Alpha Draco And His Omega Luna

Sofia

I had stopped counting the days somewhere around month three.

After that, time became something that happened to other people, people who had places to be, people who were expected home for dinner, people whose names hadn't been reduced to a number scrawled on a tag and fastened around their wrist. Mine said 07, that was all I was now.

The cell they kept us in before the auction smelled of damp stone and fear. Fourteen of us. Fourteen women who had, at some point, been someone's daughter, someone's friend, someone's whole world. Now we were merchandise, lined up and catalogued like items in a shop window, waiting to see whose hands we would pass into next.

I had made peace with a lot of things over four years. The cold, the hunger. The particular cruelty of men who had decided that power meant ownership. I had not made peace with this rhe idea of being sold. Of standing on a platform while strangers calculated my worth in dollars.

But here I was.

They came for the others first.

I stood at the back of the holding room and watched them go, one by one, each disappearance punching a small, quiet hole in my chest. Beatrice. Amara. The girl whose name I never learned but who used to hum to herself at night when she thought no one could hear, all gone.

Kara squeezed my hand before they took her. She was trying not to cry, and the effort of it made her face do something terrible this awful, brave crumpling that she immediately smoothed away.

"I'll be alright," she said. To me, or to herself. Maybe both.

I didn't say anything. I held her hand until they made me let go.

Lilly went next. She didn't look at me when they led her out. She kept her eyes forward, her small hands folded in front of her. Lilly had never needed words to say everything, a glance, a tilt of her chin, the careful stillness of her expression. But she couldn't look at me, and that told me more than any words could have.

She was terrified.

We all were. We just wore it differently.

When they came for me, the auction hall was already thick with smoke and the low murmur of men who had too much money and no conscience whatsoever.

I had expected something grimier. I don't know why perhaps because everything else about this life had been grim. But the room they led me into was almost elegant in a twisted, grotesque way. Crystal chandeliers threw fractured light across the walls. Men in tailored suits sat in tiered rows, their faces half-hidden in shadow. Candles burned on iron sconces, their flames casting long, restless shadows that made the whole place feel like the inside of a fever dream.

I walked onto the platform and I did not look down.

I had decided, somewhere in the past four years, that whatever they took from me,