OLWEN
Istood on the auction block, third from the left, and performed the act of breathing.
Shallow inhale. Pause. Slow exhale.
I’d practiced in front of a cracked mirror for three weeks straight, watching my reflection until the rhythm looked natural, until the rise and fall of my chest matched the women around me.
“Lot forty-seven.”
The auctioneer’s voice bounced off stone walls, too loud, too jovial for what this place was.
He was a thick man with a red face slick with perspiration, jowls quivering as he consulted his leather ledger.
“Human female. Twenty-two years. Literate. Numerate. Merchant stock.” He squinted at his notes. “No diseases. No deformities. Teeth intact.”
A yellow smile. “Excellent breeding potential, gentlemen. Shall we start the bidding at one hundred gold?”
I kept my gaze fixed on a point above the crowd.
The rafters. Thick oak beams gone dark with age, left over from the building’s days as a granary, or perhaps from less savory purposes.
I didn’t want to know.
Easier to look up there than at the faces below. The monsters who had come shopping for wives.
I counted them in my peripheral vision because I couldn’t afford not to know what hunted me.
A serpent lord in the corner, his scales glinting copper and green beneath a hooded cloak. Other shapes in the shadows, monsters I didn’t look at long enough to identify.
And in the front row, a wolf shifter, massive. Bigger than any wolf had a right to be while still wearing human form. His shoulders strained the seams of his leather vest, a chest like a barrel.
Fur the color of rust crept up his neck and across his jaw, and his eyes were gold coins in a brutal face. He leaned forward on the bench, nostrils flaring wide.
Scenting the air.
Hunting for the one thing all predators sought in prey.
Fear.
His brow furrowed. Nostrils flared again. Again.
His lips peeled back from yellow teeth. The gold faded from his eyes, replaced by something colder. Hunger. The kind that sharpened when the hunt got difficult.
“Two hundred gold,” he growled.
The auctioneer’s face split into a grin that showed too many teeth. “Excellent opening bid! A discerning eye, good sir. Do I hear two-fifty?”
The other monsters shifted. Glanced at the wolf. At me. Calculating odds, weighing risks.
I kept my gaze on the rafters and counted my heartbeats.
“Two-fifty,” the Serpent Lord offered, his voice a dry rustle.
“Two seventy-five.” The wolf. Irritated now.
“Three hundred.”
The new voice came from the shadows at the back of the market hall.
