Sold to the Prescott brothers

I do not understand the word sold until it is too late to run. "Sign here," my father says, like he's asking me to countersign a birthday card. My hand freezes over the page. Something in my chest lurches, a sick drop, like missing a stair in the dark. I love my father the way you love something that keeps burning you, carefully, from a distance, one eye always on the exit. Right now that love feels like a wound that never closed, because he is holding a pen out to me like none of this matters. Like I do not matter. "What am I signing?" My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. "I told you. A financial agreement. Stop making it complicated." Complicated. He has called my feelings complicated since I was twelve years old. I snatch the pen from his hand but I do not sign. I look past him at the room, my pulse already climbing. The building was wrong from the second we pulled up. Sleek. No signage. Too quiet for what he called a private financial firm. I felt it then, that low warning hum behind my ribs, and I pushed it down the way I always push things down for him. I should have grabbed his arm in the car and made him turn around. I did not. I never do. A man in a dark suit opens a door and waves us through. We step inside and the room swallows the sound of my own breathing. Large. Dim. Cold in a way that has nothing to do with the air conditioning. A long table. Rows of chairs. Along the far wall, a panel of tinted glass with shapes moving behind it, men sitting very still, watching. I cannot see their faces but I feel their eyes crawl over me like a change in weather. Other men sit scattered through the room, silent, all of them facing forward, where a man with a microphone is calling out numbers in a flat, bored voice. I do not understand what I am looking at. Then I hear it. Sold. He says it gently. The way you would say next, or thank you. A transaction word. Fear slams into me before my mind catches up, cold and immediate, flooding my hands, my throat, the backs of my knees. Something has happened that I cannot undo. I spin toward my father. He is already walking toward the exit. "Dad." My voice cracks on his name. I grab for his sleeve and miss. He does not stop. "Dad!" The door shuts behind him. My whole body goes rigid. I do not scream. I do not chase him. I go very still, the way I have always gone still when the floor drops out from under me too fast for my legs to catch up, my mind racing even as my body locks in place. A man in a suit steps up beside me and sets a document on the table. "Miss Carter. If you would like to take a seat." "What is this?" I demand, my voice shaking now, no longer steady. "Your father has already signed. We just need your signature on the indicated line." I look down. My full name in clean black letters. Claire Eloise Carter. My date of birth. My home address, the one he has not sent a single letter to in four years. He gave them my address. Rage rips through me, hot and sudden, so clean it almost feels like relief. I snatch the document closer, scanning it, my hands trembling now, searching for some clause, some loophole, some way out. Across the room three men sit apart from everyone else. Not behind the glass. In the room, and yet entirely separate from it. The eldest is tall, dark haired, silver threading his temples. He did not look at me when the numbers were called. He looks at me now like he is reading something written under my skin. The middle one flicks his eyes over me once, something close to contempt crossing his face, then looks away, like I am a problem dropped into his lap that he already resents. The youngest does not look away. He holds my gaze, and his is the only face in the room with any warmth in it at all. Almost sorry. Not sorry enough to stop this. Just sorry enough that I notice. One number was called for all three of them. One bid. Together. The man in the suit leans toward me, his voice dropping low. "You can sign, Miss Carter, or we can discuss the alternative with your father." My eyes dart to the door he walked through. I look at the three men in the corner, my heart slamming against my ribs. I look at the blank line waiting for my signature. I think of Zoey, who has no idea where I am right now. I think of my apartment, my unfinished logo for Rosie's bakery, the quiet ordinary life I built with my own two hands because no one else was ever going to build it for me. I think of every time my father walked away from a mess and left me standing in it. My hand should be shaking. It is not. It has never shaken, not once, not through any of this, because I learned a long time ago how to keep the outside of me perfectly still no matter what is tearing through the inside. I press the pen to the paper. I sign my name. The man in the suit lifts the document, gives me a brisk professional nod. "Welcome, Miss Carter. Someone will show you to the car." Across the room, the youngest brother is still watching me, and something in his expression has shifted. Not sorry anymore. Closer to certainty. Closer to satisfaction. I stare back at him, my pulse roaring in my ears, and one thought cuts through everything else with terrible clarity. He knew my name before tonight. I do not know how I know it. I just do. And I am going to find out exactly how long.