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Where was he?
“Sir, you have to clear the balance before you can sample.” The voice from the side, one of the auctioneers, cut through. The groping man straightened, giving her a moment of relief to collect herself.
Lyla took a step back, inhaling to control the spiral her thoughts were going toward, knowing she would lose herself if she went in, but it was a struggle to resist.
The man handed a wad of cash to the auctioneer, and Lyla surveyed the club again, trying to see if the devil was there.
He wasn’t.
Swallowing down the bitter disappointment, she tried to come up with a way she could get out of the night mostly intact.
“Let’s go, sweetheart.” Fifteen settled his arm around her waist and she looked at the wedding band on his finger, wondering if his wife knew he was out with the intention of fucking a girl half his age. But it was none of her business. They dug their graves, and she felt no remorse when they fell into it.
As they made their way outside, her heart began to pound.
Outside.
She loved the outside.
But she didn’t see it, not much. Growing up, her childhood and teenage years had been spent in special training houses. Some had been underground, some above, but they had always been confined within, her bed in the basement with the other kids. Now, she lived in a dormitory of other girls, in a complex that was large and heavily protected, but they weren’t allowed to go outside without reason and escort. That was one of the only reasons she looked forward to the auction, because if someone won her, she would get some respite for a moment outside, feel the wind and see the sky, if only for a brief moment.
The man led her out the backdoor of the club into the alley that opened into the parking lot.
“Stay here while I get my car,” Fifteen instructed her. “I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you try to run, do I?”
She shook her head. She knew what they did to those who ran. Her only other friend had run away when they’d been children, and she knew to this day they were hunting her. The Syndicate, the organization who owned all the slaves, did not let anyone escape. She had run one time too, and she'd been caught. And she had experienced first-hand what they did to those who ran.
Shoving the memory away, she stayed where she was. At her easy acquiescence, he smiled and left.
Standing alone at the edge of the alley behind the building, Lyla turned her neck up for the glimpse of the night sky, her heart heavy at seeing nothing but the dark. She knew the stars weren’t visible in the city some nights, she’d just hoped they would be. It had been too long since she had seen them, and too little in her short but hard life. But there was nothing tonight, no moon, no stars, just endless black littered by gray smoke and clouds.
She wondered some days what the point of her existence even was, on days when the future looked as the sky did—bleak, hopeless, endless. But then she reminded herself of the one thing that kept her going, the search for one little answer that made her wake up every morning and brave the day.
Suddenly, the hair on the back of her neck rose.
It was his scent that reached her first, a scent she’d only inhaled a few times in all the years he’d watched her, a scent that had imprinted itself in her mind. She’d only been so close to him a few times, and she didn’t know exactly what he smelled like because she hadn’t scented many nice things in her life, but it was distinct and male, and it was him.
She knew he was behind her. She could feel his breath on the top of her head, feel the heat of his larger body at her back, feel her dormant senses flaring to life as they always did in contact with him. And having him at her back always made her feel both chased and cherished, the dichotomy of emotions difficult for her to comprehend herself.
God, she hated him, she hated her response to him, hated that she wanted to hate him deeper but couldn’t, and she hated that he knew it and didn’t care one bit.
She stayed still, not breaking the silence with a single word. She had asked him the question a few times, and each time he had fucked with her mind, and left her confused, frustrated, and angry. She just held onto the anger now, as she had for many years. Anger was good. Anger made her feel. Anger reminded her that she was still alive.
“Did you enjoy his touch?”
The voice, his voice, came quietly from behind her. If death had a voice, it would be his. Again, she didn’t know what his voice was similar to, because she didn’t have anything to compare it to. But she knew she’d heard the voices of many men in her life, and his was, without a doubt, the most dangerous of them all.
It reminded her of a vague story she remembered someone telling her, a memory that was faded and probably from before she got into this life—the story of a man playing pipes and making all the rodents in town follow him, right off the edge of a cliff to their deaths, happily and merrily as they danced along. He had that kind of a voice—deep, alluring, seductive, a voice that could lead people obliviously to a cliff and to their own demise, making them enjoy it while they remained blind. A dangerous, dangerous voice on a dangerous, dangerous man. The voice of death beckoning the mortals to test their mortality.
It was just her luck that she had found him, of all people, that fateful night years ago.
She kept silent, refusing to follow to his tune.
“I asked you a question, flamma,” he reminded her again.
So did I, she wanted to say.
She didn’t know why he called her that. She was sure he knew her name, and was even more certain it was as close to a term of endearment as a man like him could get. In the beginning, when he’d called her that, it had filled her with hope and made her feel a sense of belonging. As the hope dwindled, she knew it meant nothing. It grated on her. She wasn’t his anything. A man like him wasn’t endeared to anything.
