Low. Quiet. The kind of voice that didn’t need volume because it expected obedience. The kind of voice that had never in its existence needed to repeat itself.
The crowd parted.
Not voluntarily. I watched their bodies move, watched the way they stepped aside without deciding to, as if the shadows themselves had pushed them.
And from that darkness, he emerged.
The Raven King.
He walked through the crowd, and the crowd let him. Tall. Lean, dressed in black that swallowed the torchlight, wearing a long coat with silver clasps shaped like raven skulls.
Hair the color of ink, swept back from a high forehead.
And his eyes.
Black. Completely, impossibly black. No whites, no iris, no pupil. Just void looking back at me, dark and depthless as a well that went down forever.
He stopped at the edge of the bidding floor.
He didn’t look at my body the way the wolf had. There was no assessment of curves, no calculation of breeding potential. He looked at something else.
Something behind my face, or perhaps at the space where something should have been.
The hollow place.
Could he see it?
Could he see me?
A pouch landed on the bidding table with a heavy thunk. Not the musical clink of gold. Something duller. Colder.
“Black iron,” someone whispered.
The auctioneer’s smile faltered. His fingers twitched toward the pouch, then stopped. “Sir. We prefer standard currency for the market.”
“I am not paying for flesh.”
The Raven King’s gaze never left mine. Black eyes, dark and bottomless, and I felt myself falling into them like a stone into still water.
“I am paying for silence.”
Silence. I could do silence.
The wolf snarled, a genuine animal sound full of threat, and shoved forward through the crowd. “I bid higher. Three-fifty. Gold.Real gold, not grave-offerings.”
The auctioneer looked between them.
I watched his face calculate: the wolf’s gold spent easier than funeral coins, but the Raven King was not a creature one wanted as an enemy.
His thick fingers drummed against the ledger. Sweat beaded at his temples.
“Perhaps we should let the lady choose,” he said, voice oily. “As is custom.”
The wolf snorted. “Fine. Let her choose.”
He grinned at me, and there was nothing friendly in it. “Come here, girl. Let me get a proper look at my new bride.”
He grabbed my wrist.
