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35
Annie
"The bidding starts at one million dollars," a voice said.
I shook my head but nothing became much clearer.
"I see one million, do I see one-point-five?"
Auctioneer, said a helpful internal voice. You're listening to the voice of an auctioneer. "Thank you, I see – "
I tuned it out. There was a sense of missing time bothering me but more than that, the fact that the time missing had been short. I was pretty sure I was same place, same night, probably somewhere in the same hour as when I'd been trying to escape.
Which was what? I asked myself and this time the helpful internal voice had nothing to say except, Open your eyes.
I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was the black girl who had come in with the blandly beautiful man I thought I recognized from somewhere.
He was no longer of any importance at all to me. She was. Because she was trussed to a post, standing on a makeshift stage where the dining table had been, completely naked and the same group of people were bidding on her.
What the fuck?Because if it was an auction, it was between only the people who had come here for dinner tonight. If they wanted to participate in wife swapping or partner trading, why not just fucking do so?
The answer became apparent when I saw the screen behind the girl, a double feed showing us in the room and tiny thumbnails of people all over the world bidding.
Just during the time I was back, the black chick went up over four million dollars.
I felt physically sick, worse than I'd ever felt during withdrawal, and I had no idea if it was from whatever the asshole guard had injected me with, or the situation I found myself in.
Both, probably.
I'd offered to take these women with me. I'd said I was going to go. If they had agreed, if they had chosen to stand with me, what would have happened? The guards were armed but I didn't think they'd kill all of us.
Just you, idiot. Don't close your eyes again.
Oh, but it felt so good to feel consciousness swaying away like the lapping of wavelets at the edge of a lake. I could just be lulled back to sleep, dream away this latest horror.
Need a jolt? Open your eyes and look down.
I almost responded that the stupid dress was old news, but a tendril of cool air brushed against me and my eyes jerked open convulsively, my head straining to look down at my body.
I was completely naked and lewdly bound so my breasts jutted out obscenely and the rope was the only coverage I had on my lower body, the plucked and shaved and shiny bits of me, covered where the rope was bound cruelly tight between my legs.
Nearby someone whimpered. For a horrible moment I thought it was me, then I realized it was the older woman. I tried to meet her eyes, though what I thought I could convey to her – Hey, isn't this wild? But we're all in it together and you must have known your husband is a shit! – I didn't know.
The black girl had been bought for more than five million by her own owner. Fine, if that's how they got their jollies, this whole thing was idiotic. Why not just make their donations? But even as I asked it I understood the control, the power, the game, the humiliation of those of us stuck up here. The dominance and the unwilling, uncontrollable submission.
He'd said he bought me. So now he was going to buy me again? At least the funds this time would go to do some charitable work, a thought that made me want to start laughing hysterically.
And then I stopped. Because the older woman was being auctioned and she did not go with her older, distinguished husband but with one of the younger men, who looked avidly at her while holding a side-of-his-mouth conversation with the man she'd come with. Their eyes didn't leave her.
Cold terror darted through me. I knew Cole St. Martin, at least to some extent. I had been with him long enough that I trusted, mostly, that he truly wouldn't do anything to harm me permanently.
I had no such knowledge about any one of these other men.
Be unworthy, said the voice. I thought maybe the voice was police officer Annie, back from the dead or wherever she'd been hanging out. Be vile. Be disgusting.
It shouldn't be hard. It was what they told women when they were grabbed by a rapist: piss yourself. Shit yourself. Vomit. Spit, drool, whatever, just be so disgusting he doesn't want to touch you. You're already in deep shit.
That's what the voice was saying now. You're already in for it. At least you'd stay with Cole. The known quantity.
