Chapter 3: The Price of a Cheap Meal (1)

The darkness had texture—it pressed against Seraphina's face like wet wool, thick with the copper tang of blood and the sharper bite of fear. When the wagon hit another rut, her skull cracked against wood, and the pain was almost a relief because it meant she was still alive.

Her mouth was gagged with rough cloth that tasted of mold and salt. Her wrists burned where coarse rope had rubbed the skin raw, and when she tried to move, her shoulder collided with another body—warm, trembling, equally bound.

Seraphina's eyes adjusted slowly to the suffocating dark. Through gaps in the wagon's wooden slats, she caught glimpses of buildings sliding past: the elegant stonework of the noble district giving way to crumbling brick, then rotting wood, then nothing but refuse-strewn alleys that reeked of human waste and despair.

The Black Alley. She'd heard servants whisper about it—the place where people disappeared, where the empire's filth collected beyond the reach of law or mercy.

A child whimpered somewhere in the press of bodies. The sound was high and broken, and it made Seraphina's chest constrict with horror because whoever made that sound couldn't be older than ten.

Memory returned in jagged fragments: Cedric's smile that hadn't reached his eyes. The wine that tasted wrong. His hand steadying her as she collapsed, his voice murmuring something that might have been an apology or might have been arithmetic.

Ten gold coins.

The price of a cheap meal at any halfway decent tavern in the capital.

That's what she'd been worth to him.

The wagon lurched to a stop, and rough hands dragged Seraphina into pale morning light that stabbed her eyes like knives. She blinked away tears and found herself in a garbage-strewn alley behind a decrepit warehouse, its walls stained with substances she didn't want to identify.

A man with a scarred face and a pipe clenched between yellow teeth moved down the line of captives with a lantern, examining them like livestock. He pulled back eyelids, checked teeth, squeezed arms to assess muscle.

"Lot forty-three, male, fourteen, awakened with earth affinity—that'll fetch decent coin for the northern mines," he muttered to a clerk with a ledger. "Lot forty-four, female, thirty, unawakened, brothel stock—"

The woman he'd indicated tried to speak through her gag, and the scarred man—Garveth, someone called him—backhanded her casually across the face. She crumpled to the filthy cobblestones and didn't move.

Seraphina learned silence immediately.

Garveth reached her and yanked the gag down, studying her face with cold calculation. "Well now. Noble-born, aren't you? Got that look about you—soft hands, good bones, completely fucking useless." He reached for the brooch on her dress—the Sterling family crest, tarnished silver with an amethyst stone—and tore it free, fabric ripping. "No names here, sweetheart. No families. No past. You're just product now."

He tossed the brooch into a nearby rubbish bin.

Seraphina watched her last connection to her identity disappear into garbage, and something inside her went very still and very cold.

"The Thorne boy's debts are settled, at least," Garveth continued to his clerk, pipe smoke curling around his words. "Though ten gold barely covers transportation costs. Cheap bastard could've negotiated higher if he'd actually cleaned her up first." He grabbed Seraphina's chin, turning her face left and right. "Still pretty enough for specialty work, once we get the bruises to fade."

Specialty work. The words made her stomach turn.

They were herded into the warehouse—a cavernous space that stank of unwashed bodies and despair. Seraphina's dress was stripped away and replaced with a shapeless gray rag marked with chalk: LOT 47.