room around her.
The other women were in various states. The woman directly to her left—young, early twenties at most, blue eyes, and hunched with her knees drawn up—had been crying quietly for most of the past hour. Alanis had no comfort to offer that wouldn't compromise her cover.
The girl reminded her of the sixteen-year-old running through a dark forest, the dozen women she'd helped extract over the years. She understood what it felt like to feel trapped, thinking there’s no way you’d escape.
A handler appeared at the partition door. "Next two."
The young woman to her left went first, with unsteady legs and hands as the handler guided her through the door. One by one, the group reduced.
The noise beyond the partition changed each time—the crowd getting slightly more excited, the auctioneer's cadence picking up, and the sound of the gavel growing louder.
Alanis held herself still through each one. She was here. She had done what she'd come to do. Whatever happened next, whoever bought her, she’d find a way to escape. That was the job.
“Last item of the night.” The handler led her out to the main stage.
The lights hit her bright and hard, but she adjusted quickly.
There were thirty-eight, possibly forty seats, and the stage was three steps up.
She had prepared for this—being looked at as an object—by acknowledging in advance that it would be unpleasant.
Buyers filled the warehouse, most of whom she'd need a closer look at to profile fully.
The auctioneer was to her left, two handlers on the floor, positioned at the nine and three o'clock of the crowd, and the coordinator at the far right wall.
The stage exit to the rear was unguarded, which was weird.
She was scanning the back rows when she found him. Third row from the back. Left side.
Blue-green eyes. Light blond hair. The fuck? Why is a man she met at a bar three nights ago sitting in a trafficking auction?
The answer her brain produced was the obvious and most disgusting one—he was a buyer as well. Rage bubbled up in her chest. Of course, with her sort of luck, she just had to have earth-shattering sex with a fucking human trafficker.
She quickly schooled her features, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of catching her off guard. She stood upright, looking at the crowd, trying to focus on those who seemed like they wanted to bid on her until his hand went up.
“One hundred thousand dollars.” It happened in a flash. The crowd was stunned into silence, and within seconds, she was sold to Rael.
She descended the stairs and was led to him by a handler, while mentally giving herself a pep talk. Step one: maintain her cover, complete the handoff, follow standard operational protocol for extraction from the venue. Step two: figure out what the hell is happening.
The expression on his face when she stopped right in front of him gave nothing.
He had the best poker face in existence.
A man at a trafficking auction who had just spent one hundred thousand dollars and wasn't showing any version of satisfaction or anticipation was either extraordinarily controlled or wasn't here for the reasons the transaction implied.
She held his gaze and said nothing.
She had a cover to maintain and a room full of people she needed to not alarm, and whatever was happening here, she could figure it out outside. So, she allowed him to lead her to the exit with his hand on her back.
He led her to a dark SUV, parked in the lot at the building's east side, in a position that covered three exit routes
He opened the passenger door and guided her in. She heard the child locks engage when he closed it. She turned her bound wrists in her lap, looked out the windshield, and ran through her options.
Rael got in the driver's side, and that’s when she finally spoke up, “Are you going to tell me what the fuck that was about?”
He turned on the engine and said, "When we're clear of the area."
Alanis watched the city move past the window while she counted intersections. A couple of minutes later, Rael pulled into an empty parking lot and turned off the engine.
"I know what you’re thinking, but I am not a buyer," he said.
“Oh yeah? Then shit, I must be Aphrodite.”
Rael gave her a side-cutting glare. “This isn’t funny.”
“Trust me, I know. You just paid fucking one hundred dollars for me at an auction! So, forgive me if I’m not exactly pleasant right now!”
"I've been investigating that operation for almost a year.” He said evenly. "I was there for intelligence. I go in as a buyer, observe the event, document what I can." A pause. "And then I saw you on that stage."
She held his gaze. “So, you rescued me?”
"Yes."
"From an operation I put myself into deliberately."
"I-uh-didn't know that."
"No, you didn’t." She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose, feeling a wave of frustration and anger. How dare he show up and disrupt her plan? Throwing around that kind of money like she was some sort of charity case. “And the other women?”
A muscle in his jaw ticked. "Still in there."
"Then we have a problem, because I am not going anywhere until we do something about that.”