The lights dip low. Only a hum remains from the centre stairs, until the stage lights up.
My eyes draw to the table as something glints on it; it’s a remote, and by seeing the number panel on it, I know exactly what it’s for.
A shiver runs through me.
This is a fucking auction.
Saint’s hand grips my chair, pulling it closer to place his hand on my restless leg. I hadn’t even noticed it bouncing whilst taking in the severity of the situation we’re in.
A voice thunders from afar, and I glance up to lock onto the man responsible for it all.
Judge Montgomery.
The tone of his voice is unforgettable as his threats to Jenna lurk in my mind.
“Good evening, all. We’re happy to have you here for our year-end event. And let me tell you, what a night we have lined up.”
I drone his voice out, shifting my focus on what Saint draws on my leg. He moves between guiding his palm up and down my exposed thigh, circling his thumb, and tracing various shapes with his index finger.
We can’t speak, and this is the only way he can communicate with me. My chest heaves when I work out he’s written‘I love you’across it.
My eyes travel up to him, and he throws me a lazy wink before focusing ahead, still absentmindedly distracting me as the show begins ahead of us.
I don’t want to watch what’s going on down below, but I force myself to glare at a hidden reality of the underworld, women dragged onto the stage whilst they’re quite literally bid on like an antique road show.
No thoughts for the numbers coming in, no concern that there are actual human beings having their human rights abused.
Most of them look drugged out of their mind, others look like they’re fearing for their lives, a small pocket standing with vacant glares, the latter responsible for ringing out the highest of prices.
This isn’t right.
Something feels off about them; they’re almost like living zombies. Obeying every command and not fighting against the security that handles them into the stage.
Have they been here that long that they no longer fight against it?
The thought causes my heart to pinch.
My inner conscience screams at me to save them, to ask Saint to rally each and every one of them up and take them with us. Help them rebuild their lives through my company; Regina and I could expand.
In reality, I know we can’t right now.
That last part of me, the one that had my darkened path forking off to only the names I held in a list, to victims we would converse with to let them know what we were doing.
Vanishes.
My aim of helping others hurt by the Sumus has now stretched to Omnia, no longer feeling the need to check in with them to ask if they want their abusers killed.
They’ll all burn for this.
Now my focus is solely on the man beside me, the one who’ll make me his queen beside his reign of terror.
I study his features, a jaw as sharp as a blade as the shadows gloom across it, defining the muscles that seem to adorn every inch of him.
His brow is dipped, attention firmly on what’s unravelling below, eyes darting at the corners. He doesn’t show a flicker of emotion or discomfort as he watches, and I know that’s likely due to being numbed to this sort of atrocity.
Witnessing such violations will take its toll on you. I can see it in the faint lines that etch his eyes, the way his jaw subtly flexes when a cry breaks free from below.
He might appear to others as a predator built for war, but he cares deeply.
