POV: Mia
My name is not Seven.
But that is what they call me here.
I have been Seven for three days. Three days on a cold concrete floor. Three days in a red dress I did not choose, eating food I did not ask for, sleeping next to women I do not know. Three days of listening to footsteps above my head and music through the ceiling and the sound of men laughing like the world is completely fine.
My name is Mia Russo. My father was the most powerful man in this city. And none of that matters anymore.
The room holds twelve of us. Nobody talks. We learned that fast the first night, a girl in the corner tried to scream and the guard opened the door so quickly it was clear he had been waiting for it. After that, silence became the only rule we all agreed on.
I use the silence to think.
I count the exits. One door, steel, hinged from the outside. One ceiling vent too small for a body. One drain in the floor. I count the guards two per shift, rotating every six hours, the second one always slightly slower than the first. I count the other women. Eleven. Some are crying without making sound. Some are staring at the wall. One girl across the room keeps touching a small ring on her right hand like it is the only real thing left.
I do not touch anything. I keep my hands in my lap and I think.
My father spent twenty years making sure I never ended up in a room like this. He sent me to school in another country. He kept my name out of the papers. He told me once I was maybe twelve, sitting on the steps of his office "The best thing I can do for you, Mia, is make sure nobody ever knows how much you matter to me."
I thought he was being poetic.
He was being practical.
He is dead now, and here I am, and the people who put me here know exactly who I am and exactly how much I matter. That is the only reason for the red dress. The only reason for the good lighting in the stairwell they march us up one by one. They are not selling frightened women. They are selling names. They are selling the idea that you can own a piece of something that used to be untouchable.
When the guard slides the meal tray under the door, he does not look at any of us. That is the part that makes my chest tight. Not the lock on the door. Not the dress. The fact that to him we are furniture. We are already objects and the auction has not even started.
When he comes back an hour later and reads the numbers off his clipboard, I am on my feet before he reaches Seven.
I will not be dragged. I decided that on the first night. Whatever happens, I walk on my own.
The stage is worse than I imagined.
The lights are white and hot and pointed directly at my face, which means I cannot see the room clearly only shapes, shadows, and the pale ovals of men's faces turned up toward me. There are maybe forty of them. They are dressed well. They have drinks in their hands. A few of them are talking to each other like this is a networking event and I am a conversation piece.
Not one of them is looking at my face.
I find a spot on the back wall a small crack in the plaster just above the exit sign and I stare at it. I lock my eyes on that crack and I breathe and I do not look at the men below me.
The auctioneer starts talking. I stop listening to the words and focus on the crack.
Then I hear a number and I can not help it I flinch. Not because it is high. Because of how fast it came. Like the man who said it was not bidding. Like he was just ending something.
A fat man in the front row snaps his paddle up. I noticed him the moment I walked out he had been watching the door, waiting, and when I appeared he sat up straighter and smoothed his jacket and smiled at me with small, wet teeth. The kind of smile that knows it is going to get what it wants.
The number climbs. I breathe. I stare at my crack in the wall.
The fat man raises his paddle again and glances back into the room like he is daring someone and I think: nobody is going to stop this, this is how it ends, this is
Then a voice from the back of the room says a number so large that the auctioneer actually stops speaking mid-syllable.
The room goes completely quiet.
The fat man's paddle stays down.
Every paddle stays down.
The silence stretches for five full seconds and then the auctioneer clears his throat and says, in a voice that is trying very hard to sound professional and failing: "Sold."
I look for the speaker.
The back of the room is all shadow. The lights are pointed at the stage, not the audience, and whoever spoke is standing where the light does not reach. I can not see a face. I can not see a body. I can only see
Eyes.
Dark eyes. Steady. Looking directly at me with an expression I can not name from this distance. Not hunger the room is full of hunger and this is not that. Not pity. Something older and more complicated than either one.
My heart does something strange.
Not fear. Not exactly. Something that lives in the same neighborhood as fear but has a different name the feeling you get when you are almost remembering something. When a smell or a sound pulls at something buried so deep you can not find the edges of it.
I know those eyes.
I do not know how. I do not know from where. I stare into the shadow and try to pull the memory up and it will not come only the certainty, bone-deep and inexplicable, that I have looked into those eyes before. That whatever comes next is not a beginning.
It is a continuation.
A guard touches my elbow to move me off the stage.
I let him, because my legs have gone strange.
Behind me, the room fills back up with noise the next lot is being announced, business continues, the world keeps moving. But the dark eyes in the back of the room hold mine for one more second before the shadow swallows them completely.
I know you, I think. I just don't know yet why that terrifies me more than any of this.
Then the door closes behind me, and I am alone in a black car, and I am moving through the city toward something I cannot name.
The drive takes forty minutes. When the car finally stops and I step out onto a stone driveway and look up at the house in front of me enormous, lit from within, quiet in the way that serious places are quiet a man opens the front door and light falls across his face.
My legs stop working entirely.
Because I do know those eyes. I have known them since I was ten years old.
And the name that comes up from the buried place, the name my mouth shapes before my brain catches up, is the last name I expected and the only one that makes a terrible, perfect sense.