ELLA'S POV
The door opened.
Marcus Reid's face was professionally empty in a way that confirmed he had done this many times and had made his peace with it. "It's time, Miss Monroe."
My legs didn't want to work. I had to make them, one deliberate command at a time: stand, move, follow — while the other five women watched me go with expressions that covered the full range from I'm sorry to thank God, it isn't me yet.
The hallway was twelve steps long. I counted them because counting was the only thing I could do that felt like control.
We came out onto the main floor, and the audience swam into focus.
Dozens of people. Designer suits, couture dresses, the practiced ease of money so old it had stopped needing to announce itself. They looked like the kind of people you see in opera house programs and charity gala photos. Not an auction for human beings.
But their eyes.
The way they looked at me when I stepped out — not as a person, not even as a curiosity, but as an acquisition. An appraisal. Something to be assessed against internal criteria I would never know.
I had never felt less human.
"Ladies and gentlemen." A woman's voice, carrying without effort. She stood at the podium: striking, silver-streaked dark hair, the kind of authority that didn't need volume. "Welcome to this evening's acquisition event. I am Morgana Thorne, your auctioneer and contract specialist."
Her smile was pleasant and completely empty of anything that resembled hesitation about what she was doing.
"We have six exceptional offerings this evening. All contracts are binding and permanent under supernatural law. All sales are final. Payment is due immediately upon purchase. Contracts take effect upon the consummation clause, as outlined in your bidder documents." She gestured, and a woman was led onto the stage — the one who'd been crying in the room.
She was still crying.
"Age twenty-two, excellent health, trilingual, suitable for household service or companionship. Starting bid: one hundred thousand dollars."
Paddles went up before she finished the sentence.
"One hundred."
"One-twenty."
"One-fifty."
They were bidding. In paddles, like cattle at a county fair. On a human being who was crying on a stage while strangers calculated what her presence in their life was worth to them.
My stomach heaved. I breathed through it.
She sold for two hundred thousand to a man in the third row who looked pleased with the number. She was led through a side door and disappeared, and Morgana moved on with the smooth efficiency of someone who scheduled these things the way other people scheduled quarterly reviews.
Four more. Each one worse to watch than the last.
Four hundred thousand. Six-fifty. Eight hundred.
The fifth woman — described as having "witch ancestry" and "breeding potential" — went for one-point-two million to a bidder I couldn't see from my position, and I was still processing that sentence when Marcus's hand touched my elbow.
"No." The word came out before I could stop it. "Please. I can't—"
"Your sister, Miss Monroe." Quietly. He said it quietly, like it was a kindness that he didn't have to shout. "This is for her."
He guided me toward the stage.
My feet moved. One step and then another, like a body that had accepted something my brain was still refusing. The lights were hot on my face when I stepped up. The audience below me — all those eyes, assessing, calculating — turned to look.
"And now," Morgana said, with a different quality of attention, "our final offering of the evening. Very special. Very rare."
She began to describe to me the way you'd describe a vintage piece at Christie's.
Age twenty-four. Excellent health. No prior supernatural knowledge or training — completely unaware of her own nature until this evening.
I didn't understand what she meant by that.
Genetic testing confirms non-human DNA. Bloodline unknown but highly valuable. Starting bid: one million dollars.
One million dollars. For Ella Monroe, who had forty-seven dollars in a checking account she hadn't been able to look at in three months.
"One million," someone called.
My eyes found the source. Middle-aged man, third row, the kind of cold eyes that came from having made too many decisions about other people's lives.
"One-point-two."
"One-point-five."
The bids escalated fast, the way they hadn't for the others, and something about the speed of it was more frightening than the number. They knew something about me that I didn't know about myself. All of them.
I scanned the room — looking for what I didn't know. A friendly face. An exit. Something.
Then I saw him.
Back row, right side. He sat differently than everyone else — not leaning forward with the appetite the others had, but back in his chair, almost relaxed. Like a man who already knew how this ended and had stopped pretending to find it suspenseful.
Dark hair. Strong jaw. Eyes that caught the stage light and, for just a second, reflected gold.
He was watching me with an intensity that felt different from the appraising look of the other bidders. Not calculating value. Something else. Something I couldn't name.
"Three million," said a man in the front row. Silver hair, the particular smile of someone who was used to getting what he wanted and found the process of getting it entertaining. Someone behind me whispered: Dante Volkov. Alpha of the East Coast packs. If he wants her—
"Five million."
The voice came from the back. From the man with the gold-lit eyes.
He stood when he said it, and the room rearranged around him.
Not aggressively — he wasn't loud, he wasn't large in any way that should have commanded attention. But he had the quality of stillness that sits in the center of something much larger, and every person in that room felt it.
"Lucien Blackwood," Morgana said, and something in her voice shifted almost imperceptibly. Respect, or the closer relative of respect that lives next to fear. "You honor us."
So that was him. The name that had been following me for three weeks like a shadow with a business card. The man who had been keeping Lily alive for six months without telling me. The man who owned what my father had left behind.
He looked at me.
Not at my body, not in assessment. He looked at my face. Like he was checking something. Like he already knew the answer but wanted to confirm it in person.
I felt it physically — the weight of it, the specificity of it. Like being recognized by someone you've never met.
"Six million," Dante countered, his voice edged with something that wasn't just a number.
Lucien didn't look away from me. "Eight million."
"Nine."
"Ten million dollars." His voice cut through the room with the decisive quality of someone who had decided this was the last thing he was going to say on the matter. "And I'll kill anyone who bids against me."
Not a threat. The flat statement of a fact that he happened to be mentioning in case it was useful information.
The room went so quiet I could hear my own pulse.
Dante looked at Lucien across the space between them for a long moment — some kind of calculation happening behind his eyes that I couldn't read. Then he settled back in his chair and nodded once. "She's yours. For now."
The last two words were their own kind of threat.
Morgana's gavel fell. "Sold to Lucien Blackwood for ten million dollars. Contract binding and permanent under supernatural law, effective upon consummation."
I didn't understand the last word. Not yet.
Lucien walked toward the stage with the unhurried certainty of someone who had never once in his life walked toward something and not arrived. He climbed the stairs. Stood in front of me.
His eyes were actually gold. Not a trick of the light — a warm, deep amber that didn't belong to anything human.
"Hello, Ella," he said, and his voice did something to the air between us, and to my pulse, and to the part of me that had been clenched tight since the moment I walked through the warehouse door.
"Stay away from me." My voice shook and I hated it.
"I can't do that." He reached out, slowly, and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear with fingers that were — against all logic — gentle. "You're mine now. Legally purchased. Magically bound."
"I didn't agree to this!"
"You walked through that door." He said it without cruelty. Almost sadly. "That was agreement enough under supernatural law." His thumb traced along my jaw, and I hated the way my body didn't flinch. "Don't fight this, Ella. It'll be harder if you fight."
"Then it'll be hard."
Something moved in his eyes. Not irritation. Something that looked almost like—
"Eventually," he said quietly, "you won't want to."
Then he kissed me.
I'd been kissed before. Nothing that mattered, nothing that stayed. This was—
Different in a way I had no language for. Like something clicking into place that I hadn't known was misaligned. Like a frequency I'd never been able to tune to suddenly coming in clear.
I gasped, and he took the opening, and the room disappeared entirely.
When it ended, I was shaking. My lips felt altered somehow — like the map of my own body had been redrawn while I wasn't paying attention.
"What was that?" I couldn't get more words than that out.
"The bond," he said softly. His forehead came to rest against mine, and nothing about the gesture was calculated. "Your soul recognizing mine. Your wolf calling to her mate."
"I don't have a wolf. I don't have—I'm just—"
"You're everything," he said. And then, before I could respond to something that large: "Come home with me now."
He lifted me before I could protest. Just — picked me up, one arm under my knees, like I was something he had every right to carry.
"Put me down!"
"No."
"This is kidnapping! Someone—"
No one moved. No one looked particularly troubled. Because in whatever world I had stumbled into, this was simply how things worked, and I was the only one in the room who hadn't received that particular memo.
He carried me out of the warehouse, into night air that hit my face like cold water. A black SUV at the curb. He put me inside, slid in beside me. The door locked.
"Let me go," I said. My voice had stopped shaking and started something worse — the flatness of someone who has run out of register to express what they're feeling. "Please. I'll do anything. Just let me go."
He looked down at me.
For a moment, his face wasn't the controlled, certain face of a man who had orchestrated all of this. It was just a man's face, and it had something in it that looked like regret worn thin by necessity.
"I can't," he said. "You're the only thing keeping me alive. And I'm selfish enough to choose my life over your freedom."
The car pulled away from the warehouse.
Away from everything I'd known.
LUCIEN'S POV
She was crying.
Silent tears, pressed against the far door, putting as much distance between us as the back seat allowed.
Every instinct I had — the Alpha, the wolf, the dying man — screamed at me to close the distance. To pull her close and make promises.
But I had no promises worth making yet. Not ones I'd earned.
Monster, my wolf said, which was fair.
"I know you're scared," I said, keeping my voice as level as I could manage. "I know this isn't what you chose. But I need you to understand—"
"Understand what?" Her voice broke at the seam of the sentence. "That you're someone who buys women? That you've been manipulating my life for six months without telling me?"
"Yes." No point softening it. She was smart enough to know softening when she saw it. "I fabricated the debt. I covered your sister's medical costs to create leverage. I orchestrated the auction to claim you publicly before someone else could." I held her gaze when she finally looked at me. "I did all of it. And I'm not sorry."
"You're sick."
"I'm desperate. There's a difference." I poured two fingers of whiskey from the car bar, offered the glass. She didn't take it. I drank instead. "Your father owed me money. Real money, borrowed under contract with terms he understood. When he died, that obligation passed to you. That's supernatural law."
"There's no such thing as—"
"There are thousands of werewolves, vampires, witches, and fae who've been operating under that law for millennia. You're part of that world now. You were always part of it." I pulled out the file I'd had prepared, opened it. "Your mother was a Silver Moon wolf. Your father was human. He used magic to suppress your wolf when you were born — to protect you, he would have said. To protect himself from what he didn't understand, more accurately."
I showed her the DNA results. The genetic markers that had lit up like a map when my people ran the tests three months ago.
She stared at the papers. "This is fabricated."
"Have you ever had dreams where you were running on four legs? Woken up with dirt under your nails and no memory of going outside? Felt rage so intense it scared you?"
She went very still.
"That's your wolf," I said. "Trying to break through the suppression your father built. It's been failing for years. It will fail completely soon, whether I'm here or not."
"Why would he do that? Suppress me?"
"To protect you from people like me." I said it plainly. "Silver Moon wolves are extraordinarily rare and extraordinarily powerful. Your blood can heal anything. Your touch can break curses. Your voice can command Alpha wolves. People like me — people like Dante Volkov — would do terrible things to possess that." I looked at her. "Your father knew. So he made you invisible to the supernatural world by making you invisible to yourself."
She didn't say anything. She was looking at the file. Reading it.
"He kept you safe," I said. "He was also wrong about how he did it. You should have grown up knowing what you were. You should have had the choice." I paused. "I'm not defending him. I'm just saying I understand why."
"And what you did? Taking that choice from me in a different direction?"
The question landed where she meant it to.
"I don't have time," I said. "That's not an excuse. It's just the truth. I am dying. The curse has been killing me for twenty years and I have months left. You are the only thing — the specific, irreplaceable thing — that can break it. I ran out of time for ethical approaches."
"So you used me."
"Yes."
The car slowed, turned through gates that rose up from the dark. The estate came into view — lit windows in a house that was too large for one person, which was something I'd stopped noticing years ago and was now seeing freshly through her eyes.
"This is home," I said.
She looked at it for a long moment.
"It's a very beautiful cage," she said, and turned to look out the other window.