My mind was a mess of noise.An auction.I’d been in an auction.
I tried to breathe, but my chest wouldn’t cooperate; it felt too small, too tight, like my lungs couldn’t hold the terror or the relief or the grief sitting inside me.
Someone had bought me.
Someone had paid a ridiculous amount of money to own me.
And I didn’t know whether to be grateful or sick.
Whether being sold meant I would live… or simply die a slower death.
Whether the person who bought me was a savior or another monster with deeper pockets.
Either way, I was still a commodity.A number with a price tag.
And as they dragged me down the hallway, my feet barely touching the floor, all I could taste was the bitter truth: I was nowhere near free.
I was shoved into a small room behind the curtains, stumbling on my sore feet.The door slammed.The lock clicked.Silence followed, thick and absolute as I was left alone.
A single bulb hung from the ceiling, humming faintly like it might die at any moment.It threw a washed-out cone of light over a metal chair and a crate shoved in the corner.
My pulse wouldn’t settle.It punched against my ribs, frantic, uneven.My hands trembled uncontrollably until I forced them into fists, squeezing hard enough that my nails carved half-moons into my palms.
An itchiness crawled beneath my skin, like a thousand insects let loose.I rubbed my arms, like I could chase the feeling away, but it only clung harder.
I stood dead center in the room, breathing fast, thinking, calculating.There were no windows in this room with the stale air.No vents big enough for me to crawl through.No loose pipes that I could turn into a weapon.
This wasn’t a room.It was a cage.And I was boxed in.
Then came the crack of gunshots, so close it vibrated the bulb above my head.
I froze in place, lungs locking.
There were more shots before shouting erupted—deep voices, too many to count.Something heavy banged into a wall.Glass shattered.A woman screamed and then fell silent.
Chaos rushed in from every direction.
I pressed myself to the door, straining to catch anything that would tell me what was coming.Footsteps pounded the hallway.Men shouted in languages I only half recognized.Something metal scraped violently across concrete.
My throat tightened.
I smelled smoke.
It wasn’t the faint kind from a cigarette or someone burning incense.The smell was thick.Acrid.Bitter enough to scrape the back of my throat on the first inhale.
Fire.
My stomach dropped, a cold plunge that stole every bit of strength from my legs.Heat began to creep through the cracks around the door, crawling across the floor like a living, burning thing.It was small at first… then grew slowly.
Every instinct screamed the obvious truth at me, that this place was burning down.And I was locked inside it.
Maybe this was it.Maybe this was where everything finally caught up to me.
I had survived a massacre.I had survived that alley.I had survived being dragged from my home like an animal.
But dying in a windowless room, during someone else’s war, without even knowing whose bullets were flying?It felt cruel.Random.Wrong in ways I couldn’t articulate.It spelled defeat.
I sank to my knees because standing suddenly felt impossible.My palms flattened against the cold floor, grounding me, holding me together by a thread.My breath shuddered out, shaky and uneven.