Chapter One | Auctioned
Lin’s POV
“Sir, please, let me go!” I begged, my hands tightly tied behind me, a sack covering my head. “I promise I won’t say a word to anyone.”
I was walking home from my graveyard shift when a white van stopped in front of me. Three thugs wearing masks came out, forcing me inside before I even got the chance to react. I tried screaming, but it was useless to the remote shortcut I should never have taken tonight.
Tears filled my eyes as I felt the van turning and speeding, my body trembling from all the scary possibilities spiraling inside my head. Why me? What do they want from me?
I could hear them laughing, talking—but I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. They seemed to be speaking another language.
Desperate, I tried to loosen the rope in my wrists despite the rough fibers burning my skin. Just a little more—just one more tug—but then I felt a flat cold metal touch my cheek. “No funny business, pretty girl,” one of the thugs warned.
My breath catches into my throat.
I don’t want to die. I can’t die. I still have to find him.
A few minutes later, the van screeched into a stop. My breath hitched as I listened to the shuffle of bodies around me. Through the scratchy burlap sack over my head, I caught glimpses of movement—shadows, shapes. Not three. Five.
Five masked men.
One of them dragged me out harshly, making me slump on the concrete ground. I felt the burn on my knee as it scraped the ground.
“Careful, man! She’s worth millions of dollars.”
Mi… Millions? So, they’re selling me? Human traffickers got me! Are they going to harvest my organs? Sell me to a black market?
The next thing I felt was a dry cloth shoved into my mouth before they manhandled me, carrying me on their shoulders like a sack of potatoes. I kicked, flailing like a captured bird, but it was pointless.
“Keep moving,” a voice snarled close to my ear, “and I'll break those legs for you.”
I stopped moving almost instantly.
We entered inside a building, the sound of the busy road slowly moving farther in my ears. I tried to heightened my senses, collecting every little information I could use to escape this place—
“Ahh!” I whimpered as they suddenly dropped me on the tiled floor.
“Get the damn blindfold off,” a voice barked, the same one who threatened me. “And leave the gag. I'm not in the mood for her whining. ”
I flinched as the blindfold was ripped away, the harsh light immediately blinding my eyes. I lay helplessly on the floor, my eyes adjusting, until I finally saw a repulsive man standing before me. He stuck a cigarette between his dry lips, staring down at me like he was assessing a piece of meat.
“Asian. 5'3. Petite. Straight black hair. Small eyes. Age?” he said, his voice flat and emotionless. He turned to the masked men, and one of them removed his mask, his face surprisingly young. “Twenty-five, Sir.”
A cold dread settled over me as I looked from face to face. They knew me... They had been watching me.
It was their plan to abduct me from the very beginning.
“A virgin?” he asked.
The young man nodded his head.
A creepy smirk curved onto his face, pulling out his phone to call somebody. I pushed myself further in the corner, trying my best to hide myself from them. It was never going to work. There were six of them in the room versus me.
I scanned my eyes around the surprisingly elegant room. My expectation was a dark place or an abandoned factory with lots of rats and cockroaches crawling the place. But it wasn't…
It was like a five-star hotel, red-themed deluxe with mirrors on every wall. I could even see my own poor reflection curled in the corner.
My heart is racing with every second passing. What is this place?
“He didn't like any of the girls?”
“Did he say what he liked?”
“We have a young woman here. Fresh. Untouched. He’ll want her.”
The man’s gaze slid back to me, his smirk widening as if he could already taste the profit.
“Tell him,” he said into the phone, his eyes never leaving mine. “We’ve got something special. She won’t last long.”
(FIVE HOURS LATER)
“Bidding starts at two million!”
I woke up to the shout of a man. Slowly, I opened my eyes. My vision was blurry—I couldn’t see anything clearly.
I tried moving my hands and feet, but they were bound.
When I looked up, glowing boards suddenly shot up in the air. I strained my eyes to make out the figures staring at me. Their side of the room was cloaked in darkness, while I stood exposed on a platform, a harsh spotlight trained on me. At my side was a man in a formal suit, his voice loud and commanding, like he owns the room.
“We have twenty million!” the man announced.
I looked down at my hands and feet. They weren’t tied with ropes after all—they were cuffed.
“Thirty million!”
My vision slowly cleared, and only then did I realize the people I thought were watching me weren’t physically there at all. They were on laptops—screens showing what seemed like video calls. Each bidder wore a mask.
“Fifty million!”
My ears rang at the sound of it. Am I… at an auction?
“Higher than fifty million?” the man asked. The screens stayed black, except for one—glowing bright, marked with the staggering bid of fifty million.
“Going once, going twice—”
I shut my eyes as the laptop closest to me suddenly lit up.
So many zeros!
“Oh my!” the auctioneer blurted, his composure breaking for a moment. He cleared his throat and read the figure flashing on the screen. “We have one billion!”
I swallowed hard when a masked man appeared on that laptop’s screen. Even through the video, I could feel the way his gaze clung to me, heavy and suffocating.
“Going once, going twice—SOLD!”