Mia POV
I have approximately thirty seconds before my legs stop working.
I know this is the way you know a storm is coming, not because you can see it yet, but because the air has changed and your body figured it out before your brain did. My knees are shaking underneath me. The spotlight is so hot it feels like standing inside a bulb. And the room full of men I cannot fully see is looking at me the way people look at something they are deciding whether to buy.
I lock my knees.
I will not fall down in front of these people. I will not give them that.
The auctioneer is still talking. He switches to English now, which I think is for my benefit, or maybe just for the room's performance of information, clean and businesslike, like he is reading off a spec sheet.
"Female. Age twenty-two. Height five-four. No medical conditions on record. No family connections in the region."
He pauses there. Let that last part settle.
No family. No one is coming.
I stare out into the dark, and I think about my father, and I think about Rosa, and I think: you are wrong. You are so completely wrong about that.
But thinking it doesn't help me right now, so I file it away and do the only useful thing I can.
I count.
One door in the one the guard dragged me through. One door out, on the far right wall, slightly lighter at its edges, which means it leads somewhere with windows or outdoor light. Four guards that I can place from the way the dark moves, two flanking me, one near the entrance, one near the exit door. No windows in this room. Ceiling high enough that the spotlight rigging takes up most of it.
That is my whole world right now. That door on the right. That sliver of lighter dark.
If I can get to it before the guard near it reacts
A voice from the front of the room stops the thought cold.
"Fifty thousand."
It is said that the way you say pass the salt. Casually. Like, fifty thousand dollars is an inconvenience, not a fortune. Like, I am a slightly interesting piece of furniture.
My stomach turns completely over.
The auctioneer responds with energy now, a little lift in his voice, and more numbers follow. Sixty. Seventy-five. Eighty. I track them without meaning to, the way you track a car crash, unable to look away, even though looking doesn't help.
I search the dark for faces.
It is useless. The spotlight is designed exactly for this to show everything on my end and nothing on theirs. I am completely visible, and they are completely hidden, and that imbalance is the whole point. I understand that. I hate it. I use the hat to keep my spine straight.
One hundred thousand.
The room thins out a little. Not as many voices now. The serious ones are separating from the ones who were just watching. I count maybe four active bidders left, their voices moving around the dark like I am the center of a clock and they are the hands.
One-twenty. One-fifty.
At one-eighty, it becomes two voices.
I cannot see their faces, but I can hear the difference between them. One is younger, controlled, clipped, trying not to sound excited and not quite managing it. The other is older. Much older. Gravelly, like the voice scraped itself raw a long time ago and never recovered. Patient. Unhurried.
The older voice scares me more.
Young men bid with their egos. They can be outlasted. The older voice bids with something that has no ego in it at all, just certainty. The certainty of a man who has done this before and knows exactly how it ends.
Two-twenty.
The younger voice hesitates. Thirty full seconds of quiet where I can hear my own heartbeat and the faint sound of someone shifting in a chair.
Then silence.
The older voice says two-fifty like a period at the end of a sentence. Done. Finished. Mine.
The room agrees with him. I feel it before I hear it, that collective exhale of men who have made up their minds. The auctioneer's voice lifts into its closing rhythm.
And this is the moment I lose control of my breathing.
Because I look at that exit door and I know I cannot reach it. Because I think about what comes next, being handed over to a voice I cannot see, belonging to a man I do not know, and my body decides, completely without my permission, to panic.
My chest tightens. My vision blurs at the edges. I press my bleeding wrists against my thighs, and I dig my nails into my own palms, and I think: Dad. Dad, what do I do? Tell me what to do right now.
And then from the very back of the room, a voice speaks.
Quiet.
The way a thunderclap is quiet for the single second before the sound catches up to the light.
One sentence. A number. Spoken without rushing, without raising its volume by a single degree.
Five hundred thousand.
The room doesn't react all at once. It happens in layers like a wave moving from the back to the front, confusion becoming recognition becoming something very close to shock. The auctioneer stops mid-syllable. Somewhere to my left, a man actually laughs, short and disbelieving, and then cuts himself off.
The old man at the front says nothing.
I spin toward the back of the room. I press my hand up against the edge of the spotlight, trying to block it, trying to see past it, desperate for one face, one shape, anything.
Just dark. Just rows of suited shoulders and the orange glow of cigarettes being held very still.
The auctioneer collects himself. He says the number back. His voice has changed, a new energy in it, something between excitement and nerves.
He asks if anyone will answer.
Silence.
The gavel comes down so hard I flinch.
Sold.
The word hits me like a door closing.
And then footsteps. From the back of the room. Slow, deliberate, moving not toward me but toward the exit and a guard peeling off the wall to follow, and a low voice saying three words to the guard that I cannot hear, and the guard nodding.
He is already leaving.
He bought me, and he is already walking away, and I still have not seen his face. Not one feature. Not one detail can I carry out of this room.
Except one.
The guard closest to me has his phone out. He is texting quickly, one thumb, and I am close enough, just close enough, to see the name at the top of the message screen before his hand drops.
Reyes.
The name hits something in my memory so hard my vision goes white at the edges for a full second.
Reyes.
I know that name.
I knew it from a detective's office three months ago. From a folder left open by accident on a desk. From a name said quietly and then immediately taken back.
Reyes.
The same name, the detective said the night he told me my father's death was a robbery.
The same name, he said, he'd never said.
My legs finally give out. I go down to one knee on the hard floor, and a guard grabs my arm to haul me up, and I let him, because I am not thinking about the guard or the room or the exit door anymore.
I am thinking: the man who just bought me is the man who killed my father.