3. Chapter 3
Serenity
The hands close on me before I hear the door. I’m on the cot with my back against the wall, and then I’m in the aisle with a guard on each arm before I know what’s happening.
Nobody tells me anything. Nobody has to. When they come for a draw, they call your number. When they come without a word, you’re not on a schedule anymore. You’re on somebody’s list.
“I can walk,” I say.
The one on my left doesn’t loosen his grip. “Then walk.”
I walk. I let my eyes pass over him while I do it.
Heavyset, breathing through his mouth, and he plants his right foot short, favoring the ankle.
A year ago, I’d have given myself decent odds against him, cuffs or no cuffs.
I may not be big, but my wolf always gives me the edge over a human.
She gives me the honest answer now: too weak.
Just staying upright is a challenge some days.
The door at the end of the ward opens for me, and the worst part is how ordinary the hallway is on the other side.
A year of watching people go through that door and never come back.
Behind it: gray paint, pipe runs along the ceiling, a mop bucket parked against the wall.
Somebody’s radio is playing somewhere, tinny and cheerful.
People clock in here. People eat lunch here.
I don’t know what I expected. Something that matched the horror, I guess.
They take me left, through a second door, into white tile and steam. An ablution block, showers lined along one wall. The heavyset guard doesn’t look away as he strips off the gray smock that I’m wearing. I don’t look away either.
Asshole.
If he thinks he’s going to intimidate me, he can think again.
He turns on the faucet. The water is hot; I can feel it from where I’m standing. After twelve months of cold taps and a bucket, they give me water hot enough to redden skin. I try not to recoil.
A woman in a rubber apron walks in and points at the tiles under the spray.
“Stand there. Arms out.”
The first pass of the brush hits between my shoulders, and I flinch before I can stop it. Then I make my arms stay out. I make my feet stay planted.
“I can wash myself,” I say.
“Faster if I do it.” She keeps scrubbing, working down my spine with hard, even strokes.
“I’ve had plenty of practice holding still. You won’t get a complaint.”
She snorts. It’s almost human, that snort, and then she tips my head back to wet my hair, and we’re done being people with each other. She washes my hair twice. Whatever she works through it smells like flowers, but it never grew outside a bottle.
I don’t give her a name. Names are for people I’ll see again.
My wolf is up. She hasn’t got the reserves to surge, so she paces instead, tight circles low in me, hackles dragging the underside of my ribs.
The brush, mostly. She wants to take somebody’s wrist off.
The cuffs sit hot against my own wrists, water beading on the runes, ready to answer her if she tries.
Not for this. Whatever’s coming is going to need strength. Save it.
She keeps pacing. But she saves it.
They dry me, and then it’s a third room.
There’s a rug on the floor. A real one, laid over the concrete. I step onto it, and the warmth comes up through my soles before I can stop it. I have to lock my knees to stay standing.
Two lamps instead of the ceiling tubes. A folding screen with birds painted on it.
A chair with a cushion. A rack of dresses along one wall, and I reach out and take the gray silk between two fingers before anyone can hand it to me.
It’s cool and light, the smooth texture so different from the rough cloth I’ve been wearing.
What the hell is this place?
I stand there and try to figure it out while a woman bustles at the rack. Nobody does this with stock they’re bleeding out in a ward. You don’t wash what you’re going to waste. We’re being shown to someone who matters.
The dressing woman is older, quick, a pincushion strapped to her wrist. “Arms up,” she says, flapping her hands upward, and I lift my arms before she can lift them for me.
The silk comes down over my head. She circles me, pinning and tucking, keeping up a light, busy patter the whole time.
“There. Stand straight. Pretty. The dove-gray is good with the blonde.”
“What happens tonight?” I ask her.
She pats my shoulder and keeps talking past me, words I can’t follow fast enough to catch.
The dress fits by the second adjustment, which means someone gave her my measurements. Which means someone took my measurements. I think of every medical check they ever put me under for, and I stop the thought there.
The dress has no sleeves. Nobody’s pretending about the rune cuffs.
She combs my hair out, loose down my back, and pins one side. She tilts her head at me, moves the pin an inch, and nods.
“Very nice,” she says. Her hands are gentle as she arranges a wave over my shoulder to my chest. “A touch of mascara to bring out the blue. Your lips are naturally pink. You’re lucky.”
My hands stay against the silk. I don’t feel lucky.
I’m being prepared.
Livestock gets prepared. Sacrifices get prepared. I don’t want to know which one I am.
The holding corridor is on the other side of the painted screen, and there are eleven of us in it.
All women tonight. All in silk. Gray, green, wine-dark, white. Cleaned and combed, standing along the wall in our bare feet.
Eleven of us.
So who buys eleven women? Nobody does. Somebody buys one or two. The rest go back.
I stand very still while that lands. Going back is the good outcome. After a year in here, I know exactly what that means.
Whatever’s out there is worse.
The new girl is beside me, shaking so hard her earrings tick. They gave her earrings. A month, I guessed for her, back when they brought her in. I think that was optimistic.
Standing here listening to her earrings tick faster, I drop it to a week, and I hate that I can judge her at a glance. I hate more that I’m probably right.
“Breathe,” I say, barely moving my mouth. “In through your nose. Out through your mouth.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. You’re doing it now.”
Her breath evens a little. The earrings slow.
Near the end of the row—flame red.
They’ve dressed her like us, dark green silk, her hair loose and bright down her back, and it’s the first time in a year I’ve seen her standing.
She’s tall. The cuffs on her wrists are double-banded, and her two handlers stand a full step further off than anyone stands from the rest of us.
Even scrubbed and wrapped in silk, they give her room.
Her head turns. Gold-ringed eyes come down the line and find me. Neither of us moves—not with this many guards watching—but her eyes hold mine a beat longer than they need to, and that’s enough.
It helps more than it should. Somebody in this line knows my face. If I go through a door tonight, somebody will notice that I’m gone.
Then the door at the far end of the corridor opens.
Handlers come off the wall. The pin woman vanishes behind her screen.
The crying somewhere down the line stops mid-breath.
A man walks in carrying a tablet, talking as he comes, and the room isn’t reacting to him.
The room is reacting to the man behind him. He isn’t talking. He doesn’t need to.
He’s tall. Dark-haired, pale. Nothing about him needs to try. He’s beautiful. There’s no other word for it.
I could poke my own eyes out. Eleven women waiting to be bought, and this is what my body decides to notice.
My wolf comes all the way up. Then she stops.
She can’t read him.
She reads everyone. It’s what’s left of her.
Sickness, lies, which guard’s afraid of which.
She can always get the measure of a person.
She reaches for this man and can’t fathom him.
No heat off his skin. Barely a scent; cold, clean, nothing alive enough for her to sort.
She doesn’t growl. She leans forward. My hands go cold. She’s never done that before.
He pauses and looks down the line of us.
“Is this all of them?” he says, not looking at the man with the tablet.
“All of the females, my lord,” the man says. “We have males too, but I presumed that your tastes—”
“Don’t presume to know my tastes.” There’s a slight accent to his voice. Something melodic.
He begins to walk, slowing here and there, his eyes moving over faces. He stops at one, takes her chin, and turns her head from side to side. She licks her lips and whimpers in a way that doesn’t sound like fear.
Silk rustles, feet shift, someone clears her throat. I grit my teeth and keep my hands at my sides.
The girl with the earrings breaks when he’s three girls away.
“Please.” Her voice cracks on it. “Sir. Please. I’m strong, I can work. I’ll do anything. Anything. Please.”
The whole line tenses for the correction that always follows noise. It doesn’t come. He passes her without slowing. His head never turns. He didn’t see her at all.
The next woman drops her eyes and angles her body toward him as he comes, offering.
Is she that desperate to get out?
Of course she is. We all are.
He passes her the same way.
I do what I’ve done for a year. Eyes forward, level with the middle distance.
Face quiet. Hands against the silk. It’s the only trick I have.
Then something lifts off my skin that I didn’t expect, thin and cold, the glamour coming up on its own.
I keep thinking I’ve lost it, but then it’ll show itself again. It doesn’t go down.
He stops in front of me.
The corridor goes so quiet I can hear the lamps humming behind the screen.
This close, I can see what’s wrong with his eyes.
It’s the color. Violet gone dark. A color eyes don’t come in.
They move over me without warmth, without interest. Not a look.
An inventory check. The guards look at the pretty ones a different way. This isn’t that.
He waits. I know what he’s waiting for, because it’s what the others gave him. The flinch. The plea. The dropped eyes. My heart is going hard enough to shift the silk over it.
So I break the silence myself.
“Am I supposed to beg?” I keep my voice level and quiet, just for him. “I’ve forgotten how. But the girl three down does it beautifully, if that’s what you’re shopping for.”
Behind him, the tablet man stops breathing.
The man in the suit looks at me for one more long moment. When he answers, his voice matches the rest of him. Calm. Exact. Courteous enough to raise the hair on my arms.
“It isn’t.”
He turns his head to the tablet man.
“That one.”
The tablet starts tapping. The handlers are already moving toward me. Down the line, the new girl is crying again, quieter this time, her shoulders coming down.
The handlers turn me toward the door. The last thing I see down the row is the dragon, rigid, stare locked on me.
Nobody’s ever come back through this door to say what’s on the other side.
It opens.