"Final call."
The words weren't loud, but the room treated them like a verdict. Conversations dropped to half-volume. Chains clicked like a melody of misery.
Keys moved. Locks turned. Lines unhooked and rehooked, bodies shifted with the same careless rhythm as crates in a warehouse. When they reached Nyx, the guard didn't waste a gesture. Key in, turn, the cuff kissed his wrist and let go. Blood crept back slow, as if it wasn't sure it was invited. His ankle shackle followed. His knees dipped, found their pride again, and held.
"Up."
Not harsh, not kind. Just the sort of voice that never needed to be either.
He stood.
Two ahead, two behind. The woman in the high collar led without looking back, the corridor sloping upward like a throat taught to swallow light. The air changed as they climbed—less stone and sweat, more silk and gold; the faint bite of lamp oil; the whisper of good cloth moving over itself. Noise rolled toward them in uneven waves: honed laughter; the measured call of bids; the creak of benches beneath those who had come here by choice.
They came out beneath an arch carved with leaves or hands depending on how honest you felt. Nyx didn't feel like having opinions about art.
The room beyond wasn't grand so much as deliberate. A round pit in the center, rails low for easy viewing. Benches rose in tight rings. The back was crowded—traders in rough coats, small names with big wants, faces already halfway to a deal. The front breathed space. Fewer bodies, better fabric, the lazy geometry of power. All of them masked—velvet beaks, polished half-masks, and metalwork fine enough to turn faces into the masks of patient predators.
Six were already under the white, unblinking light that wasn't sun or flame. A handler read traits like a tired priest. At the dais, a man with a theater smile translated bored inventory into appetite, letting his voice rise and fall on a tide that knew exactly when to break. Fingers twitched, heads dipped, day-wages turned into collars.
One rotation. A second. Serra went with the third; she didn't look for him and he didn't look for her. Meeting eyes here was the same as offering your throat.
"Final lot,"
the auctioneer purred. The line around Nyx thinned until it was just him.
Two fingers touched his shoulder. The woman in the high collar angled her chin toward the stairs. He followed the chin.
The light hit him like a hand—warm for a heartbeat, sliding off as if whatever he was didn't care to be warmed. The room's sound shifted. Not applause. Attention. The front row leaned a fraction, enough to be felt, not seen.
The auctioneer rested both palms on the lectern. The smile found a new notch.
"Ladies and Gentlemen."
His voice carried like it had paid extra for the privilege.
"You have been patient—and your patience—as ever, will be rewarded."
He let the sentence hang. Let the quiet stretch until it pulled. Then turned a flat hand toward Nyx.
"A new entry to our Exchange. Untouched by prior contracts. Scarred, yes—life leaves its notes—but not broken. Of the Noctari line, once of House Veylin."
Not human... The word settled in his head like a stone breaking still water—ripples he hadn't asked for, didn't know how to stop.
He'd thought the cuffs, the pit, the auction were the humiliation. Turns out, waking up as something else was the real trick.
Fantastic. Not only dead to the family—apparently dead to my own species. Guess I can stop worrying about fitting in at dinner.
The ripple that passed through the front benches was small but sharp, like a blade under cloth. A tilt of a mask here, the set of a shoulder there. A gloved hand stilled mid-fidget.
"A rare bloodline,"
the auctioneer went on smoothly.
"And rarer still—bearing what records name as a unique trait. One of one. Never seen before, not in any bloodline or contract."
The info about his so called trait stirred the room—soft intakes of breath, the subtle tilt of masked heads. A few glances cut toward one another, quick and sharp, like knives testing their edge.
Murmurs moved in pockets. Some leaned forward, others leaned back as though distance made the bidding safer.
"Composed stance. Steady eyes. A frame made for work that isn't merely work… and perhaps more besides." He tilted his head, inviting the gaze of the room to travel.
"We begin at fifty."
"Sixty."
Back benches, rings on every finger. The voice of a man who liked the sound his money made—filtered through a mouth-slit of black leather.
"Sixty-five."
Front right. Fur in a warm room. A little laugh on the end, as if she'd tipped a servant. Her porcelain half-mask didn't smile with her.
"Seventy."
Back again. Competitive. Petty.
"Seventy-five."
"Eighty."
"Eighty-five."
"Hundred."
The word came clean and even, center of the front row. No flourish. No raised hand. A simple nod from a black half-mask traced in engraved gold, the metal catching light only when she breathed.
Nyx let his eyes slide there because pretending not to look would be its own kind of look. She wore black that drank the torchlight and returned it in molten gold, patterns curling like fire over her curves. Long white hair fell loose down her back, a few strands sliding forward to frame the mask. A single gold earring swayed with the tilt of her head. Young, but not the helpless kind—her stillness carried a weight that drew eyes without permission. The room recognized her and adjusted. Voices lowered. Movements grew careful.
"One-fifty."
The back benches rallied, voice a little too loud behind a hawk-beak mask.
"Two hundred."
She didn't blink.
The auctioneer's smile widened by degrees.
"Two hundred on the floor. Do I hear—"
"Two hundred twenty."
A gilded moth-mask turned a fraction toward the pit, its wearer poised and deliberate—another bidder, not the one in black.
"Two-forty."
"Two-sixty."
"Two-eighty."
Back benches again, trying to sound like a tide instead of a puddle.
"Three hundred."
From her, like a period at the end of a sentence.
Nyx listened more to the air than the numbers. The front row's attention was a pressure on skin, like heat off an oven door. He could feel where certain eyes wanted him to meet them—an iron wolf-mask two seats down, a silver-weave visor opposite. He didn't. He let them do the wanting.
"Three-twenty."
A man to her left, broad shoulders, narrow patience, signet ring displayed over glove, his mask hammered into angles that pretended to be a face.
The woman in black didn't look over.
"Three-fifty."
A scrape of bench wood in the back, then a mutter—someone doing math they shouldn't be doing aloud. A pair of birdlike masks bent together, whispering through lacquered beaks.
The auctioneer lifted a hand, let it hover, trained the room like a dog.
"Three hundred fifty. For a frame made for more than labor. For a presence that stands without prompting."
Nyx almost laughed. He'd never been praised for standing before. First time for everything.
"Three-seventy."
The signet ring again, jaw tight now beneath his mask. He glanced at Nyx the way people look at a window they intend to own.
Nyx met his gaze for the length of a breath—no challenge, no bow—then let it slip past him, as if the man weren't the thing in the room worth seeing. A small, quiet cruelty. The kind you could deploy when you had no weapons at all.
"Four hundred."
She did not wait.
The signet ring's mouth did a small involuntary thing beneath the metal. He started to speak, stopped. The room made that almost-sound it makes when a glass tips and doesn't fall. In the back, a fox mask went very still.
At Nyx's back, a guard shifted weight. Leather creaked. Serra stood three bodies from the exit, eyes down, but attention tilted toward the pit like water toward a drain. Calren was somewhere behind, the grin in his voice even when his face held still. Special, he'd whispered earlier. Nyx wasn't sure if the word had teeth or sugar.
"Four-fifty."
The moth-mask bidder again, unwilling to be edited out of the story. Her gloved fingers toyed with a fan that never opened.
"Five."
Not five hundred. Just five, and the space after it. The air did a small, collective inhale.
The auctioneer didn't bother pretending surprise. He gave the number its shape with care.
"Five hundred."
He let the echo settle, then—
"Five hundred, front center. For a lot without prior contract, of the Noctari blood, and a unique trait, built for discretion or display, and worth both."
Nyx stood under the white light and tried not to imagine what a person expected when they paid that much to own a stranger. He kept his shoulders easy. He kept his breathing quieter than the room.
"Five twenty."
Signet ring, stubborn and ashamed of it. The angled mask ticked, like a clock that resented time.
Her eyes turned to Nyx then, not cold, not warm, simply the way a scale turns to what it's weighing. She didn't speak. She didn't need to. The auctioneer lifted a finger, acknowledging a bid that hadn't been given and yet somehow had.
"Six."
A few heads in the back went down the way grass does in strong wind. The moth-mask bidder smoothed a sleeve without looking at it; the signet ring found something very interesting to contemplate on the floor. A thin, reed-slender mask in the gallery tilted—curiosity, not challenge.
"Six hundred,"
the auctioneer repeated, voice like velvet wrapped around a gavel.
"Do I have—"
Silence behaved itself for once.
"Going once."
Nyx felt the shape of a life turning. Not falling, not rising—pivoting on a point he hadn't known existed.
"Going twice."
He wondered if she liked that he hadn't cowered. Or if she liked that he hadn't performed defiance either. People liked their purchases a certain way.
"Sold."
The gavel didn't crack; it landed. A sound with weight. The room exhaled—relief from some, regret from others, the casual indifference of those already deciding what to drink next.
The white light stayed on him, as if reluctant to let go.