InkHeart“Let us open the bidding at one hundred thousand dollars.”
The auctioneer’s voice is a slick veneer over the blinding glare of the spotlights. I stand on the block, the gold silk slip I’m wearing offering no defense against a cold that has settled deep in my bones. It’s the same cold as the metal tag, number twenty-seven, chained to my wrist.
“One hundred thousand from the gentleman in the front!”
I fix my eyes on a point in the darkness above the shapeless mass of the crowd, trying to find a place to retreat inside myself. Someone else can be here. Some other girl.
A murmur ripples through the audience as the price climbs. Two hundred thousand. Three-fifty. The numbers are vulgar, indistinct. They are assessing me like livestock, calculating the value of my skin, my teeth. The air is thick with the cloying scent of their colognes, and I find I can’t quite draw a full breath.
“Five hundred thousand!” a man yells, his voice slurring with excitement.
The numbers leap again, a volley fired back and forth. Six hundred. Seven. Eight-fifty. They’re just noise now, a drone against the frantic drumbeat in my ears. I close my eyes, and the burn of a single tear makes my mascara sting. I think of my father, and I pray this is enough.
“Going once…”
My stomach clenches.
“Going twice…”
“One million.”
The voice isn’t loud, but it lands with a weight that crushes all other sound in the room. The room dies. The auctioneer, his gavel hovering mid-air, fumbles his words. “I… I beg your pardon, did I hear…?”
“One million dollars,” the voice repeats, edged with an impatience that makes the auctioneer flinch.
Every head swivels toward a figure standing in the shadows at the back of the room.
“One million dollars,” the auctioneer breathes, his tone shifting to a fawning deference. “Sold. To the gentleman in the back.”
The bang of the gavel is a gunshot. It’s over. My legs tremble. A handler moves to grab me, but a hand is raised in the shadows, a sharp, dismissive gesture that halts him.
The buyer is coming himself.
He moves out of the darkness, and it’s his stillness I notice first. He is tall, wearing a suit of dark wool with such an impeccable cut it seems to absorb the light around him. As he mounts the stage, his movements are deliberate, possessing an unnerving economy of motion.
My breath catches. As he steps into the full glare of the spotlights, my heart stops.
Luca Carvelli.
Not the quiet boy from my neighborhood with charcoal-smudged hands and the smell of graphite clinging to him. The boy who’d once left a drawing of a robin on my doorstep because I’d mentioned I liked them. The boy I’d rejected for the spring dance.
Tears of gratitude blur his image. “Luca,” I whisper, my voice breaking on a sob.
He doesn’t look at me. His gaze is fixed on the auctioneer. He pulls a phone from his pocket, taps the screen, and shows it to the man, who nods frantically.
“The transfer is complete,” Luca says. His voice is the same one from the shadows, stripped of any warmth I remembered. “She is mine.”
He finally turns his head. His eyes meet mine, not the soft, shy eyes of a boy who drew birds, but the gaze of a man appraising an asset. His fingers wrap around my upper arm, a steel band. He says nothing as he pulls me from the stage, his long strides forcing me into a stumbling trot.
“Luca, thank you,” I stammer, dizzy with relief. “I don’t know how you found me, but I thought—”
He shoves open a side door, pulling me into a small, mahogany-paneled room. The door clicks shut behind us, followed by the heavy, final sound of a lock turning. He releases my arm, shoving me so I stumble back against the wall. He turns to face me, and in the quiet of the room, my hope withers. There is no kindness in his face. Only a cold, banked rage.
“You’ve forgotten,” he says, his voice a low whisper as he closes the distance between us. He cages me against the wall, one hand planted next to my head. I smell expensive wool and something dark and spicy. Nothing like the boy I knew. “Of course you have. It was nothing to you.”
“What was nothing?” I whisper, my throat tight.
“The spring dance,” he says, his eyes boring into mine. “I asked you. You laughed about it with your friends. I heard you.”
The memory, trivial and buried for years, surfaces with sickening clarity. The sound of my own laughter, high and careless, and the whispers of my friends. A stupid, childish cruelty.
“We were kids, Luca.”
“I was a boy who offered you the only thing he had,” he hisses, his face inches from mine.
His free hand comes up and his fingers close around my throat. The grip isn’t crushing, but it’s a firm, terrifying promise. I gasp, my hands flying to his wrist, but his hold is unbreakable.
“You made a choice all those years ago,” he whispers, his thumb stroking the frantic pulse at the base of my throat. “Now, I’ve made mine.”
His gaze drops to my mouth, then sweeps over the rest of my body. “What that boy couldn’t have,” he says, “I bought.”
He releases my throat, the ghost of his touch a brand on my skin. Taking a half-step back, his eyes never leaving mine, he shrugs off his suit jacket. The movement is smooth, methodical, filled with a chilling sense of purpose. He drapes the jacket over the back of a chair and slowly begins to work the button on his cuff.