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Prologue

As they lower Mom into the ground, the priest talking about bullshit like dust and ashes, I can only think one thing:

Coward.

Giselle Vetella (née McCabe) had been a beautiful woman, no doubt, but she had lacked more than a few brain cells.Shehad put herself in this position.Shehad spiraled into hopelessness because of her own damn choices.Shehad jumped from the fifth story balcony attached to her suite.Shehad left me here to reap the consequences of those choices.

The priest stops talking and I glance up, my sunglasses hiding the eye roll I give him as he gestures to the open grave with a forced sympathetic smile, sweat beading on his upper lip. I step forward, chucking the white rose I’m holding into the hole, the flower landing with a soft tap against the wooden casket.

I move to step back, but a hand grasps my elbow with no amount of gentleness, keeping me in place. Stephen tosses his own rose into the grave, his fingers tightening on my arm until I’m hiding a cringe at the bruising force of his grip. He holds me still as the gathered crowd filters away from the grave, murmuring his thanks to those that offer condolences in passing. When it’s just my stepfather and I standing six feet above my mother’s corpse, he turns to me.

I don’t turn my head, but I watch him out of the corner of my eye, my chest tightening with apprehension. He doesn’t say anything at first, just studies my profile.

Stephen Vetella is the kind of attractive that screams danger, pain and money, and my mother had certainly gotten all three in return for marrying him. His black hair is combed back, his equally dark eyes tracing over my skin in a way that leaves me feeling slimy. How my mother was able to look past the utter ick of everything about Stephen is beyond me. How was she able to look at him and not see a Skin Trader?

The Vetella family is one of several prominent families that benefitted off the legalization and taxation of selling...well...skin. Looking for one night of sex? Go to your local Skin Center and head to the Library to pick out any male or female you’d like for the listed price. Looking for someone to cook and clean for you? Visit the Stable to purchase or lease slaves.

Anyone can be sold under the right conditions. Orphans are huge in the Skin Trade—some enter as babies and are purchased from the Nursery by couples who can’t conceive their own kids. Some enter as babies and never leave the trading system, damaged and destroyed without prejudice. The Indebted are the next largest contributors to the stock. Racking up debts you can’t pay was a surefire way to find yourself in the Stable.

Mom was lucky she’d never been sold, finagling her way out of debts by flirting her way through life. She’d gotten her hooks into anyone who would have her; who would support both of us. Stephen was only the last in a long line of twisted men who had fallen for her charm. It just so happened he was also the most powerful.

Now that she had jumped to her death, I was technically an Orphan, living in the house of a man who sold them.

Fucking awesome.

“You’re very pretty, Blake,” Stephen finally says in a way that makes my skin crawl. “Such pretty blonde hair. And those gray eyes you’re hiding could bring a man to his knees.”

My stomach drops, my heart hammering in my chest, but I don’t respond. I learned months ago that speaking to Stephen just gives him ammunition.

“You’ll be eighteennextweek, correct?”

I nod, my mouth drier than the Sahara in a drought.

“Dad.”

I flinch at Mo’s voice, Stephen’s fingers flexing around my arm as he shoots his son a look of annoyance. “What?” he snaps.

“I’ll take Blake home,” Mo answers, his own fingers brushing my other arm. I turn my head for the first time, looking up at my older stepbrother.

Mordecai isn’t so bad, but he’s rarely around. Business keeps him away most of the time—Stephen’s business. The handful of times we’ve interacted, he’s been nothing but kind and willing to hang out, even if heisfive years older than me.

If I didn’t know that Mordecai was Stephen’s son, I wouldn’t guess it at first glance. They look nothing alike. Mo’s skin is such a smooth, pretty pecan brown color while Stephen’s is on the darker side of fair. His cerulean eyes look electric against his skin, while Stephen’s are baby shit green. His hair is a little longer than his normal buzz cut, the corkscrews looking fuzzy, while Stephen is rocking that comb over to hide the fact that he’s starting to bald and the hair plugs aren’t taking.

Shocking the hell out of me, Stephen releases, nodding. “Keep her there until I decide what to do with her. She’d fetch a good price for some time, but I might want to keep her instead.”

I whip my head around, looking at my stepfather dead on for the first time. My sunglasses are hiding my panicked expression, but it’s like he sees it anyway, smirking at me. Every instinct is telling me to bolt, because neither of the choices he’s debating are good ones for me.

Before I can make a run for it, Mo takes my arm in the same way his father had been holding and leads me away from my mother’s grave. I wriggle, trying to twist out of Mo’s grip, without drawing attention of the other mourners still milling about. He’s detached, not reacting to my attempts to free myself except to clamp down harder on my arm, dragging me along when I stumble over a flat gravestone. He glances at me, looking almost contrite, before he pushes me into the backseat of a town car.

I reach for the door on the opposite side, scrambling to escape the car and the future. The door handle pulls, but the door doesn’t open. I lunge back for the open door, but Mo slides in as I make it there, a grimace on his face.

He slams the door shut behind him and yanks on the handle, showing me it can’t be opened from the inside either. My heart pounds in my chest, panic flooding into my gut and making me nauseous.

“Home,” he orders the driver, who jerks his head in a single nod and directs the car onto the graveyard road. Mo turns his eyes on me and his expression turns sorrowful. “Fucking dad,” he mutters.

There. I’ve got his sympathy. I can work with that.

I lick my parched lips, shoving my sunglasses up on top of my head. “Please, Mo. I don’t want to be sold.”

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