ELLA'S POV
My feet were bleeding.
Not metaphorically. Actual blood, hot and wet, was pooling inside my left sneaker where I'd worn through the sock lining somewhere around nine hours. I'd been standing on linoleum since six this morning. The diner advertised "cushioned anti-fatigue flooring" in the employee handbook, which was the funniest thing I'd ever read because that floor felt like standing on a sheet of concrete someone had taped a thin apology to.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead — that specific, relentless frequency that turns everyone's skin the color of something you'd find in a hospital waiting room. I caught my reflection in the coffee pot while I refilled table four and did not recognize the woman looking back at me.
Twenty-four years old. Looking forty.
Ella! Order up!
I grabbed two plates with hands that shook from low blood sugar. When was the last time I'd eaten? The granola bar at noon, maybe. Or maybe that was yesterday. The days had started blurring together the way they did when you were too tired to tell time properly.
Food costs money. Money goes to Lily's bills. That was just math now. Not a sacrifice — just arithmetic.
I set the burgers down in front of two men who didn't look up from their phones. Invisible. I'd gotten so good at being invisible that I sometimes checked my reflection just to confirm I still existed.
Maybe easier that way. Invisible people don't have to explain why they're falling apart at the seams of a diner uniform that stopped fitting right three months ago when I lost eleven pounds. I didn't have to lose.
My phone vibrated in my apron pocket.
Again.
I counted: eighth time in the last hour. All from the same unknown number. All ignored, because ignoring problems had been my primary coping mechanism since Dad died six months ago, and I discovered that the quiet, careful, boring accountant I'd grown up with had left behind something considerably less boring than his life suggested.
Two million dollars of debt.
To someone named Lucien Blackwood.
I'd laughed when the lawyer first told me. Actually laughed, right in his face, because the number was so absurd it couldn't be real. My father didn't have two thousand dollars. He drove a twelve-year-old Civic. He clipped coupons. He died with forty-seven dollars in his checking account and a life insurance policy that barely covered the funeral.
I'd thrown the lawyer out. Ignored the letters. Deleted the voicemails.
That had been a mistake.
"Girl." Rita's voice came from behind the register, carrying that particular frequency she reserved for when she thought I was about to do something stupid, which was her way of saying she could see I was already in the middle of doing something stupid. She'd worked at this diner longer than I'd been alive and had her grandmother's sixth sense to match. "You're going to answer that or let it buzz itself into a coma?"
"It's nothing."
"Nobody calls eight times over nothing." Her eyes — the kind of eyes that had seen enough of real life to recognize it on contact — settled on my face for two full seconds. "Take your break. I got your tables."
The phone buzzed again.
Nine missed calls. Same number.
Then the text came through, and I read it three times before it made sense, and then it didn't make sense, just got clearer.
Miss Monroe. Final notice. Mr. Blackwood expects you at the following address tonight at midnight. Come alone. The debt will be collected — one way or another.
An address in the warehouse district. The part of the city where streetlights stood broken because even the municipality had given up on the fiction that anyone cared.
My hands were shaking before I finished reading.
The phone rang. I picked up.
"Miss Monroe." A man's voice. Smooth, professional, the kind of control that meant the person on the other end had made many calls like this one and felt nothing about any of them. "My name is Marcus Reid. I represent Mr. Lucien Blackwood regarding your late father's outstanding financial obligations."
"I don't have two million dollars." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "I don't have two thousand. So, unless your boss wants a collection of secondhand clothes and a laptop held together by a phone case duct-taped to the side, he's out of luck."
"Mr. Blackwood is aware of your financial situation." A pause that felt engineered. "He's prepared to offer alternative payment arrangements."
Alternative arrangements. The phrase meant: we have already decided what happens next, and you will not like it.
"What kind of arrangements?"
"That requires an in-person discussion. Tonight. Midnight. The address has been provided." His tone never changed. It was the verbal equivalent of a locked door. "I should inform you, Miss Monroe — this is your final opportunity to resolve this matter through conventional channels. If you fail to appear, Mr. Blackwood will be forced to pursue more aggressive collection methods."
"Are you threatening me?"
"I'm presenting you with options." The pause this time was shorter. Sharper. "By the way — I understand your sister Lily is currently hospitalized at Mercy General. Room 412. Such a shame about her condition. I'd hate for her situation to become more complicated due to unpaid financial obligations."
The world went very still.
"Don't you dare—"
The line went dead.
I stood in the hallway that smelled like industrial cleaner and the particular despair of shared bathrooms, staring at my phone, trying to remember how lungs worked.
Lily.
Twenty-one years old and sick in a way that none of the doctors could explain or fully treat or give a name to that made it feel like something that could be defeated. Six months of treatments that cost more than I made in a year, most of it covered by charity programs and payment plans I was already defaulting on. She was the only person left in the world who gave a genuine damn whether I woke up tomorrow.
And someone had just used her hospital room number like a threat.
I looked at the address on my phone screen.
Every reasonable instinct I had said: call the police. Call someone. Don't go alone to a warehouse at midnight.
But the police couldn't help with debts owed to people who knew which room my sister was in. And running — taking Lily and just running — wasn't possible when Lily could barely walk to the bathroom without sitting down halfway there.
People who could access information like that didn't let you run.
They found you.
I pulled off my apron.
"Rita." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I need to leave."
She looked at my face and didn't ask questions. "You in trouble?"
The laugh that came out of me sounded like something that had forgotten what it was supposed to be. "When am I not?"
"You want me to call someone?"
I had no one to call. Friends required time I hadn't had in a year. The family was a sister in a hospital bed and a father six months on the ground.
"I'll be fine," I said.
"Call me tomorrow," Rita said. "So I know."
If I'm alive to call was the thought I kept to myself.
The warehouse district at eleven-forty-seven PM was the kind of silence that wasn't actually quiet. Distant sirens. Wind through a chain-link. The sound of my own breathing too loud in my ears.
I'd parked three blocks away and walked. My sneakers made soft sounds on broken pavement. Each step sent a fresh pulse of pain from my feet that I used as a kind of anchor — you're still here, still moving, still choosing to do this.
I found the warehouse. Light bled from under a metal door. Voices inside, multiple, the particular murmur of a gathering that had been carefully arranged.
Come alone, the message had said.
I was very clearly not alone in there.
My hand reached the door handle and stopped.
Every horror podcast, every true crime transcript, every cautionary tale about women who walked into situations exactly like this one played through my head in about four seconds. Young woman. Midnight. Warehouse. Unknown men. Nothing good had ever followed those variables.
But then Lily's face.
The way she'd apologized the last time I visited, like being sick was something she'd done wrong. The way she still tried to smile when I came in, that particular smile that said I know you're exhausted and I'm sorry and I love you all at once.
She was the reason I was here.
She was the reason I'd done everything for the last six months.
I opened the door.
The interior stopped me cold.
Not a dingy abandoned space. Someone had transformed it. Rows of chairs — expensive ones, theater lobby quality — filled the main floor, most of them already occupied by people in clothes that would have paid my rent for a year. Professional lighting. A raised stage at the far end with a podium and a microphone.
It looked like an auction house.
My stomach dropped to my bleeding feet.
No. No no—
"Miss Monroe." A man appeared at my elbow. Tall, still, with the kind of controlled presence that belonged to people who were very good at their jobs and whose jobs were frightening. "I'm Marcus Reid. Thank you for coming."
He sounded like the man on the phone. Of course he did.
"What is this?" I couldn't make my voice do what I wanted.
"A private acquisition event. Mr. Blackwood will explain shortly." He gestured toward the stage with the tone of someone for whom this was simply Tuesday. "If you'll—"
"I'm leaving." I turned.
His hand appeared in my path — not grabbing, just present, like a wall that had decided to be polite about it. "Your sister's treatment, Miss Monroe. The ongoing experimental protocol at Mercy General? That funding can be withdrawn with a single phone call."
I stopped.
"Anonymous donor," he continued, quietly. "You didn't think insurance was covering experimental treatment, did you? Mr. Blackwood has been paying for your sister's care for six months. Twenty thousand dollars monthly. That's where most of your debt originates."
The floor moved. Or I moved. One of those.
Six months. Lily had been in intensive treatment for six months, and I'd told myself it was charity programs, medical trials, the kindness of strangers—
I'd been so stupid.
"He's been keeping her alive," Marcus said, not cruelly, which somehow made it worse. "And he can stop. Tonight. Or you can hear his proposal."
My eyes burned. I did not cry.
"I don't have a choice, do I?"
"Everyone has choices, Miss Monroe," he said. "Some are just harder than others."
He led me through the warehouse — not toward the chairs, but to a small room off the side. Six women inside. All roughly my age. All wearing the same expression I felt on my face.
One was crying silently. One sat in the corner with her arms wrapped around her knees. A redhead by the far wall had a cigarette going despite the sign that said not to, and her hands were the only thing about her that shook.
"First time?" the redhead asked, looking at me.
"First time what?"
"Supernatural auction." She exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. "They bring humans here, or people who don't know what they are yet, and sell them to the highest bidder from the supernatural community. Different laws. Different rules than what you know."
The room tilted.
"That's trafficking," I said. "That's—"
"That's Tuesday, for these people." She studied me with eyes that had already processed what mine were still refusing. "Debt?"
I couldn't speak.
"Usually debt," she said at my expression. "Someone you loved dies and leaves obligations, and suddenly powerful people own what they left behind." She tapped ash onto the concrete floor. "Same story, different details, for all of us."
"We can—there has to be a way out—"
"Doors are warded. Magically sealed. And even if you got past that—" she tilted her head toward the sounds beyond the door, "—they know everything. Your address. Your family. Your weak points." She looked at her cigarette. "Best you can do is hope whoever buys you is the lesser evil."
Lily's room number. Said like it was nothing.
I sank into a chair.
This was real. This was actually happening. Twenty-four hours ago I was a waitress calculating whether I could afford to eat dinner.
Now I was merchandise.
"Breathe," the redhead said. Not unkindly. "In through your nose, out through your mouth. Don't pass out before they even get you on stage. That's just embarrassing."
I breathed.
And waited for whatever came next.