TO BELONG TO CEASER

CHAPTER2:MENTION

—Agnes—

“Follow me.”

The words were flat, a command with no softness, and when his eyes narrowed on me my limbs obeyed before my brain could scream. Chains still marked my wrists, the sting of metal was fresh under my skin. I stumbled off the stage like a puppet, the crowd parting with the kind of fear that ripples through people when something dangerous walks by.

A man stepped forward, fat with greed and slick with cheap cologne, the same one who’d shouted the obscene bid. He tried to block us, voice slick as oil. “Wait—sir, I’ll pay triple. Hand her to me later. No one needs to know.”

The masked man didn’t flinch. He turned slowly, and something in the room shifted like a tide. The bidder’s confidence dissolved like sugar in rain, he backed away with shaking hands, a choked laugh escaping him. He stumbled and fled, and the crowd watched him go as if they’d witnessed a miracle. Or a death sentence.

My chest hammered. The way that masked man , had looked at the bidder… it wasn’t theater. It wasn’t the show he’d put on for the hall. It was a cut, a blade drawn without ceremony. The bidder knew he’d been measured and found wanting. My mouth tasted of copper.

They shoved me toward the exit. The night air bit when we spilled out into the street. Parked like a shadow waiting at the curb was a black Maserati that glinted under the moon. It didn’t belong here among the rust and grime, it belonged in another life. My legs froze. I’d imagined cavemen, animals, drunks — not this. Not a predator with a car like that.

“Please.” My voice cracked. “Please, I’ll disappear. You’ll never see me again.” It sounded laughable even to me.

He didn’t answer at first. The reminder, I was purchased, came like a cold stone when he finally said it. “I paid a fortune for you.” Not angry. Not triumphant. Just a fact laid out clean, like a verdict.

Inside the car the leather smelled of something expensive and dangerous. He drove without speaking, his hands steady at ten and two. I kept glancing at him. The mask hid features I wanted to memorize, and his silence hummed with a control that made the hair at my nape stand up. He wasn’t loud. He was patient, the kind of person who could wait a long time and still take everything.

We arrived at gates that sighed open without protest. A mansion rose up like a citadel, all white stone and sweeping steps. Men in black suits met us; they moved around him like he tugged invisible strings. A maid took me with a bowed head when he told her to “give her a room. Clothes. Let her freshen up.”

Her hands were trembling as she stepped into my small, impossible room. Silk sheets. A mirror framed in gold that reflected back a stranger with messy hair and hollow eyes. I scrubbed at the chain marks until my hands ached and the room stopped spinning. I tried to breathe without making a sound. Maybe if I moved quietly enough, the truth would blur and disappear.

Hours passed in a haze of water and silence. Then a soft knock. “Miss,” the maid said, voice barely a thread. “He’s asking for you.”

My feet carried me down a long hall that never seemed to end. The room he’d called me into felt warmer than my room, not cozy, just alive. Flames from the fireplace threw light across him. He stood there, mask off, and my breath stopped. He was actually breathtaking. Ridiculously handsome, coat hanging off broad shoulders, the kind of man who made the air feel tight.

“Sit.”

I sank into the chair, the silence stretching until I wanted to scream. Then he spoke, low and controlled. “Now. Let me tell you the rules.”

I wanted to disappear. But his voice had a steady edge to it — not cruel, not kind and I found myself listening. He laid out rules like facts: no running, no screaming, no trying to escape without permission. He mixed words about protection with words about ownership, and each one knotted my stomach tighter. When he said my name, my pulse shifted in a way that made me hate the feeling.

—Caesar—

I hadn’t planned to step into that pit. I’d gone out for air — for anonymity, for a place where my name and my lineage could be muffled by smoke and noise. The estate, the empire, the legacy — they sit like a crown that cuts into my skull. Tonight I wanted the town beneath me, not the throne above me. I wanted nothing.

But then I saw her.

She was shoved onto the stage like contraband, a scrap of red hair and pale skin that made the whole hall tilt. She didn’t scream; she lifted her chin in spite of everything. That stubbornness snagged something inside me that I don’t like to name. The beast — the thing in my ribs that I chain daily with business and blood — turned from a hungry whisper into a snarl.

I told myself I wouldn’t bid. I don’t indulge in the things that feed that part of me, not when the cost is a person. But it wasn’t a plan. It was an impulse so old it felt like a law. I doubled. Twice. It wasn’t ego that pushed the number up; it was possession firing like a muscle.

I studied her with a cold, unreadable look while she sat in front of me, trembling under the weight of it. Disoriented, angry, frightened but still marked by that stubborn line of defiance at the corner of her mouth. Dangerous. Charming. Infuriating. All at once.

“Rule number one” i said lowly to draw her attention