The number on my screen has six digits. I read it, blink, read it again, and my brain returns an error—value not found in known reality, please reboot.
Forty-eight hours ago, the first bid came in low enough to sting—a stranger reviewed my photos, my measurements, my verified virginity, and decided I was worth less than a used Honda Civic. I stared at that number in a bathroom stall, unable to decide what hurt more—being sold or being underpriced.
Then a second bid doubled it. A third pushed past my mother's surgical deposit like a car blowing through a stop sign and kept climbing into numbers that belong to people in a completely different tax bracket.
I've checked obsessively—between shifts, on breaks, in every bathroom stall this building owns—watching the figure rise in horror. Who are these people? What exactly do they think they're buying?
I pocket the phone and round the corner toward the east stairwell—straight into a wall of woodsmoke and quiet authority that has no business occupying this corridor at eleven p.m.
Spencer Wallace leans against the wall like the building was constructed around him. When his eyes find mine, his chin lifts a fraction—a predator registering a change in the wind. "Bailee."
"Spencer." I adjust my grip on the cart, knuckles aching. "Lost? Executive floor is four stories up."
"I know where the executive floor is." He pushes off the wall and the distance between us loses three feet it was using for my survival. "You smell different tonight."
"Industrial bleach. New supplier." I hold my ground because retreating from a Wallace in a hallway is something you don't recover from. "Very exotic."
"Not the bleach." His scent layers through the ammonia—woodsmoke, aged leather, something underneath both that wraps around the base of my skull and pulls. "Underneath it. Something's been shifting for days. Tonight it's louder."
"I'm stressed." My pulse stages a full revolt against the inside of my wrists, and I flatten my voice to compensate. "Groundbreaking news for a woman on three jobs and four hours of sleep."
"That's not stress." He steps closer—not asking permission, not apologising for the oxygen he's consuming—and my spine locks one vertebra at a time. "That's fear. And something underneath fear you're trying to bury."
"Fascinating clinical assessment." The wolf-adjacent part of my brain recognises exactly what he is—eldest, dominant, the kind of authority that doesn't announce itself because every cell in the room already knows. "Do you bill by the hour?"
"What happened?" Not a question—a door he's opened and is standing beside, arms crossed, waiting.
"Nothing that requires the acting CEO's attention." I keep my eyes on his collarbone because meeting those storm-blue irises at this range feels like a death wish.
"I'm not asking as the acting CEO." His voice drops half a register and something behind my sternum responds like a wire pulled taut. "I'm asking because you look like you’re counting down to something, and the number's getting small."
"You don't know me well enough to read my countdowns." My throat works around the words, because the accuracy of it is unfair.
"I know enough." His jaw shifts—small, tight. "I know you haven't eaten today. I know you took the stairs instead of the elevator because you're avoiding the third floor. And I know whatever's on your phone has been eating you alive since yesterday."
"That's surveillance, not knowledge." My phone buzzes against my hip and every sentence in my throat collapses. The vibration is a detonator, and the thing it's detonating is tonight.
"You could tell me." Quieter now, almost gentle, which is worse—because gentleness from Spencer Wallace sounds like something that could crack a person open if she stood still long enough. "Whatever it is."
"I have to go." I pull the cart backward too fast, wheels shrieking against tile—graceless, obvious. "Floors to finish."
"Bailee." My name lodges between my shoulder blades like a hand pressed against my body, and my step falters for half a second before I force it forward again.
"Goodnight, Spencer." I don't turn around. The stairwell door swings shut and I can still feel his gaze through the steel, precise as a fingertip tracing the length of my spine.
The stairwell on nine has no cameras. I sink onto the third step, pull out my phone, and the screen rearranges my entire night into a before and an after.
Auction closed. Winner confirmed. Payment verified. Below that—a hotel in the financial district, suite 1204, tonight at nine. The buyer is a string of anonymised characters—no name, no photo, no species, no age.
Just a transaction number and a payment confirmation large enough to make my vision blur. I stare at the screen trying to extract a person from a string of redacted data, and the data stares back, offering nothing.
The amount covers everything—surgery, deposit, follow-up, prescriptions, and a brand new house to boot. Salvation and a sentencing typed in the same notification. I scroll past dress code suggestions and check-in logistics to a line that reads: You may leave at any time.
Clinical. Polite. I read it three times and still don't recognise the woman in this stairwell as someone who would be reading this on her phone.
Nine p.m. The hotel lobby is marble and soft lighting—the kind of place where money took a bath and decided to stay. I cross the floor in the only dress I own without bleach stains, heels borrowed from a coworker who didn't ask questions.
The elevator plays jazz. I press twelve and rehearse the script I've been building since seven—transactional, boundaries, leave when it's over. The money hits an account. A surgeon lifts a scalpel. My mom’s heart keeps beating.
Twelfth floor. The hallway carpet swallows my footsteps, and the silence has the quality of places that charge four figures a night for the privilege of discretion. I stop outside 1204.
I knock once. My knuckles against the wood sound final—a period at the end of a sentence I cannot unwrite.
The door opens.
Miles Wallace stands in the gap—sleeves rolled, hair pushed back, green-hazel eyes finding mine with an expression that is not surprise. He's been expecting me. He looks at me like someone who's been watching a clock hit an hour he's been dreading.
"Bailee." Soft—confirming something to himself, like he's been saying my name to an empty room and is only now matching it to the person. "Come in."
My feet cross the threshold before my brain files its formal objection. The suite unfolds—floor-to-ceiling windows, city scattered in light below, a room that costs more per night than I make in a month.
Against the far wall, arms folded, gunmetal eyes locked on me with that unreadable stillness—Blake. The man who caught my phone. The two-second pause I built an entire belief system around denying. He saw everything.
My gaze swings left and the stairwell makes sudden, devastating sense. Spencer stands beside the window—storm-blue eyes, dark auburn hair—watching me with the stillness of a man who just received the answer to every question I refused him tonight.
The bid is theirs. All three of them. And the door behind me clicks shut with a sound that feels more like a verdict being read.
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