He’s huge, taller than the weremen, and broad through the shoulders, plated in a hard shell of bluish gray that shades to purple where the light hits it. He wears human clothes only from the waist down. His face is pale and angular under the blue marks on his forehead, his ears are pointy, and his black hair falls long and straight past his shoulders.
I can’t read anything in his eyes. They give nothing away. I’m more afraid of him than of everything else that has happened this morning put together.
This isn’t the escape I planned. This is worse. Or maybe it’s the only door I have left.
“Sold, then.” The auctioneer’s voice cracks as he calls it. He turns to me, and there’s real concern on his face as he watches me. “Miss Elmsley, the bride holds final choice. Do you accept this man as your buyer?”
The hall waits for me to refuse. I can feel it from every direction.
My mother has both hands pressed to her mouth. My father has gone from red to deathly pale. Darina grips the edge of the stage with both hands, staring up at me pleadingly. Humans and monsters are waiting for the Elmsley girl to laugh, apologize forher little fit, climb down, and go back to her silk dresses and her pretty jewelry.
I look at the Scorpius. He stands below me with the paddle loose at his side, near enough now that I can see my own outline reflected in his dark blue eyes. He waits like everyone else. Even he doesn’t believe I’ll go through with it.
“Sold,” I say, and I’m proud of myself when my voice doesn’t waver.
Let them stare. I’m going to prove every one of them wrong. Even myself, really.
Chapter Four
Osric
I came to the market to fail. The plan was simple: stand through the auction, buy no one, and go home to Otheera with proof that I tried. Then the first bride steps onto the stage, and my plan doesn’t matter anymore.
She wears a noblewoman’s dress, fine enough for one of their balls. She stands with her chin high while her hands shake at her sides. Her hair is deep red, pinned up the way rich humans wear it. She’s furious, and underneath the fury, she’s terrified. She’s exhilarating.
Then the clicking starts.
It rises low in my vocal cords, sharp and rhythmic, impossible to disguise as something else, and almost impossible to stop. No Scorpii female has ever pulled a single click out of me. This human woman wakes the mating call from across a crowded hall.
I lock my jaw and breathe, slow through the nose, out through my parted lips. Around me, the other buyers nearly flinch. Body hair rises on the arms of the wereman beside me. The orc behind him shifts his weight and scans the hall for a threat he can’t find. They don’t know why their bodies are reacting, so they ignore it and turn back to the stage. But I know. Even to other monsters, the clicking sounds predatory.
I force it down. It works, barely. No one heard it clearly over the noise of the crowd, but I know what almost happened in a room full of guards, clerks, and peacekeepers. That’s enough to tell me how thin my control has worn.
When they logged me at the gatehouse, I still believed in my own plan. Now a human girl in a ballroom dress has done what no female in seven cities ever did, and everything I told myself on the way here is worthless.
“That’s the Elmsley girl,” someone says behind me.
“Aldric Elmsley’s daughter? Here?”
“His only child. Her father decides who does business in this city.”
“Then no one bids. You’d win a bride and lose Concord.”
The auctioneer opens her at a thousand credits, which is high, and the hall goes quiet. No paddle rises. Esme Elmsley – I have her name now, whispered by strangers – stands up there and watches a crowd of monsters reject her.
“Whoever buys me takes my companion as well,” she calls out.
No one reacts.
“Eight hundred,” she says. No one moves. “Five hundred.” No one bids. “Four hundred.”
Buying her is a mistake. The males around me are right.
Her family owns this city, the whispers around me promise trouble. I own a dilapidated stone house at the edge of a desert her people call the Waste, while she’s a noble woman raised behind iron gates.
None of it changes what the call in my throat means. My body recognized her when she stepped onto the stage. If I let her walk away, I’ll never get another chance.
I raise my paddle.