Mia POV
The first thing I feel is cold.
Not the kind of cold that comes from a window left open or a blanket kicked off in the night. This is a cold floor. Concrete cold. The kind that seeps into your bones and tells you, before your eyes even open, that something is very wrong.
I don't move right away.
I learned that from my father. When you don't know where you are, be still first. Listen before you look.
So I listen.
Men's voices. Low and fast. A language I don't recognize, something clipped and sharp, like words being cut with scissors. Then laughter. Then a sound that stops my heart completely.
Numbers.
Someone is counting up. Slowly. Deliberately. Each number is higher than the last, spoken the way you speak when you want everyone in the room to know you are in control.
My eyes open.
The room is dark except for a thin strip of yellow light running under a heavy metal door about six feet in front of me. The walls are concrete. No windows. The air smells like motor oil and something sweet and chemical that makes the back of my throat ache.
I try to sit up.
That's when I feel my wrists.
Zip-tied. Behind my back. Tight enough that my fingers are already going numb.
Okay. I breathe through my nose. Slow. Okay. Think.
Last thing I remember: I was at the bus stop on Carver Street. It was 9 PM, already dark. I was coming home from Rosa's. I remember my phone buzzing, I remember reaching into my bag, and I remember a black car pulling up too close to the curb.
And then nothing.
And then here.
I push myself up to my knees, then my feet, using the wall behind me. My legs shake. My head pounds. Whatever they used to knock me out is still clinging to the edges of my brain like fog that won't burn off.
The numbers outside the door climb higher.
I press my ear against the metal. The voices are clearer now. I still can't understand the words, but I understand the rhythm. I've heard it before on TV, in old movies, in the kind of documentary that makes you feel sick and grateful at the same time.
Call and response. Offer and counteroffer. Going once. Going twice.
I stop breathing.
This is an auction.
The thought arrives fully formed, and it is so huge and so terrible that my knees nearly go out from under me. I lock them. I will not fall. I press my forehead against the cold metal door, and I let the truth land without looking away from it.
This is an auction.
And I am not in the audience.
Move. My own voice, inside my head, is hard and sharp. Move right now, Mia.
I throw myself against the door. It doesn't budge. I turn and slam my shoulder into it, once, twice, the pain shooting all the way down my arm and up my neck. I kick it. The sound it makes is embarrassingly small, a dull thud swallowed by the noise on the other side.
No one comes.
I scan the room again. No furniture. No tools. Nothing I can use on the zip tie. I press my back against the wall and slide down it, and pull my knees to my chest, and try to work my hands down over my hips, a trick I read once, years ago, in a book I thought was just fiction.
I get them in front of me on the third try.
My wrists are bleeding where the plastic cut in. I barely feel it.
I use my teeth on the tie. Gnawing, pulling, tasting blood. For two full minutes, nothing happens. Then the plastic gives, just slightly. I pull harder. Harder. The tie snaps.
I stand up.
The voices outside stop.
Silence for three seconds long enough for me to think I did something, they heard me, and then the door swings open so fast I stumble backward.
A man twice my size fills the frame. He doesn't look at my face. He grabs my arm like I am something to be carried, not someone to be spoken to, and he drags me forward and I dig my heels in and it does nothing, absolutely nothing, because he is enormous and I am twenty-two years old and my hands are shaking and all I can think is Dad, I'm sorry, I should have stopped looking, I should have just let it go.
He shoves me through a second door.
The light hits me like a wall.
A single spotlight. Directly above. Blinding and hot and aimed like an accusation. I throw my arm up over my eyes and blink, trying to see, seeing nothing but white.
The room falls quiet.
Then a voice, smooth, professional, the kind of voice that belongs behind a podium, says something in that clipped language. And then, in clean and perfect English:
"Lot number seven. Female. Twenty-two. Healthy. No ties."
No ties.
He means no family. No one to look for me.
He is wrong about that. Rosa will look. She will call the police, she will call my phone, she will stand on every corner in the city screaming my name if she has to. But Rosa doesn't know what she is looking for. She doesn't know this room exists. She doesn't know that right now, I am standing in a spotlight in a room full of men I can't see, being described like a car at a dealership.
The bidding starts.
The numbers move fast. Fifty thousand. Eighty. One hundred. Each one lands on my chest like a stone. My eyes are adjusting, and I can see shapes now, rows of chairs in the dark, the outlines of suits, the orange glow of lit cigarettes like eyes in the black.
One voice rises above the others. Older. Confident. The voice of a man who is used to getting what he asks for. He calls a number that silences everyone else.
The room waits.
The auctioneer says something that sounds like a closing statement.
I think: this is it. This is how it ends.
And then a voice comes from the back of the room.
One voice.
Calm. Low. The kind of quiet that doesn't need to be loud to stop every other sound in the building dead.
It says a number.
The number is so large that even I, who knows nothing about this world, nothing about these men, nothing about what I am worth to strangers in the dark, even I understand what it means.
It means: she is mine, and there is no point in arguing.
The old man at the front says nothing.
Nobody says anything.
The gavel comes down.
I spin toward the back of the room, desperate to see his face. But the spotlight is still on me, and beyond its edge, there is nothing just dark, and the faint sound of a chair moving, and footsteps walking away before I can find them.
I never see him.
But I hear one of the guards, somewhere to my left, say a single word into his phone.
A name.
Reyes.
And somewhere in the back of my terrified, fog-soaked mind, something moves. Something cold and sharp and half-remembered.
I know that name.