Page 86 of Evil Hearts

Going Once

D eath doesn’t leave you with any options. That’s why they choose us. Desperate people make desperate choices, and when it comes right down to it, most of us will pay any price to live another day.

I certainly had. With my chin held high, I stepped up onto the brightly-lit auctioneer’s block in the darkened room and reminded myself why I was there.

The thin leather collar around my neck was the price of being alive—and not merely alive, but healthy , something that had seemed impossible after I’d been thrown from my horse and broken my neck. When two beautiful women appeared at my hospital bedside, less than an hour after my second seizure and the news that I would never move again, I’d taken the offer of service in return for healing without a second thought.

Maybe it was a devil’s bargain. Maybe I’d regret it. But I was alive to regret it, and I could stand there as the fae auctioneer rattled off my virtues: youthful, physically fit, with experience as a hostler, in falconry, and in hand-to-hand combat—unusual for a freshly-bonded mortal. A worthwhile investment, eminently trainable, and aesthetically pleasing.

The bidding opened at three hundred fifty gold. A milk-pale woman with corn-gold ringlets took the first bid. A heavyset man dressed in blue-and-red brocade raised by twenty.

I tuned out the auctioneer and the bidding, letting it wash over me like white noise. My eyes settled on each fae sitting in the shadowy rows of chairs, memorizing the creatures who bought and sold humans like cattle. A fae man with his dark hair braided back in cornrows. One with close-cropped sandy hair a shade lighter than his skin. A woman dressed in violet silk.

It wasn’t the kind of slavery that wars had been fought over. I’d sold myself; bought the next seventy years of my life with the blood-sealed promise of my labor. It still turned my stomach to stand there, looking at that sea of faces, hearing the value of my life being measured in coin.

A female voice bid five hundred. Goldilocks raised it by fifty. The auctioneer’s voice pitched higher, every word sharp.

My gaze caught on a man’s eyes and stayed, the world seeming to fall away to every side, as if darkness had swallowed the rest of the room.

He wasn’t anything special. He had the same sharp-tipped ears as the rest of the fae, and the same otherworldly polish to his movements and features, but otherwise he could have been someone I passed on the street back home. Short brown hair that flopped to the side, with a little cowlick behind one ear; the sort of average build and even features that faded into the background. The only thing of note I could see were two beauty marks on his left cheek, and yet I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

I recognized him.

That was impossible. I’d never seen him before. I could count the number of fae I’d seen prior to stepping onto this auction block on my fingers and have room left over.

But I still recognized him, like we’d grown up together—as if I’d seen him every day of my life and expected to until I died. His name was Ruven Kezorwyn. He moved like a dancer. His hands were always warm.

My nostrils flared. His eyes narrowed.

“Six hundred eighty, first call!” the auctioneer cried. “Six hundred eighty, second call! Six hundred eighty, third call! And—”

“Ten thousand,” he said.

Ringing silence filled the shadows. Fae froze in place with preternatural stillness, like snakes or wildcats.

The auctioneer collected himself first. He cleared his throat and said in a shaky voice, “Ten thousand, first call.”

Murmurs stirred the air as the auctioneer gave second and third call, and as he declared me “sold, to the man in silver!” They didn’t stop as the assistant gestured me off the stage and the next mortal whose bond was for sale stepped out into the light.

A man—another human, like me—guided me out of the auction room. Someone affixed a tag to my collar before letting us pass, a simple piece of parchment bearing the seat number of the buyer and the price of sale: 31—10 000 gd .

The whispers followed me into the back as my handler guided me to the holding room for the sold but unpaid-for bondservants. I heard the words “ten thousand” passed down the hall, the rumor running ahead of me like a herald.

His name was Ruven. How did I know that? What did that mean?

People looked at me as I waited for the auction to be over and my new master to collect me. They weren’t nice looks. It was as if people were trying to peel my skin off with their eyes so they could see what made a fresh-off-death-row mortal worth ten thousand gold.

I didn’t offer them any answers. I didn’t know either. It obviously had to do with whatever primal connection I had to the man—to Ruven. Those narrowed eyes had to mean he’d felt it, too, and he’d caused a hell of a scene over it. If my two-day primer to Faery hadn’t included a discussion of social mores and the fact that fae required freely-given consent for sexual acts on pain of death, I would have been convinced that I was going to immediately be chained to Ruven’s bed in some sort of slutty harem outfit.

But since sexual slavery was off the table, I was pretty baffled as to why he’d spent that kind of money on me. ‘One thousand’ would have done the job admirably. Hell, ‘eight hundred’ probably would have, too, and raised a lot fewer eyebrows. Now all eyes were on me, and I imagined all eyes were on him, too.

Maybe that was the point , I thought grimly. I had no idea of Ruven’s motivations. This could all be some sort of power play—

“Sir, this is highly unusual!” a woman’s voice protested, jolting me out of my reverie.

“I’m aware, sweetheart. Given the circumstances, though, the buyer has no further interest in remaining, and surely Fyttoren spine and limbs lengthened, taking him from maybe five foot ten to at least six foot three. The wiry strength of a lean man changed into the hard planes of a swordsman without a single hair to mar his silk-smooth skin.

He was still Ruven. I still recognized him. He was still my…soulmate?

What a weird thought. What a weird situation .

Ruven nuzzled my palm, his hot breath skimming between my fingers. “I’m getting naked because this clothing is far too identifiable, and I’d like not to be shot full of arrows tonight. I was going to shift into a woman’s form and put on that cloak,” he said, tilting his head towards the other bench, where a square of folded black cloth sat, “but I don’t think I want to wear such a form right now, even if it might help us escape being waylaid. Not with you in my lap.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I whispered, fixated on the look of hunger painted on his face. Fuck. When was the last time a man had looked at me like that, let alone a man who looked like this ?

“I think I’m far beyond that.” Moving with controlled strength, Ruven tugged his pants off, freeing his legs one at a time. “You want to live? Pass me the cloak,” he said, not taking his eyes off of me, “and when I give you the signal, jump out of the carriage.”