Auctioned To The Lycan Twins

Lot 267

The number was burned into my skin three days ago.

Not a name. Not a person. A lot number — 267 — stamped in raw, raised flesh above my left hip bone, and every time the chain around my wrists pulled tight, I felt it stretch and sting and remind me exactly what I had become.

The auction room smelled like damp stone, cigarette smoke, and wolf musk so thick it coated the back of my throat. Rows of folding chairs filled the floor below the stage. Every seat was taken. I couldn’t count the faces looking up at me — I’d stopped trying when I realized that looking back made it worse. So I stared at the wall above their heads and tried to remember how to breathe.

The drug was still in my system. Not enough to knock me out — that wasn’t the point. Just enough to keep my legs soft and my tongue too heavy to form the right words. Just enough to make sure I wouldn’t fight.

My father had been very thorough about that.

The auctioneer was a thick-necked wolf in a cheap gray suit. He walked the length of the stage like he owned the world, tapping a silver rod against his palm. He’d introduced three lots before me. All females. All wolfless, like me. He’d sold them fast and easy, barely pausing between bids.

When he got to me, he stopped.

“Lot two-sixty-seven.” His voice carried the particular boredom of a man who had done this too many times. “Female. Twenty-one years old. She-wolf by bloodline — though I use the term loosely.” A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd. He gestured at me with the rod, tilting my chin up without touching me, just pointing. “No shift recorded. No wolf confirmed. No ranking inside any pack.” He paused for effect. “Damaged goods.”

More laughter. Louder this time.

My jaw tightened. That was all I could manage — the drug had taken everything else.

“Bidding opens at five thousand. Do I have five?”

Silence.

I watched the rows of faces. Curious. Bored. Not interested enough to spend money. A wolfless girl with no rank and no power wasn’t worth five thousand to anyone in this room.

The auctioneer cleared his throat. “Three thousand.”

Still nothing.

The humiliation should have broken something in me. Instead, it settled — flat and cold and familiar. My father’s voice had told me I was worth nothing since I was old enough to understand the words. This room was just saying it louder.

Then the air changed.

I don’t know how else to describe it. One moment the room was warm and stale. The next, every wolf in it went still — the way prey goes still when something larger enters the clearing. No sound. No movement. Even the auctioneer stopped mid-breath.

I looked toward the VIP balcony.

Two men stood at the railing.

They were identical. Same height — tall enough that the balcony made them look like they were standing above the rest of the world by choice. Same dark hair, same hard jaw, same broad shoulders. But even from twenty feet below, something about them was different from each other in ways I couldn’t name yet. One stood with his arms braced on the railing like he was about to tear it free. The other stood perfectly still, hands clasped behind his back, watching the stage with the quiet attention of someone solving a problem.

The power rolling off them was not like anything I had felt in my life. It pressed against my skin. It pushed the air out of my lungs. Every wolf in the room had felt it too — I could see it in the way backs straightened and chins dropped and eyes fixed on the floor instead of the balcony.

Nobody looked directly at them. Nobody except me.

“One hundred thousand.” The one on the left. His voice was low and unhurried and it carried through the room without effort, the way thunder carries.

The auctioneer made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

“One-fifty.” The one on the right. Cooler. Quieter. Like the edge of something very sharp.

“Two hundred.” Left.

“Two-fifty.” Right.

Nobody else bid. Nobody breathed. The two men drove the price up between them in the same tone they might use to discuss the weather, while the room watched in total, terrified silence.

Something happened inside my chest.

Not the drug. Not fear. Something I had never felt before — a slow, spreading heat that started behind my sternum and moved outward, like an ember being breathed back to life. A stirring. Something deep, something that had no name, something that whispered without words.

I pressed my fist against my ribs. The chain pulled. I barely noticed.

“Five hundred thousand.” Left. Final. Done.

The single word that followed it filled the room the way a struck bell fills a cathedral — one note, complete and absolute.

“Sold.”

The auctioneer sagged with visible relief. The crowd exhaled. Guards moved toward the stage to unchain me and I felt the first real flicker of panic cut through the drug’s fog — because whatever had just happened, wherever they planned to take me, I had no say in any of it. Again. Still.

The man from the left side of the balcony appeared at the base of the stage steps. Up close, the heat of him was almost physical. Dark eyes. A scar along his jaw. The look of a man who had made peace with violence a long time ago. He reached for my chain.

A hand appeared in the space between us.

The other one. Right side of the balcony. Here now, fast and quiet, stepping into the narrow gap like he’d always been standing there. His eyes locked on mine — and they were the same eyes, same dark color, same cut of bone around them — but utterly, completely different. Where the first man’s gaze was fire, this one’s was winter light. Still. Precise. And right now, burning with something urgent.

“She’s not going anywhere with you, brother.” His voice was even. Conversational, almost. “Not until we discuss the prophecy.”