She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t care. She stared at the wealthiest, most terrifying being in the room with the expression of someone who intended to remember his face for the sole purpose of one day making him regret it.
He raised one hand. Two fingers extended.
“The human.”
Drenn’s head snapped toward the gallery. The greed in his expression ignited like a gas flame.
“Lot seventeen, my lord—a female, captured in the Kael-Voss corridor, no prior ownership records, uncatalogued abilities?—”
“I didn’t ask for her biography.” His voice carried across the room with a weight that made lesser voices impossible. “Name your price.”
The woman’s eyes hadn’t left him. He could feel them—two points of heat against the frozen architecture of his performance. Drenn named a figure that was absurd for an uncatalogued human with no documented skills. Skarreth didn’t blink.
“Done. Have her delivered to my estate.”
A murmur rippled through the auction floor. Surprise, envy, pity. The pity was for the woman. Everyone in this room knew what happened to Lord Skarreth’s purchases.
He rose from the chair. The silk of his coat fell into perfect lines, and he descended from the gallery with the unhurried grace of a predator collecting the remains of a kill already made. Every step calibrated. Every angle composed.
He stopped in front of the block. Close enough that the woman had to tilt her head back to maintain eye contact. She did. He noted the tension in her jaw, the way her bound hands had curled into fists, the rapid pulse visible at her throat. Terrified. Furious. Refusing to let the first swallow the second.
He smiled. Slowly. Let the fangs show.
“You’ll make an excellent addition to my collection.”
Her throat worked. Her fists tightened. She didn’t look away.
He turned his back on her and walked out of the auction house without looking at anyone else. Behind him, Drenn’s voice cracked with excitement as he processed the sale.
You’ll make an excellent addition to my collection. The words sat in his mouth like rust. Same as they always did.
A storage closet—three meters by two, shelving units bolted to the walls, empty except for packing crates stamped with Corvathi shipping codes that meant nothing. The overhead light was dead. He didn’t turn it on.
Lord Skarreth’s hands were shaking.
Not much. Not visibly—not in any way that would have registered from two meters away, not in any way the audience upstairs could have detected. But here, in the dark, with no one to perform for, he could feel the fine tremor running from his wrists to his fingertips. The same hands that had gestured so casually at the lots. The same fingers that had risen to claim the human woman with the steady authority of absolute ownership.
He pressed them flat against a crate. The metal was cold. He leaned his weight into it and breathed.
The mask came off in pieces.
His spine went first—the imperial column that had carried him through the market and the auction floor buckled forward, vertebra by vertebra, until his shoulders curved and his head dropped between his arms. His jaw unclenched. The muscles around his eyes released their frozen neutrality, and what surfaced beneath was not fury or grief or any single nameable thing. It was exhaustion. The kind that lived in the marrow. The kind that years made.
He breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. The air tasted like packing grease and recycled atmosphere.
Her face.
Standing on the block. Chin up. Fists clenched. Brown eyes burning holes through a mask he’d spent years building.
He pulled the scanner from inside his coat—palm-sized, matte black, no manufacturer’s mark. His thumb found the activation switch without looking. The device hummed against his hand, cycling through frequencies: standard audio, sub-frequency, quantum-tethered, molecular. He swept the walls in a slow arc, working left to right, floor to ceiling. The shelving units. The door frame. The ventilation grate in the upper corner, no wider than his fist. The packing crates, one at a time, the scanner held close enough to read the chemical signatures of their adhesive seals.
Clean.
He swept again. Faster, but thorough—overlapping passes on the corners where surveillance nested in the junction of two surfaces. The ventilation grate got a third pass.
Clean.
He killed the scanner and withdrew the transmitter encoder from the coat’s interior lining—a flat disc, heavy for its dimensions, warm from his body. He set it on the nearest crate. Beside it, the communication unit: compact, military-grade encryption, the housing scratched and dented from years of usein rooms exactly like this one. He connected them. The encoder clicked into the comm unit’s auxiliary port with a sound like a bone seating back into its socket. A single green indicator pulsed once, twice, then held steady.
