Velvet Hunger

The first touch is cold water.

It hits the back of her neck in a hard, unbroken stream, racing down her spine and carving a path through the grime on her skin. Eva flinches, fingers flexing against the rim of the tin basin, but she doesn’t pull away. The matron behind her clicks her tongue once, a small sound of approval or impatience. Hard to tell.

“Hold still,” the woman says. “They don’t like bruises.”

The water smells faintly of iron and old stone. The washroom sits where the cathedral’s sacristy used to be. Someone told her that while they were herding the lots in earlier. As if that mattered. The high arched ceiling is still there, silvered with damp. The pillars are still carved with saints who have long since lost their faces to soot and fingerprints.

Now the saints watch naked bodies being scrubbed for market.

Hands move over Eva’s shoulders with brisk efficiency. A rough cloth. Fingers digging into the hollow of her collarbone, the dip at her throat. The water bites with chill and cheap soap. The matron pushes her head forward and rakes nails along her scalp, washing her hair like she’s dealing with a child who doesn’t know how to bathe.

At the next basin, someone is crying. Wet, hiccuping sounds, like a kettle that won’t settle. Eva keeps her eyes on the cracked tiles at her feet and listens to the way the matron’s breathing changes when she works. Quiet when she’s focused. Sharp and irritated when someone jerks or resists.

“Teeth,” the matron says.

Eva opens her mouth. A younger attendant steps in, face pale beneath a scattering of freckles, and pries her lips wider with two fingers. She smells of starch and fear. Eva stares at the girl’s lashes, sticking together from the steam, and tries not to think about what they’re looking for.

“Good enamel,” the younger one says, like she’s reciting a lesson. “No visible decay.”

The matron grunts. “Of course not. This one sold as premium.”

Eva closes her mouth around the sour taste of metal and soap. Premium. The word sits like a stone in her stomach.

They move on to her arms, her hands, each finger drawn out and inspected. Nails trimmed blunt with little clacks of metal. The girl notes something down on a slate. Contract number. Lot number. Any scars. Eva wonders if they’re writing down the faint curved mark low on her ribs, the one from when she fell off the roof as a child playing guardian and thief with Liam.

She inhales slowly and lets the memory pass. This room doesn’t allow memories. Only measurements.

“Turn,” the matron says.

Eva turns. Gooseflesh crawls up her bare back as air hits wet skin. She looks straight ahead, past the matron’s shoulder, to where the saints once stood in carved stone relief. Their faces are gone, featureless ovals now. It’s easier to look at that than the other girls on the benches, knees pulled to their chests or hands clasped in sticky prayers.

The matron crouches, fingers sliding over the planes of Eva’s thighs, the muscles at the backs of her knees. Evaluating. For a moment, Eva feels less like a woman and more like cuts of meat. Shoulder. Flank. Loin.

“Too thin,” someone mutters behind her. A male voice this time. One of the clerks. “But the numbers are good. She’ll fetch plenty.”

Heat prickles under her skin. Not modesty. Fury.

If she speaks, she knows what will happen. The matron’s hand will land, flat and punishing, and the clerk will laugh. So she tightens her jaw instead and tastes the sourness of her own breath.

“Veins,” the younger attendant says, sounding a little more confident now.

They take her arm and turn it palm up. The clerk steps closer and presses two fingers to the inside of her elbow. She watches his gaze follow the blue lines under her skin, then flick to his ledger.

“Healthy pulse,” he says. “Good pressure. Good color. Type B positive. No history of fever disease recorded.”

“Selling term,” the matron adds. “One year.”

A different clerk, this one further down the row, laughs.

“Assuming she lasts that long.”

More laughter. Soft, mean. It rolls over Eva like dirty water. She keeps her eyes on the saintless wall and imagines one still has a face. Imagines its eyes are open and fixed on Liam. Alive. Breathing.

Cheap way to comfort herself, maybe, but it works. She’s good at that. At finding a thought that holds and squeezing it until everything else blurs.

Liam is why you are here. Not them. Not the ledger.

The water turns pink around her ankles where soap and old cuts run together. The matron stands and reaches for a towel.

“Dry,” she says. “Then dress.”

The towel is rough. Eva takes it and works quickly, because the sooner she’s done the sooner the matron will move on and stop seeing her. She drags the fabric over her arms, her breasts, her stomach, her legs, until her skin stings and looks falsely healthy.

A bundle lands on the bench beside her. Thin white cloth. Folded neatly.

Eva unfolds it. It’s a slip, nothing more, the kind meant to cling when damp and leave nothing to the imagination. No sleeves. Barely a suggestion of a neckline.

The matron follows her gaze.

“They’re bidding on blood, not fashion,” she says. “Put it on.”

Eva steps into the slip. The fabric whispers up her thighs, cool and insubstantial. It smells of lye and the faint copper tang that never quite leaves things in this place. When she pulls it over her shoulders, it falls to mid calf. Modest, if she doesn’t move. Indecent the moment she walks.

She can feel the other girls watching. Some with curiosity. Some with envy.

“Lucky she has shape,” one of them whispers. “They like that. I look like a stick. They’ll think I’m diseased.”

“Sick cattle are cheap,” another answers. Her voice shakes. “At least you’ll go.”

Eva focuses on the simple task of smoothing the fabric, of tucking wet hair behind her ears. She could tell them there’s nothing lucky about this. That being “premium” just means a fancier collar. A nicer chain. Instead, she bites her tongue and keeps that truth for herself.

As if summoned by the thought, the matron holds up a band of dark metal. The inside catches the light. Smooth and polished. The outside is ridged, stamped with tiny engraved sigils that mark ownership and date.

Collar, she thinks. Not necklace. Collars lock.

“Chin up,” the matron says.

Eva lifts her chin. The metal touches the back of her neck, cold enough that her shoulders twitch. The matron wraps it around, snug but not choking, then feeds one end into the other. There’s a click, small and final, as the mechanism engages. Eva feels the sound in her teeth more than hears it.

The younger attendant steps in again and runs a finger along the seam, checking for gaps. Checking security.

“Lot seventeen,” she recites. “Eva Hart. Term of service, twelve months. Contract number eighty one nine.”

The clerk answers without looking up from his slate. “Lot seventeen. Recorded.”

The name echoes strangely in the old stone room. Lot seventeen. Not Eva. Not Miss Hart. A number with a voice.

The matron adjusts the collar once more, then steps back and looks her over with the flat eyes of someone who’s done this too often to feel anything about it.

“Stand with the others,” she says. “You’re almost pretty. Don’t slouch.”

Almost pretty. Eva files that away alongside premium and healthy enamel. Whatever. The numbers are what matter. Numbers are what bought Liam another year of bad decisions.

She moves to the line by the far wall, where a dozen other collared bodies already stand. Some shift from foot to foot. Some stare at nothing. One girl keeps whispering the same phrase under her breath, a prayer or a bargain. The words are too soft to catch.

The air in here is warmer than the main hall. Closer. Smelling of steam and bodies and the bitter tang of cheap soap. Up above, the vaulted ceiling fades into shadow, the old ribs of the architecture vanishing into gloom.

Eva fixes her gaze on the great double doors at the front of the room. They’re tall and heavy, carved with saints and sigils, and the cracks between them glow faintly with colored light from the hall beyond.

Beyond those doors, the buyers are gathering.

She hears them before she feels them. Laughter, low and rich. The distant clink of glass. The scrape of chairs. The faint clatter of coin changing hands. Vampires always sound relaxed before they feed, in her experience. The same way men back at the docks used to sound before a fight they knew they’d win.

The matron walks down the line, tugging slips straight, nudging ankles closer together.

“Hands at your sides,” she reminds them. “Chin up. Eyes down unless told otherwise. Don’t speak. Don’t faint. They don’t pay extra for dramatics.”

Someone snorts. Eva doesn’t look to see who. If she looks, she might start talking, and then it’ll all tumble out. The anger. The fear. The words she never said to Liam when he shoved his crumpled debt notice into her hands and said please, please, please.

A bell rings.

The sound shivers through the stone and into her bones. Not the clear church bells of old, but a heavier, uglier clang. The kind used on docks at shift change. On prison carts. In slaughterhouses.

The matron straightens, her own shoulders squaring as if she’s going on stage too.

“That’s our cue,” she says. “Remember, breathe.”

The clerk unlatches the great doors. They creak open by slow degrees. Light spills in, rich and stained and full of motion.

The floor begins to vibrate under Eva’s bare feet as the crowd beyond rises to its feet, and the first taste of their voices floods through the opening.