I don't wait long.
Maybe an hour. Maybe less. The meals haven't come, so it's hard to measure, but the shadows under the door shift and the boot pattern changes again—heavier this time, deliberate, two sets approaching in lockstep—and I know before the lock buzzes that this is different.
The door opens.
Two guards I haven't seen before. Bigger than the night shift. Broader. Their faces are blank in a way that's worse than cruelty—no anger, no amusement, nothing. Just function. Bodies built for a purpose, carrying it out.
One of them holds a pair of cuffs. Real ones. Metal. Not zip ties.
"On your feet."
I stand. My legs shake but they hold.
"You’re coming with us."
Chapter 4
They don't take me through the corridors I know.
Instead of turning left toward the Nurse's station, toward the route I've mapped in my head over thirty-six hours of listening to footsteps and counting doors, they turn right. Then up. A set of stairs I didn't know existed—concrete, narrow, industrial—and then a door that opens onto cold air and the smell of exhaust and the first sky I've seen in two days.
Night. The orange-gray wash of city light against cloud cover. I have maybe three seconds to see it—three seconds ofoutside, of a world that still exists beyond concrete walls—before they pull a hood over my head.
"Move."
A hand on the back of my neck, shoving me forward. My bare feet hit gravel, then metal—the floor of a van. No seats. I'm pushed down onto my knees, cuffs catching on something bolted to the floor. The van smells like diesel and bleach.
The door slams. Engine starts. We're moving.
I try to track the route the way I've seen people do in movies—count the turns, estimate the distance. Left turn. Straight for a while. Right. But the hood is disorienting and the van takes corners hard enough to throw me sideways, my shoulder slamming into the wheel well, my cuffed hands unableto brace. One sharp turn sends me sprawling and a boot finds my ribs—casual, corrective, the way you'd nudge a suitcase that slid out of place.
"Stay down."
I stay down. Cheek pressed against the cold metal floor, ribs throbbing, tasting the inside of the hood. The van rumbles beneath me and I count heartbeats because it's the only thing I can count.
Prepped.
The word has been rattling around my skull since I heard it through the cell door.Ellis wants the omega prepped. I've been turning it over, trying every possible meaning, and every possibility is worse than the last.
The van stops. Twenty minutes, maybe. Maybe less. The door opens and hands haul me out—stumbling, disoriented, gravel under my feet again and then smooth concrete, then a door, then the hood comes off and I'm blinking in a corridor that looks nothing like the facility.
Polished concrete floors. Recessed lighting, warm-toned. The antiseptic smell is layered over something else—leather, maybe, or oil. This place is cleaner. More designed. Nothing like the concrete cells and fluorescent hum of the facility.
Oh god. Is this it? Am I being sold?
The thought hits me like a wall of ice water. Ellis said buyer. Ellis said auction. And now they've driven me somewhere new, somewhere polished and warm, somewhere that looks like it was built to impress someone—and my brain fills in the rest before I can stop it.
This is a showroom. I'm the product. Someone is here to buy me.
My bare feet leave smudges on the polished floor. My lip stings where I bit it during a sharp turn, and my ribs are sore from the boot, but nothing's broken. Just rattled. The metal cuffsbite into my wrists with every step. One guard in front, one behind.
They stop at a door. The guard in front scans a keycard. The lock clicks—not the wasp-buzz of my cell, a clean electronic click, like something expensive. Like something designed.
The door opens.
The room is warm. Not cell-warm—deliberately warm, the temperature calibrated so that bare skin won't prickle with goosebumps. Amber lighting, low and diffuse, casting everything in tones of honey and shadow. The ceiling is higher than my cell. The air smells like leather and something chemical I can't name.
In the center of the room: a wooden frame. X-shaped. Bolted to the floor. Padded leather restraints at each point—wrists, ankles.A St. Andrew's Cross. I know what it is because a girl named Tasha who came into Cornerstone every Tuesday spent twenty minutes one shift describing her search for a specific BDSM reference guide we didn't carry. She talked about furniture the way other people talk about throw pillows—casually, enthusiastically, with diagrams on her phone. I nodded politely and shelved her special order and filed the information away the way I file everything away, and now here I am, and the information is telling me torun.
