The Auction

The Auction

Kitty Thomas

Kindle Edition

Copyright © 2011 Kitty Thomas

all rights reserved.

Kindle Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Publisher's Note:

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Contact [email protected]

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the following people in no particular order:

Robin for cover art.

Natasha for copyedits and developmental edits.

Jackie, Cari, Annabel, Claudia, Jamie, Michelle, and Cara for beta reading.

Tiffany for reading and blurbing.

M for believing in me.

Also, if I’ve left anyone out, please let me know. I lost my list for this, so if I’ve left you out, email me and I’ll add you to the list.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction, and the author does not endorse or condone any behavior done to another human being without their consent.

Warning: This book contains sexual situations of dubious consent, master/slave, multiple partners, girl on girl, alien sex, and oral play.

I never worried too much about the auction. It was what happened to
other
girls. The ones who didn’t have someone with pockets deep enough to set them free.

The city officials didn’t care what happened afterward. You could keep the woman you bought, or give her away or sell her or set her free. As long as enough wealth had been redistributed back into the city’s coffers, that was all they cared about.

I wasn’t particularly rich, but I was wise enough to make friends with those who were. My parents had died
out there,
that place that was outside the city and forbidden. Supposedly they were killed by the monsters.

By the time I was sixteen I was giving Stephen Thurman—among others—blow jobs behind the learning center. He was part of the richest family in the city and three years my senior. I’d hedged my bets with others but focused most of my attention on him. He was the only one who had his own money and wouldn’t be dependent on a loan from his father. He’d promised to buy me and then let me go.

I’d made it my primary occupation since the death of my parents to be as surly and disagreeable as possible. I think in the back of my mind I believed this would make me an undesirable on the auction block. Stephen could buy me quickly for little money, and then it would be over. Life would return to normal.

Thinking back, it’s amazing the lengths I was willing to go to to orchestrate my freedom and avoid enslavement. But really I’d been a slave even before the auction. The thing I had most tried to prevent, I’d lived it for two years to stay in Stephen’s good graces.

The day I was sold was a bright, warm day. I stood with ten other girls who’d just turned eighteen. We were fair, thin—but not too thin, with long hair in curled ringlets. We wore a ring of local purple flowers in our hair and white gowns like ancient virgins about to be tossed into a volcano.

A deep and ominous drum sounded in the distance as we were marched around the side of the hill to the platform at the very edge of the city. The local officials called us a
batch,
as if we were sweet cakes or a grouping of widgets. Sweet young women all in a row. Wind them up and set them to do your bidding.

As the procession continued, we moved in a somber line; no one tried to run. I wondered if the temptation screamed in their minds as it did mine. The officials didn’t chain us because there was no point. There was only one civilized place on the whole planet, and we were living in it. Outside the city, you were as good as dead. The monsters lived out there. So if the city said: “Slavery, yes, we like it!”, you nodded and smiled and then lowered your head like a good girl.

When our people left the source planet over a century ago, they brought with them our past in hundreds of dusty rectangular chunks called books. I was told these books were history but they felt like fiction.

Even so, I read as much as I could about everything from our past before the relocation: plants, animals, technology, culture. Much of the technology they spoke of, we’d somehow lost. Perhaps we didn’t have enough people whose minds were turned toward invention on our ship. There had been a time deep in our history when we’d used computerized books, but now we were relegated to scrolls.

The auction was ridiculous and demeaning, but it wasn’t far removed from photographs I’d seen of what were called debutante balls on Earth. At those functions, the women had been in white gowns, with an escort on their arm. They’d been on display and presented to society, and no one had thought it odd or offensive.

The first girl was led up to the center block and spun in a slow circle. Her name was Lizbeth, the richest and snottiest girl in the city. I secretly hoped she’d end up enslaved to some strangely rich ruffian, living in a cave out in the wild somewhere—not that our people lived that far from the protection of the city. Of course that wouldn’t happen. Her boyfriend had been loaned money, and he would be buying her today.

He’d tease her for the next twenty or thirty years about how he owned her. But he wouldn’t really, not if her father had anything to say about it. In her case, it was merely ceremonial.

The whole affair is surprisingly civilized. We aren’t beaten, or thrown down naked, or prodded like cattle. There is hardly an air of sexuality to the proceedings at all, as if it escapes these people’s minds that if you really own someone’s body, you’ll probably use it for more than just keeping house. But no one talks about that because it’s not polite and clean and civil. And we all want to be polite and clean and civil. It’s necessary to survive here.

When someone is bought by a stranger and becomes a true slave, everyone looks the other way and talks about the punch and pie they’ll be consuming after the ceremony with those who were only
fake bought
. We know to close our eyes as the girl is led away to whatever part of the city he lives in, and we will pretend she never existed in the first place. At least publicly. Should one of us later pass her on the street, we’ll avert our eyes.

I looked back to the center block upon which Lizbeth stood. Fast phrases tumbled from the auctioneer’s mouth as he drove the price higher and higher. I could almost see his eyes lighting with greed over what the city could buy when the next transport ship landed. The city officials had had their eyes on computerized books forever.

Lizbeth’s father was becoming irritated by how much money he was losing as others kept driving the price up. Finally, all bidders but the boyfriend dropped off, and that was that. On the source planet they used to have these ceremonies called weddings. Just like the debutante balls, they would wear white gowns. In older times there was something called a dowry for weddings. Money always exchanging hands for women. And yet nobody ever questioned it or thought it odd.

So I guessed Lizbeth was
married
now. Because I knew she wasn’t enslaved. Just looking at her radiant face staring down from the platform with a kind of imperial majesty, I knew which one of them was the real boot licker. And from the little jeers in the crowd and friends elbowing the boyfriend in the ribs, everybody else knew it, too.

That was when my name was called: “Annabelle Walker.”

I grimaced at the recitation of my full name. Really? They had to go there. Call me Anna or call me Belle, but never tread the dark and unholy path of blending them together. I stepped out from the line and went to stand on the center block.

The man running the auction smiled at me.
Smiled.

Was I the only sane person here who found this all disturbing and wrong? Perhaps what was disturbing and wrong were the secret fantasies I’d entertained of being bought. Not by Stephen, but by someone else. Someone I didn’t know. He would stare at me and I would look back at him, and in that gaze, his purpose for me would be obscenely revealed as the wetness dripped down my thighs.

Looking out at the sea of people overwhelmed me, and I felt light-headed for a moment. The auctioneer grabbed my elbow to steady me. There were no women among the bidders. Auctions weren’t an appropriate place for women, except for that one time in your life when they were.

I let out a breath when I saw Stephen positioned toward the front. The shrewd look in his eyes and the smirk that played about his lips caused me to suck that breath back in. That was the moment I knew he had every intention of paying for me, but none of letting me go. I looked away from his face, my eyes traveling down to his riding boots, gleaming in the sun.

I’m sure I looked submissive and demure with my eyes cast down like that, but nobody was fooled. I’d made too big of a show of being a complete undesirable. Then the bidding started, or it was supposed to start. There was a long stretch of silence, and I looked up suddenly at Stephen, begging him with imploring eyes to say something, even though I didn’t really wish to belong to him.

I had no idea what happened if nobody bought a girl. Was she just free to go? That couldn’t be it, because if it was then people would just not bid altogether. No, if I wasn’t bought then something awful would happen.

Finally, Stephen raised his hand, accepting the opening bid, and I let out a breath.

“That’s lucky for you,” the auctioneer whispered. “If no bidder came forward, you’d belong to the city. And believe me, you don’t want that.”

“Do I hear any more?” He directed the question to the men standing below. A few chuckled. And one shouted out, “Nah . . . that one has too much attitude for me. Nice piece of ass, though. Maybe Stephen will let us watch.”

My face flamed as a couple of snickers erupted from the row of girls standing behind me, including the one who didn’t have someone who could afford to buy her. Even she felt as if she were in a position to mock and giggle.

As the auctioneer was about to slam the gavel down, a voice rose from the back, doubling the price. I couldn’t get a good look at the man because he was shrouded in a dark cloak. His voice sounded like boots crunching on gravel: hard-edged, dangerous, accented. Accented from where? Was he from another planet? From a transport ship? One wasn’t due here for another year.

Visions of being taken from my home planet and belonging to some ship’s captain caused a shiver to run through me. I couldn’t ascertain if the shiver was excitement or fear. Maybe a bit of both. Though I didn’t really want to go with the stranger. Of course not.

With every second that crept by, my agitation grew. Stephen looked to be in a state of indecision.
Please don’t abandon me to him. Please.
Who was this stranger, and why did he want me? I wasn’t unattractive, but I also wasn’t the prettiest, at least not in my opinion. I also had a reputation for being difficult, little better than a criminal. Probably the only reason the city hadn’t classed me as such was a vain attempt to get some coin out of me first.

Stephen raised the bid, but not by much. Immediately the man at the back countered. People started whispering, murmurs with question marks on the end. I couldn’t hear the questions, but I could make a few guesses.

The stranger seemed as if he could bid all day. He hadn’t hesitated for a moment when Stephen had raised the bid.

Despite all odds, Stephen countered, but the price was upped by the other man. Stephen shook his head at me. All I could think was:
I suffered through all those blow jobs for nothing.
And then following directly on the end of that thought was:
At least I won’t have to do it again. Not with him.

“Sold!” The auctioneer seemed practically giddy. No one had expected me to go for so much.

The crowd parted for the stranger as if he were royalty. As he got closer, his size became more apparent. He wasn’t one of us. Not human. He was one of the monsters, those who were here before we colonized, who had let us live for the amusement value we brought them more than anything else. My pulse thundered in my head, the urge to run seeping into the muscles of my legs. Escape scenarios tumbled through my brain.

The monsters never came to these things. Though we were only able to fortify the city with small, weak fences that could never keep out a monster who could fly, they had promised to stay away as long as we never ventured forth from the one small area they’d granted us use of. Up until today, they’d kept that promise.