The Devil's Auction

The hood comes off and the first thing I see is fire. Not real fire — torches, dozens of them, staked around a concrete floor, throwing orange light up into a corrugated ceiling that stretches into darkness. This isn't a barn. It's a hangar. Old, abandoned, big enough to have once swallowed a plane whole. My wrists are zip-tied behind my back. My knees are raw from being dragged across gravel. I taste blood where I bit my own tongue when they threw me down. I remember pieces. My car door opening on Fifth Street. A hand over my mouth that smelled like leather and gasoline. After that, nothing but the dark. Now there's this. No phone in my pocket. No sound of a highway anywhere close. Wherever they drove me, it was far enough that screaming won't reach anyone who'd help. Motorcycles, parked in rows so straight they look staged for a photograph. Men standing beside them, arms crossed, patches stitched across their vests — names I don't know. Twisted Kings. Blackthorn. Dead Man's Court. Different colors, different territories, all of them here for the same reason tonight. I don't recognize a single face. Somehow that's worse than if I did. "Gentlemen." A voice booms out, amplified, cheerful in a way that turns my stomach. "You know the rules. No colors drawn. No blood on Auction ground. Whatever happens here, happens in peace." Auction. The word lands like a fist to the chest. I try to turn my head and someone grabs my hair, yanks it straight, forces my face forward. A man steps into the torchlight — silver rings on every finger, a scar splitting one eyebrow in two. "Lot four," he announces, voice carrying to the far walls. "Not weapons. Not information. Something better." He grips my jaw, tilts my face up like I'm livestock at a fair. "She's not for your bed," he says, and the crowd laughs, low and ugly. "She's smarter than that. A reporter. Spent six months digging where she shouldn't. Cops. Judges. Men in this room." My heart stops. "She doesn't know what she found," he says. "But some of you do. And you'll pay anything to make sure she never writes it down." I can't breathe. I write about permit fraud and city council budgets. I am not important enough for this. I want to scream that they have the wrong woman, except some small, cold part of me already knows they don't. "Starting bid," the man calls out, "one million." A hand goes up near the front. Then another. Numbers climb faster than I can track — a million five, two, three — men buying me like storage nobody's opened yet, and every one of them wants to be the one who opens it. "Should've let her disappear quiet," a voice mutters behind me, close enough that I feel his breath on my neck. "Now every club in five states knows her face. That's not information anymore. That's a liability with a price tag." I don't turn around. I don't want to know which one of them said it. Nobody in this room sees a person. They see a padlock, and they're all holding a key they think will fit. I'm going to be sold to a stranger tonight, and I don't even know why. I search the crowd for anything human. A woman. A guard who looks unsure. Anything. That's when I see him. He isn't bidding. He stands at the very back, arms loose at his sides, the only man in the building not looking at me like merchandise. He's looking at me like he already knows me. Tall. Dark hair pushed back like he hasn't slept in days. A patch on his vest reads PRESIDENT over two words stitched in red: IRON REAPERS. Every man who was laughing a second ago goes quiet when he starts walking forward. "Four million," someone shouts, panicked, like he can feel what's coming. The president of the Iron Reapers doesn't stop. Doesn't raise a hand. Doesn't say a number. "Kane." The auctioneer's voice shakes for the first time all night. "You know how this works. You bid or you sit down." "I'm not bidding," Kane says. His eyes never leave mine. "Then get back." "No." The word drops into the hangar like a glass shattering on concrete. Somebody laughs, nervous. A dozen hands drift toward guns that shouldn't exist on Auction ground, not under torchlight, not under truce. "This is a peace night," someone shouts. "Not anymore," Kane says. The first gunshot cracks the air, and the whole world turns into screaming and revving engines and men shoving toward the exits. Someone near me is screaming — not my name, just screaming — and for one disorienting second I can't tell the difference. I'm still tied to a chair with nowhere to run. Glass shatters somewhere behind me. A torch tips and the light goes wild across the walls. Somebody's boot catches the leg of my chair and it goes over sideways, my shoulder slamming into concrete hard enough that stars burst behind my eyes. Someone cuts the zip tie at my wrists. Rough hands, fast. I look up and it's him. This close, his eyes aren't cold at all. They're furious. "Don't scream," he says, low, right against my ear. "Screaming gets you killed. Staying with me might not." "Might not?" My voice cracks. "Who are you? Why does everyone want—" "Later." He hauls me up by the arm, steady even as the room collapses behind him. Somewhere to my left, two men in different colors are trading punches over a table that's already on fire. Nobody stops them. Nobody has time to. Then he stops — just for a second, just long enough to grip my chin the way the other man did, except this time it doesn't feel like an inspection. It feels like a question. "You don't remember me," he says. "Three weeks ago, you were outside a gas station on Route 9 with a camera in your hand. My brother walked into that gas station that night." My blood goes cold. "He never walked back out," Kane says. "And I think you filmed the man who killed him."