Page 1 of The Seller

Chapter 1

Stavros

She’s all limbs, long legs exposed under the insufficient length of what passes for a skirt, curled up against the cold truth of the world. Her face is hidden beneath a curtain of hair which won’t protect her from anything down here.

I saw her lift her head and look around as I was coming down the stairs, but she’s decided it’s better to pretend to not be awake now that I’m standing over her, a man she doesn’t know, and has no reason to trust.

She is lit by a single bare bulb hanging above her head. It casts shadows all around her helpless frame. Those dark depths hold horrors she can’t begin to imagine. This place of captivity will become her world over the next hours and days. Soon, she’ll forget that there is anything outside these walls. She won’t know anyone or anything besides me.

Her helplessness makes me throb with need. She is nineteen years old, almost too old for what I have planned for her, but I think we can make it work.

“Sit up,” I say, crouching down next to her prone form. It puts my face, my hands, my body closer to her, gives me more control and more presence.

She doesn’t move, but I can see her breath quicken in the flaring of her nostrils and the pulse visible at the base of her pale neck. Naughty girl, refusing an order. She’ll soon learn not to do that.

She’s going to learn to obey.

She’s going to become so conditioned to obedience that anything else is literally unthinkable.

That will come in time. Today she will be scared and perhaps even defiant.

I love these first precious hours with a new girl. This is the time in which I learn precisely where her soft spots are, and she discovers that the world is not what she thought it was.

I reach down, let my fingers run through her hair. It is smooth and silky, with just a little grip from the product she used to make it sit so sleekly around her face. My caress brings a whimper to her lips, then a gasp as I tighten my fingers, grabbing her hair down by the roots. I lift her head up. Her upper body follows. As I tilt her head back, she can’t help but look at me with pretty, innocent blue eyes.

She is trembling in my grasp, portraying the kind of fear entirely appropriate for a situation such as this. But that is the word that sticks in my mind.Portraying.I have been there when a hundred different girls have found themselves in this situation, I have seen a hundred frightened expressions and felt the tremors of their terror. There is something superficial about this one. She is afraid, but not as deeply as she should be. I wonder if the drugs are yet to fully wear off.

“Help me,” she whispers as I lift a bottle to her lips.

“I am helping you,” I say, dribbling a little of my sedative-laced water between her lips. She swallows automatically. Good girl.

“I need to call my family.”

“Sshhh,” I say, gentling her with a brief brush of my hand against her temple. “You’re alright.”

She’s not alright. She won’t be, either. With one rash decision, she’s fallen off the radar of safe society, and into the pit which surrounds it on all sides. Most people aren’t even aware how limited their safety is. They have no idea how brutal the chaos which surrounds them on all sides truly can be. This girl is about to find out, and there’s something beautiful in that.

Even if it means death, to have seen the true face of this world we call home just once, is real freedom. So, then, though she is locked away in this basement which is so distant from everything she knows, in some way, I am setting her free.

This girl is young, beautiful, and apparently, impulsive. She’s been taught that she is a person, but down here, in my basement, she is just raw material. We look into one another’s eyes for a long moment. She is trying to understand me, trying to work out if I am a hero who has saved her, or something else. Unfortunately for her, it is the latter.

“Please…” she has a tremor in her voice now. Reality is starting to sink in and she’s starting to get scared. She should be. Nothing good comes of finding yourself down here. This is the place hope comes to die.

“What’s your name?”

“Siri.”

I pause. “You’re named after the app?”

“I was born before the app,” she says, somewhat indignantly. In that moment she forgets her surroundings. She’s pulled back to her original self, and I get a glimpse of the girl who she was before she came down here. There’s something proud about her, something elegant, almost regal. This is a girl who comes from power.

Interesting.

“Who are your parents, Siri?”

She presses her lips together, and I know she’s not going to tell me.

“They’re dead.”

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