Velvet Hunger

The first touch is cold water. It hits the back of Eva’s neck in an unbroken stream, racing down her spine and carrying the grime from her skin into the tin basin. She catches the rim with both hands. Behind her, the matron clicks her tongue as if flinching is a personal inconvenience.

“Hold still. They don’t like bruises.” The woman sets the empty jug down and reaches for a cloth. Her nails scrape Eva’s scalp as she pushes her head forward, pulling the black hair and its red streaks through her fist. “You’d think you’d come clean, knowing what today’s for.”

Eva keeps her mouth shut. The last of their soap went on Liam’s borrowed jacket. He’d wanted to look respectable when the creditors came, which would’ve been funny if she hadn’t been the one wringing it out over the kitchen bucket.

The washroom used to be a room where the cathedral’s priests kept their robes. An attendant told them that while herding them in, pleased to have something interesting to say about the place. Saints still stand above the basins, their faces worn to featureless ovals. At the next one, a woman cries into her hands while someone tells her to stop wasting time.

“Teeth.” The matron catches Eva’s chin. A younger attendant steps forward and pulls her lip back with two fingers, smelling of starch and fear. Eva fixes her gaze on the freckles across the girl’s nose until the inspection ends.

“Good enamel. No visible decay.” The girl reaches for her slate, grateful to have found the right answer.

“Of course not. This one’s premium.” The matron releases Eva’s chin and takes her arm. They examine her nails, the calluses across her palms, the small curved scar low on her ribs. She got that falling off a roof while playing guardian and thief with Liam. He’d cried harder than she had, then told their mother he’d been the one who dared her to jump. He used to admit things before somebody dragged them out of him.

The clerk steps closer, checking the blue lines inside Eva’s elbow against his ledger. “Healthy pulse. B positive. No fever disease recorded.” He turns a page with a damp fingertip. “Too thin, though.”

“She’ll fill out if they feed her.” The matron turns Eva by the shoulder and runs the cloth down her back. “Selling term, one year.”

Farther down the row, another clerk laughs. “Assuming she lasts that long.”

Eva looks up at the saint above her basin. There’s a crack where its mouth should be, black with old damp. She wants to say something so badly that her jaw hurts with keeping it in. The younger attendant won’t meet her eyes. Neither will anyone else who might be made to pay for her opening her mouth.

Liam’s debt notice is folded somewhere among those papers. She knows the total without looking. Knows the interest, too, and the amount they would’ve added if she’d waited another week. A column adds up or it doesn’t. People keep changing what they mean after you’ve agreed to it.

“Dry. Then dress.” A towel lands against her chest. Eva catches it and works quickly, dragging rough cloth over her arms and stomach until her skin stings. The clerk watches long enough to make her want to throw it at him, then loses interest in her for the next body.

The bundle on the bench contains a white slip. No sleeves, thin straps, cloth fine enough to cling wherever her skin hasn’t dried. It falls to midcalf when she pulls it on. She’s worn worse for work. She’s never been expected to stand still while a roomful of strangers decides whether it improves the price.

“They like a bit of shape,” a woman beside her whispers, pinching the cloth away from her own hip. “I look like a stick. They’ll think I’m diseased.”

“Sick cattle are cheap,” another says. Her laugh catches in her throat. “At least you’ll go.”

Eva smooths the slip over her stomach. Before she can move away, the matron holds up a band of dark iron, its outer surface stamped with tiny symbols. The inside is polished. Somebody took care over that, making certain the restraint won’t chafe enough to spoil what they’re selling.

“Chin up.” The metal touches the back of Eva’s neck, cold enough to make her shoulders twitch. The matron fits one end into the other and presses until the lock clicks. Eva hears it in her teeth.

The younger attendant runs a finger along the seam. “Lot seventeen. Eva Hart. Term of service, twelve months. Contract number eight one nine.”

“Recorded.” The clerk doesn’t look up. He makes a small mark beside her name, and she wonders how much of her year he’ll remember by supper.

The collar sits snug against her throat. Eva tries to swallow without moving it and can’t. The matron nudges her toward the waiting line with two fingers between her shoulders, already reaching for the next band.

“Almost pretty. Don’t slouch.”

Eva straightens because she won’t let the woman have the satisfaction of fixing her posture. Across the room, great double doors glow around their edges with stained light. Laughter comes through the gap, followed by the clink of glass. The buyers sound comfortable. Men at the docks used to sound like that before fights they knew they’d win.

A bell rings. The matron walks down the line, tugging slips straight and moving hands away from collars. “Eyes down unless you’re told otherwise. Don’t speak. Don’t faint. They don’t pay extra for dramatics.” She pauses beside Eva, checking her face. “Remember to breathe.”

The clerk opens the doors. Afternoon light spills across the washroom floor, red and gold from the cathedral windows. Eva sees the crowded main hall, dark clothes against pale stone, velvet cushions where worshippers once knelt. Buyers sit with cups in their hands and friends beside them. Several are still talking when the first bodies enter.

“Lots one through six,” the matron calls. “Follow.”

A handler clips a chain to each collar and leads the group down the aisle. Eva watches a young woman with pale hair climb the steps to the platform where the altar used to stand. The auctioneer takes her tether casually, smiling as he turns her toward the pews.

“Two-year term. Eighteen. Health excellent.” His fingers tap the woman’s neck. She flinches, then catches herself. The bidders start before he’s finished listing her blood type.

The gavel cracks. A clerk bends over a ledger, and the handler leads her away. The next lot is already on the steps. Eva watches the change in the buyers’ faces as interest finds a new place to settle. One turns aside to refill his glass while a pair of twins is brought forward together. She looks at the clerk’s table instead. Papers, blood markers, seals. Everything that makes this look respectable when someone puts it in writing.

“Seven through twelve, and Seventeen.” The matron touches Eva’s shoulder. “Premium lots go when they’re called. Keep up.”

The handler clips her collar and gives the chain a small pull. Its weight drags against the front of her throat as she steps onto the marble aisle. She keeps her gaze low enough to see the buyers’ hands. Rings, gloves, the slow opening of a fan. A man near the front rests his cup against his knee, holding it steady as though her passage is nothing worth interrupting his drink for.

They wait beside the platform while the next lots are sold. The auctioneer’s voice is painfully loud from here. He squeezes a man’s upper arm to show its strength, earning a brisk round of bids. Eva draws air through her nose and lets it out carefully. There’s nowhere to put her hands but at her sides.

When Lot Twelve leaves the platform, the matron says her number. Eva climbs the steps before the handler can pull her. Boards creak under her bare feet. A tattered banner hangs behind the clerk’s table, and she fixes on a loose thread at its edge while the auctioneer takes her chain.

“Now, here’s something worth waking up for.” He brings her forward with an easy tug. “One year. Twenty-four. B positive. Never tasted by fang. Never touched in any serious way.” His chuckle invites the audience to share the joke. “High pain tolerance recorded in earlier trials. Contract guaranteed.”

Eva holds the banner in her gaze. The clerk who examined her bruises called them earlier trials as well. As if living in the lower city had been a test she’d taken for his convenience.

“Look how she stands.” The auctioneer turns her slowly. The slip pulls across her hip, damp cloth dragging against skin. “Stubbornness like that can be worth a great deal to the right House.”

A bid comes from her left. Another follows from farther back. The numbers climb while he guides the room with his smile, coaxing reluctant hands upward. Eva counts without wanting to. Every increase is an amount she’d never earn carrying crates, scrubbing tavern floors, taking the shifts nobody else wants. None of it goes to her. Somewhere after this, someone will stamp Liam’s ledger paid and send him home.

“Seven thousand,” the auctioneer announces. “Do I hear eight?” He lets the question hang while the clerk watches him over an uncapped pen. “A one-year term, ladies and gentlemen. You won’t find another like her today.”

The bids slow. Eva’s gaze slips from the banner to the front pews, almost against her will. She means to look at a buyer’s shoes, something ordinary she can remember when this is over. Instead she sees a pair of hands clenched between two knees. The right index finger bends slightly where it broke in a street fight and never healed straight.

Liam sits at the end of a pew in the jacket she washed. It still doesn’t fit his shoulders. His hair’s combed back, and there’s a clean patch on his cheek where he missed a bit of soot scrubbing himself. He’s looking toward the clerk’s table, jaw working as though there’s something in his mouth he can’t swallow.

She stares hard enough that he ought to feel it. He doesn’t turn. No guards stand beside him. No chain fixes him to anything. His borrowed shoes rest on the marble, and he can get up whenever he likes.

The relief of seeing him alive hits first. Anger follows so quickly she can’t separate them. Eva drags her gaze back to the banner, afraid she’ll say his name if she keeps looking. Apparently the clerk’s figures are easier to watch than her face.

“Seven at the back.” The auctioneer lifts the gavel a little. “Going once at seven.” His smile widens, giving the room another chance to amuse itself at her expense. “No one else?”

Eva presses her fingertips against the seams of her slip. Liam shifts in the corner of her vision. She refuses to look again, even when the pew creaks under him.

The auctioneer’s hand rises higher. Whoever made the seven-thousand bid is about to become the person she has to follow out of this room, and she still hasn’t seen his face.