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Sloane continues to stare down at the garden below. “You are the lesser evil.”
Chapter47
Everleigh
I’m back in my cell after my forced makeover, curled in a ball on the pallet bed as I sweat through my thin silk dress. My skin is burning and Resa is speaking.
I’m too focused on trying to hold back my heat to hear what she’s saying, when my cage door bursts open.
By the time I start fighting my captors instead of my needs, they have me in an unbreakable grip as they drag me from my cell.
My last sight of Resa is her standing at the door of her cage, hands wrapped around the bars and fury hardening her expression.
Her brown eyes meet mine. Her lips move. I try to read them, and I think, though I might be wrong, that she says, ‘be strong.’
And then she’s gone. Or I am, a door slamming shut between us.
I’m in a daze as they pull me along the hallway, the lights too bright, my skin burning and itching from the inside out as I try to stay alert.
It doesn’t matter that all I’m wearing is a thin silk slip that hits the top of my thighs and nothing else. I burn. My heat is close, so close I’m in a battle with myself not to start begging for an alpha’s knot.
The blank-faced servant throws open a door and steps aside. The two servants half-carrying and half-dragging me along shove me inside. As I stumble and correct myself, the door behind me slams shut.
I whirl around, trying to take everything in.
I’m in a glass cage. No, a half-circle stage. Maybe a platform? It’s not a big one, but I’m surrounded on three sides by glass, and behind me, a polished metal door with no handle.
If I squint, I can just make out rows of chairs on the other side of the glass, like the ones you’d find in a theater. They stretch up, rows and rows of them. People are sitting in them. I can’t see their faces with the complete absence of light on the other side of the glass, but I don’t need to see them to know who I’m dealing with. I can smell them.
Alphas.
The air is thick with alpha pheromones, almost drowning out the faint traces of the omegas in heat who came before me.
I stay as close as I can to the polished door. With my heat itching at my skin, the last thing I need is to get any closer to those alpha pheromones. It wouldn’t take much for me to have my ass in the air, begging for one of their knots.
“Now, we have a sudden and very interesting omega just come on the market.” A man’s smooth voice comes from everywhere all at once.
I whip around, eyes probing to locate him. And then I spot the small, silver speakers in each corner of my stage/cagething.
“The starting bid for Everleigh is a quite reasonable ten thousand dollars,” he announces.
Ever since I perfumed a year ago, Lawrence has never let me forget I’m his.Hisomega.Histo do with whatever he wishes. A thing to own.
But hearing an announcer put a price on me?Auctioningme to a room full of alphas? I have never felt less human in my life.
“Forty thousand.”
I jump, startled. I don’t know how much Lawrence or his father paid for me, but I never believed the price could jump so high, so fast.
I thought the bidding would be the worst.
The worst is not seeing who is bidding. The worst is hearing all the murmurs, the laughter, and the hum of conversation beyond the glass as the bids increase. As if these alphas were at a theater and I’m the night’s performance.
The worst is knowing that soon one of the alphas will own me.
I stare at the glass, and the thing I see most clearly is my wide, half-panicked eyes as I press my back against the silver, polished door.
I need to get out.
