His gaze found mine. I didn’t drop my stare, but every muscle in me screamed to look away.
“One billion,” he said, his gaze sliding over me, then the boys. “And five hundred million more for the Creed.”
The number hit like a verdict, echoing across the chamber. I swallowed, my pulse rattling hard in my throat.
“You will earn every cent over the next year. Am I understood?” he announced. When we didn’t answer, he leaned against the balcony. “This is where you say, ‘Yes, sir’.”
Kane, Thorne, and I repeated the words almost robotically. It wasn’t the first time we’d been commanded to address a Buyer as sir or ma’am. Rafe, however, didn’t say anything. I wondered if he’d even understood.
Our Buyer glared down at him, and a few soldiers raised their guns, aiming at Rafe. He glanced over at us, then toward the guns and up toward our Buyer. His throat worked, his eyes widening only slightly. No one besides us who knew Rafe would’ve noticed, but he was clearly unsettled. He may have been sold off more than us, but it was new for him, too. The grandeur of it all.
My lips parted. I wasn’t sure what to do. If I told our Buyer that Rafe was deaf, I could be sentencing him to death. I doubt after what the Buyer paid that he'd take kindly to being sold someone with a disability, even if Rafe was the strongest of all of us. Although I didn’t care what happened to Viktor, I did care what happened to Leah. As long as she was at that house, then that meant protecting Viktor, too.
So I took a timid step forward, one foot in front of the guys, my knuckles brushing Rafe’s, and dropped to a knee. I bowed my head, tilting my face to the side and giving Thorne and Kane a pointed look. Both brothers followed suit, and thankfully, so did Rafe.
It was enough to appease the Buyer. Guns lowered, and his next words were sharp.
“My name is Halden,” he said. “You will call me Mr. Halden or sir. Nothing else.”
He let that settle before he went on, his tone quiet enough that the silence of the chamber made every word sound heavier.
“You’ve been groomed. Beaten. Sold.” His gaze swept across us, lingering where I knelt in front. “Viktor believed that was enough to make you lethal. But Viktorwas short-sighted. Violence without discipline burns out. I don’t invest in things that burn out.”
He straightened, one hand brushing his tie into place. “For the next year, you will be field-tested. Every skill, every weakness, every limit you think you’ve learned under Viktor will be stripped back and measured. You are not here for pleasure. You are not here for any specific assignment. You are here to prove that the Creed name has value, and if it does, then we can talk about a more permanent situation.”
Permanent. All four of us stiffened at the word.
His eyes locked on me, steady and cold. “And that includes you, girl. Doll or Creed—makes no difference to me. If you survive what I put you through, I will decide what you are.”
Rifles shifted as if punctuating his words.
Halden leaned against the rail again, unhurried. “At the end of this year, youwillbe worth far more than the billion I paid. You’ll be entirely one-of-a-kind. Soldiers that can’t be argued with.” His dark, hazel eyes combed over our blank, carefully curated faces. “Icanbe a generous man. You give me what I want, and I’ll make sure all four of you never worry about a penny again. Solook around. Look long and hard. You can stay kneeling on the ground for me and you can call the wealth you see your own,orone of those guns can put you out of your misery. The choice is yours.”
We all remained silent.
“Very good.” Halden’s lips drew back in a wide, shining smile. “Let’s test the product then, shall we?”
?Arden?
Thirty days in, and Halden stopped pretending we were people. To be honest, I’m not sure he ever saw us as anything more than products, but it was clear on day thirty-one after being run ragged every day, put through test after test, that he planned to carve away all of Viktor and replace it with what he needed Creed to become.
His soldiers forced me toward a narrow, glass coffin placed atop what Creed and I called The Tank. It was a literal tank about ten feet deep and fifteen feet wide, and it sat in the center of one of the many labs we’d been taken to. Every week, we ended up here, the challenge we faced greater than the last. That day, my wrists were shackled behind me, ankles clipped, a chain running up the spine of my grey uniform like a cruel, silver ladder.The water in The Tank was mountain cold—so fucking cold I had to grit my teeth to keep them from clacking.
“Dislocate. Escape. Surface,” a guard instructed, his voice flat. “You have two minutes.”
A red digital timer glowed above.
No Creed were there. The guards kept stealing us in rotations, at times leaving me alone in our cell or with only one other Creed. I’d seen Rafe the least, but I was grateful for the small moments of privacy I’d been able to steal with Thorne.
“We’re going to get through this,” he promised me after the second week, the two of us tucked naked under my blanket. Our bodies were bruised, stripped raw by drills, and the smell of antiseptic from the showers clung to our skin, but it was the closest to home we had. Sex for us was frantic one night, numb the next. Bodies have a way of cataloging hurt, even when we beg them to forget. Sometimes, our bodies remembered what wasdone to us, and we’d flinch, hesitate, stumble. We cared for each other—we did—but we’d never call it making love. There was too much trauma in the act for it to be something pure or innocent, but in some ways, the mere fact wetriedwas an act of hope.
In those moments, what we wanted wasn’t pleasure. We wanted to disappear together. To be less like a body and more like smoke, vanishing into each other’s lungs. On rare nights we chased orgasms, but most times it felt like dragging ourselves uphill through mud, our bodies failing us before we reached the peak. We usually gave up halfway, collapsing into each other’s arms and deciding just being close was enough.
We were proof. Proof that intimacy could exist even when desire didn’t behave. Proof that surviving together mattered more than finishing. Thorne’s care of me, the way he chose to want me despite both our pasts, lived in my chest like a second pulse, one I tried to carry with me when the lights came on and the guards dragged me toward one torturous test and the next.
But I think we both knew it was fading—us.
The grate under The Tank rattled as I laid down in the coffin. Above, the guards who escorted me yanked once on my chains, lifting my chest an inch, pulling my arms higher into the sockets. I inhaled hard through my nose, because that’s what the month had taught us—make every breath count.
