The Alpha who bought me

The morning of the auction, Seren Aldric woke up before the bell. She always did, on auction days. Some instinct older and quieter than thought pulled her out of sleep while the corridor was still dark, while the other girls were still breathing in the slow, unguarded rhythm of the unaware. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, at the crack that ran from the light fixture to the eastern wall, which had been there since her second year and had never been repaired and she counted her breaths until her heartbeat barely stopped hammering. Five years. This was her fifth. She sat up. The dormitory held twelve beds arranged in two facing rows, the mattresses thin enough that you could feel the metal frame beneath if you slept too long on one side. Eleven of the other beds were occupied. Three of the girls had been here less than a year, new placements, still adjusting to the particular silence of Greyveil, the way sound was managed here, softened, contained, the way it never seemed to travel beyond the walls no matter how loudly you needed it to. Four of the others had been here between one and three years, and they slept the way Seren had once slept, lightly, with their backs to the wall. The remaining four were long-term residents like herself, and they were the most dangerous sleepers of them all deeply unconscious, as though some essential part of them had accepted this place so thoroughly like they had stopped fighting even in dreams. Seren was not like that. She dressed in the grey shift all residents were issued on intake, pulled her hair back with a length of cord she’d salvaged from a packing crate in the supply corridor, and went to the window. Outside, the Greyveil grounds were dark, clipped hedges, gravel paths, the distant silhouette of the outer wall with its decorative iron spires that were decorative in the same way a bear trap was decorative. The Highlands stretched beyond it, invisible in the pre-dawn dark, present as a feeling,the particular quality of air that existed on the other side of containment. She pressed one finger to the glass. Five years ago, she had arrived here in a van with blacked-out windows, fourteen years old, her parents six weeks dead of a fever that had moved through the lower districts the way fire moved through dry paper. She had no other family on record. She had no pack affiliation, she was human-born, undesignated, which in the legal language of the Pack Accords made her a ward of the nearest recognized authority. The nearest recognized authority had been the Greyveil Compound, operating under its official charter as the Northern Welfare and Placement Agency for Ungifted Persons. “Ungifted”. That was the word they used. As though having been born without a wolf’s blood was a lack. A forgetfulness of nature. She had not argued the classification. She had learned, very quickly, that Greyveil preferred quiet girls. Quiet girls were easier to place. They fetched better numbers at auction because they were understood to be manageable, and the Alphas who paid for placement agreements, which was what Greyveil called the transaction, placement agreement, as though they were a staffing firm matching candidates to roles wanted manageable. They wanted something they could bring into their pack households without drama. Omegas who cried, who fought, who asked questions with their chins up, those drew lower bids, or they were bought by a strange kind of Alphas. Seren had spent five years being the sort of girl who did not give anyone a reason. She turned from the window when the bell rang five o’clock, the sound bouncing through the corridor in three flat tones and began to prepare for the day with the calm she’d cultivated the way other people cultivated hobbies. Mira was waiting for her in the washroom. Mira Voss had been at Greyveil for two years, which meant she still had the kind of anger that showed on her face rather than being stored somewhere more efficient. She was twenty, dark-eyed, and had a mouth that moved faster than her better judgment, a quality Seren found endlessly useful for gathering information and periodically catastrophic in every other context. “Today’s the day,” Mira said. She was leaning against the far basin with her arms crossed, watching Seren’s face in the mirror with the scrutiny of someone looking for something specific. “Yes,” Seren said. She turned the tap on. The water was cold at this hour, which was normal, the heating didn’t come on until six. “Your fifth.” “You can count. I’ve always admired that about you.” Mira didn’t smile. “Seren.” “I know what it is,” Seren said. She splashed water on her face. In the mirror, her own reflection looked back at her, and she studied it with the same detached assessment she gave to everything here. Her Blue eyes. Dirty Blonde hair. A face that was not ugly and not remarkable, which she had never once tried to think much about, because unremarkable was armor if you understood how to wear it. “I know what day five means.” The age ceiling at Greyveil was twenty-two. Residents who reached their twenty-second year without being placed were considered unauctionable, too old to be desirable, too established in habit and autonomy to be worth managing. They were transferred. To where, no one in the dormitory could say with certainty, which was its own answer. Seren turned twenty-two in eleven weeks. “You’re going to get bought today,” Mira said. It was not comfort. It was information delivered with the bluntness of someone who understood that false comfort was an insult. “You have to get bought today.” “I know.” “And whoever it is…” “Mira.” “…you can’t fight them right away. You have to be smart about it. You have to” “Mira.” Seren turned from the mirror. “I know. I’ve been here longer than you. I know.” Mira pressed her mouth shut. Her jaw moved once, like she was working through something difficult, and then she said, quietly, “I don’t want it to be someone evil.” It was the most honest thing either of them had said in weeks. Seren looked at her, she really looked, the way she usually avoided because it cost too much and felt something pull behind her sternum. “Neither do I,” she said. The auction hall was on the ground floor of the compound’s main building, behind a set of double doors that were only unlocked four times a year. The Greyveil charter permitted quarterly placement events, though in practice only the late autumn auction which was this one drew the major bidders. The other three were minor affairs, attended by lesser Alphas acquiring household staff or pack support positions. The November event was the one the significant packs attended, the ones with real territory and real resources and the political inclination to acquire an Omega as a statement of status. Seren had watched the November auction four times from a window on the second floor, because girls who weren’t selected in the preliminary viewing weren’t required to attend the main event. She had made herself very easy to overlook in the preliminary viewings. She knew which side of a room to stand on, which angle of the body suggested closed-off and unavailable, how to breathe in a way that did not catch the attention of anyone with a predator’s instincts. This year, Warden Fell had personally assigned Seren to Lot Nine. There were twelve lots. They stood in a curtained antechamber off the main hall, arranged in numerical order, wearing the pale formal dress that Greyveil issued for auction days, loose, knee-length, designed to display availability without anything as crass as skin. The dress was a particular shade of ivory that made Seren look washed out, which she suspected was its entire purpose. She stood very still and listened to the sounds from the hall. The bidders were already assembled. She could hear the low murmur of male voices, mostly male, the occasional female Alpha among them, though female Alphas rarely attended the November auction, which was understood to be for acquisition rather than alliance and beneath the voices, the creak of chairs, the sound of papers, the occasional sharp exchange that told her the room was not entirely relaxed. Something was different tonight. The energy through the curtain was not the usual performance of controlled indifference. It was tight. Lot Four, the girl beside Seren, noticed it too. She was seventeen, new enough that she hadn’t learned to hide her expressions. “It’s loud in there,” she whispered. Seren said nothing. “Do you think” “Don’t think about it,” Seren said, “Just breathe.” The door opened. Warden Fell stepped into the antechamber, composed, silver-haired, in her habitual charcoal grey that matched the compound walls so precisely Seren had once decided it was intentional. She surveyed the line of lots with the expression of someone reviewing inventory, and then her gaze paused on Seren for exactly one beat longer than it paused on anyone else. It had always done this. For five years, Fell’s gaze had paused on Seren one beat longer than was necessary, and Seren had never been able to determine what it meant. “We are ready to begin,” Fell said. “You’ll be called in order. Walk to the marker. Stand straight. Do not speak unless spoken to.” A pause. “There is a late arrival to the hall. I expect composure.” A late arrival. That was unusual. The bidder registration closed an hour before the event, late arrivals meant someone of sufficient standing to override the procedure. Someone Fell had permitted in despite the rule. Seren filed this information away in the quiet interior cabinet where she kept everything that might matter later. The curtain opened. Lot One was called. Then Two. Three. Four. The girl who’d spoken to Seren walked through the curtain with her shoulders pulled back and her face carefully arranged, and the door fell shut behind her. The murmur in the hall shifted. Seren stood and waited. When she was called out as Lot Nine, her name announced without inflection by the attendant at the door, she walked through the curtain and into the light and did what she had trained herself to do, she looked at the middle distance. Not at the floor, which read as weakness and at the faces of the bidders, which read as challenge. The middle distance. Calm. Present. Unremarkable. She found the marker, stood on it, and breathed. The hall held perhaps forty individuals, arranged in tiered seating in a broad semicircle around the presentation floor. She felt them looking at her, felt the specific quality of assessment, of being looked at the way you looked at a thing rather than a person and she stayed in the middle distance and kept her breathing even. Three seconds passed. Then the room went quiet.