AllFreeNovel
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I really am just meat.
Meat you buy. Meat you bring home. Meat you slaughter. Meat you store to consume later.
Meat someone else grows and prepares for you.
Just… meat.
“One fifty!”
“One seventy!
“Two hundred!”
The Mother looks angry, bidding higher than everyone else, over and over, until the numbers reach over three hundred million.
For… me?
Light cracks through the back of the room, a man striding in, confident and sure, arrogant in the way his shoulders sway. He wears a tuxedo, like the other men in attendance, but his fits him like he wears it daily. His hair is dark, cut close, and his eyes are so –
Oh, no.
So familiar. Too familiar. Though his haircut is new and the tuxedo unlike anything I’ve ever seen on him, I would recognize Cam anywhere.
He is here.
And now I will be safe.
The Mother looks over at him, her eyes wide, her back going straight as can be, her hands moving in an agitated manner. Cam sits down in a seat right next to her, holding a champagne flute.
He holds it aloft next to her, says something I cannot hear, and drinks half the glass.
Some old man with a rheumy cough shouts out, “Three forty!”
“Three fifty!” The cries are all men now, The Mother whispering furiously with a man to her right, who I now recognize.
It is Makiah Rooney.
Who shakes his headno.
Cam, I want to scream.CAM!
As if he hears me, he makes eye contact.
Then he grins.
He looks exactly like The Mother.
Cam lifts his paddle and stands, holding the champagne glass like he is giving a toast. All eyes are suddenly on him, chair legs making muffled sounds as people pivot, the room all one organism, Cam at the center. I squeeze my eyes shut hard, then open them, struggling for clarity.
Striving to see that the scene before me is truly real.
Horror fills every pore of my body, each cell vibrating with fear of an unknown fate that I have no control over. Tied down, gagged, and on a stage where people examine me as if I am an object.
Where Cam looks at me with that evil grin.
Mind scrambling to find a reason, a pathway, a strategy that makes sense, I pray Cam has a plan. That this is all part of a complicated double-cross. Triple-cross? That he’s playing a game and I have to trust him, even when he’s here, handsome and polished, looking like one of them.
Them.
