The first thing Lena registered was the cold. Not the ambient chill of a poorly heated room, but the specific, damp cold that seeped upward through concrete, the kind that settled into the bones of the lower back and made everything ache. She was sitting on stone, her spine pressed against a wall that felt slick with moisture, and for a long, disoriented moment she could not remember how she had gotten there.
She tried to open her eyes and found that her eyelids were heavier than they should have been. There was a chemical residue clinging to the inside of her mouth, a bitterness that coated the back of her throat and made her stomach clench. Rohypnol, maybe. Or something adjacent. She had read enough forensic toxicology reports in her line of work to know the aftertaste of sedation, even if she had never expected to experience it from this side.
Slowly, painfully, the room assembled itself around her. It was not really a room. It was a chamber, wide and vaulted, with low ceilings held up by industrial steel beams. The lighting was sparse and strategic, amber spots that illuminated certain areas while leaving others in deliberate shadow. Somewhere to her left, she could hear the murmur of voices, too low and too numerous to distinguish individual words. The acoustic told her the space was large, populated, and underground.
Think, Lena. What was the last thing?
Tuesday evening. Her apartment in the financial district. She had been reviewing the consolidated accounts of Veridian Holdings, a client whose offshore structure she had been asked to audit. There had been a knock at the door, which she had assumed was the courier bringing the additional documentation she had requested. After that, nothing. A clean gap in the timeline, as though someone had simply cut the relevant frames from a film reel.
She moved her hands and found that they were not bound. That surprised her. Her ankles were free as well, and when she carefully stretched her legs out in front of her, she felt the rough texture of her own clothes, the same wool trousers and silk blouse she had been wearing at her desk. Someone had removed her shoes. The vulnerability of her stockinged feet against the cold floor was, absurdly, the detail that made her throat tighten.
Other sounds began separating themselves from the general noise. The scrape of chairs. A cough that echoed. And beneath it all, a rhythm she could not immediately place, a kind of cadence that rose and fell with irregular urgency. It took her several more seconds to understand what she was hearing.
Numbers. Someone was calling out numbers.
The understanding arrived with a physical sensation, like a hand pressing against her sternum. She had handled enough forensic accounting cases, worked alongside enough law enforcement consultants, read enough classified financial filings to know what an auction sounded like, even one conducted in hushed voices beneath the surface of a city. The rising bids. The brief silences. The sharp, conclusive sound that marked each sale.
This is an auction house. And I am below the stage.
The nausea that followed was not entirely chemical. She pressed her palms flat against the stone and forced herself to breathe in a measured pattern, four counts in, seven counts out, the way her therapist had taught her years ago for a completely different kind of panic. The technique had been designed for anxiety about performance reviews and difficult conversations. It was not quite adequate for this.
There was others near her. She could sense them more than see them: the sound of someone breathing unevenly to her right, a quiet sniffling from further away that might have been crying. She wondered how many of them there were and how many had already been brought upstairs. She wondered what the numbers meant, whether they referred to currency or to something else entirely, some unit of measurement she did not want to understand.
A door opened somewhere ahead of her, and a wedge of brighter light cut across the floor. A man stepped through, backlit, his features impossible to make out. He pointed at the woman closest to Lena, a young girl who could not have been older than twenty, and said something in a language Lena did not recognize. The girl stood up mechanically, as though the will to resist had already been drained out of her, and followed the man through the door. It closed behind them, and the chamber was dark again.
I am going to be next, Lena thought with absolute clarity. Or the one after that. And once I go through that door, whatever is on the other side will define the rest of my life.
She was a forensic accountant. She tracked the movement of money for a living. She understood, in an abstract professional capacity, that human trafficking was a multi-billion-dollar industry, that it operated on the same principles of supply and demand as any other market, and that its logistics were often managed with the same cold efficiency as a legitimate supply chain. She had even testified in a case once, a laundering operation tied to a trafficking ring in the Balkans, and had laid out for the jury the precise financial architecture through which human suffering was converted into profit.
None of that knowledge was useful now. It sat in her mind like furniture in a burning building, familiar objects made absurd by context.
The door opened again. The man pointed at her.
* * *
The stage was not really a stage, either. It was a raised platform at one end of what appeared to have been, in some previous life, a warehouse loading bay. The ceiling was higher here, and the amber lighting gave way to a single, harsh white spot that hit the platform from above. Lena could see, beyond the glare, the outlines of people seated in rows, though their faces were lost in darkness. The setup was deliberately theatrical, designed to display the merchandise while concealing the buyers.
She stood where she had been directed to stand, at the centre of the light, and tried to keep her expression neutral. The man who had brought her up was standing just behind her left shoulder, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, which she resented. Another man stood at a podium to her right, older, wearing a suit that looked expensive even under these conditions. He began speaking into a small microphone, his voice smooth and practiced, reciting what Lena understood to be a description of her. Her age. Her height. Her physical condition. The words were clinical, stripped of personality, the vocabulary of livestock assessment.
Twenty-eight. One hundred and sixty-seven centimetres. No visible defects.
She wanted to laugh at the grotesque inadequacy of that summary. She was Lena Vasik. She held a master degree in financial forensics from the London School of Economics. She spoke three languages fluently. She had once identified a seven-hundred-million-dollar fraud scheme that the regulatory authorities of two countries had missed. And now she was being described like a piece of furniture, her entire value reduced to the condition of her body and the symmetry of her face.
The bidding started. The numbers were in euros, she realised, and they began lower than she would have expected, which was a strange thing to notice and a stranger thing to feel offended by. They rose in increments, each new figure called out by a different voice from the darkness. Some were eager, others measured. One voice, low and guttural, bid with the casual persistence of a man accustomed to getting what he wanted, adding ten thousand each time without hesitation.
She could not see him, but she could hear his breathing between bids, heavy and slow, and she built an image of him in her mind that was probably unfair but felt accurate: older, thickset, a man who bought people the way other men bought cars, for the pleasure of ownership and the satisfaction of appetite. He was winning. The other voices were falling away, outpaced or simply uninterested in a bidding war.
This is it, she thought. This is how it happens. Not with drama or defiance, but with a number and a silence.
And then another voice spoke.
It came from the back of the room, calm and unhurried, and it named a figure so far above the current bid that the auctioneer actually paused. The silence that followed was not the silence of a completed sale. It was the silence of recalculation, of every person in the room reassessing the situation. The guttural voice started to respond, hesitated, and went quiet...
Lena stared into the darkness beyond the light, trying to find the source of that voice, but the glare made it impossible. All she had was the sound of it, a voice that carried authority without volume, that was used to being heard the first time. And beneath the terror and the disorientation and the chemical fog still clearing from her mind, something else registered, something she would not fully understand for weeks.
The voice had not been bidding. It had been closing.