"Miss Beckett?" The woman at the door is still watching me, polite and patient. "Is something wrong?"
Everything is wrong. My whole chest is wrong, hollowed out and ringing like a bell that's just been struck.
"I need a moment," I manage. "The cloakroom. Where is it?"
She points me down a side hallway, and I walk fast enough that my heels catch on the hem of my dress and I almost trip, the folder still clutched against my ribs like something I might be able to put back together if I just hold it tightly enough.
The cloakroom is empty except for racks of coats and a woman standing near the far wall, dark hair twisted up, a glass of water in her hand that she clearly poured for herself rather than waiting for someone to bring it to her. She looks up when I come in, and whatever's on my face must say everything, because her expression softens instantly, the way you'd look at someone who just got hit by a car they never saw coming.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
My laugh comes out wrong, more of a sob with a ribbon of a laugh wrapped around it. "I didn't even know what this was. Ithought I was coming to a dinner. A real one. With food and a silent auction for some hospital wing or orphanage."
"There's food," she says gently. "And technically, it is an auction."
My legs give out before I decide to let them. I sit on the little velvet bench against the wall and put my face in my hands, the folder sliding off my lap onto the floor, my own photograph staring up at the ceiling.
The woman crosses the room and sits beside me. Up close, she's striking in a controlled way, dark eyes assessing me without making it feel like an inspection.
"I'm Katriona," she says.
"Liv." My voice cracks around the single syllable.
"Liv." She says it like she's filing it away somewhere safe. "Breathe. In through your nose. You're not the first woman to sit on this exact bench and feel like the floor disappeared."
"My brother set me up." Saying it out loud makes it realer, makes it land somewhere deep in my sternum where it's going to live for a long time. "He told me to dress nicely and represent the family."
"He knew," Katriona says. It isn't a question.
"He knew." The words taste like metal. "He had to have known. People don't accidentally end up at a place like this."
Katriona doesn't flinch.
"Why would he do this?" I'm not asking her, not really. I'm asking the room, the universe, anyone who might have an answer that doesn't break something fundamental about how I understand my own brother. "I raised him. After our parents died, I gave up everything, every plan I had for my own life, so he could finish school and have something stable. And this is what he does with it. He sells me to the highest bidder…for what?"
Katriona is quiet for a moment, and when she speaks again, her voice has gone careful in a different way, less comforting and more honest.
"The men here aren't ordinary men," she says. "Whatever your brother owes, or wants, or thinks he's buying his way into, it's not small. People don't sell their sisters for small things."
That should scare me more than it does. Maybe it will later, once the shock burns off and leaves something sharper behind. Right now it just confirms what I already suspected the second I saw my own face printed inside a binder full of…well, me.
"I should leave," I say. "I should walk straight out that door and call a cab and never speak to him again."
"You could." Katriona's tone stays even, no judgment in it either direction. "But think about what happens after. If you walk out of this building in the middle of an auction, every family in that room will know your name, and they'll know it as the woman who ran. That kind of story travels. It attaches itself to a name and follows it. Your brother's name. Yours."
"So I'm trapped either way." A fresh wave of tears fills my eyes.
"You're not trapped." She turns slightly toward me, and something in her gaze sharpens into focus, like she's deciding to hand me something valuable. "You're choosing. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one tonight. Walking back in there with your head up is a choice. Staying long enough to understand exactly what you're dealing with before you decide anything, that's a choice too. The worst thing you can do is let fear make the decision for you."
I look down at the folder on the floor, at my face smiling up from a photograph taken on a day I thought my biggest decision had been which college lecture to skip. I think about Cole's tight jaw and the way he wouldn’t answer any of my questions.
I think about every version of myself I gave away in the last six years so he could have a future, and how easily he just handed mine over without asking.
"I'm not going to fall apart in a cloakroom," I say, mostly to myself.
"No," Katriona agrees. "You're going to walk back in there, and you're going to let them see exactly what kind of woman they think they're buying. Let them be wrong about you in real time. There's a particular satisfaction in that."
A laugh actually escapes me this time, thin but real. "You sound like you've done this before."
