Chapter 1
Lyra’s POV
I don’t like smoking. I don’t like when men smoke. But I had this rich brat puff a smoke right in my face. It smells disgusting but there is this specific smell that hung with it—him. Charcoal, blood and mint.
I want to reach out and… do what Lyra? You can’t do anything.I turn my head downwards, looking at the flat wooden ground, trying to act like it didn’t affect me, trying to act like the doll I was supposed to be, like the doll I was trained to be.
I take a breath in, the smoke is still in the air. The blood still irks me but the mint, the mint is different. I stand in line with fifty other women dressed in maid outfits. I am the seventeenth, and when he reached where I stood, he just had the nice idea to blow his smoke on me specifically.
He dropped his cigarette on the ground, it’s between our feet now. The particles scattered in a triangular shape. He stands in front of me, stays in front of me longer than he does with every woman before me.
He’s meant to move forward. He’s meant to see the rest of the women, then choose whoever he sees fit. But he turns back and walks away. The manager walks faster to get to him. Chasing after him. “Three, eleven and seventeen,” the man said with this cold cadence.
Seventeen.
I was seventeen.
The billionaire, who I don’t know the name of, leaves the room, then the building. I huff out and hear the car drives off.
I look around but look back down again. I am not meant to be in the room, I am not meant to be part of the fifty women in the room. Maybe, two months ago I was, because that was when I was assigned my mission here, but I should be done.
I stand in line with fifty other woman, chosen from them, knowing I shouldn’t have been, knowing that I should be on break. Knowing that I should be with my younger sister.
I have lost any and all forms of communication with my branch, and if I blow my cover here… let’s just say the manager is only sweet to billionaires.
The manager walks back into the room with a frown plastered across his face, I’m not looking up to see it, nor is any other woman, they know better, they’re used to him.
“Three, eleven and seventeen,” the manager says. His eyes loomed over each of them, from three to eleven to seventeen and when he reached seventeen, they landed on me, they stayed on me.
“There’s a van out,” he says. “Get out of here and get inside it. Now.”
The “now” echoes around us. Three and eleven hurdle out. Their footsteps rash and brazzle, I take another breath in and I follow after.
The stairs are perfectly sharp on each edge, the girls move down like its their wedding day. But as I step down I think about what escape I can follow. I think about running away, but I don’t have any back up or way to communicate.
The manager will find me, and when he does, I’ll probably regret my existence. I’ll probably regret coming on this mission. The girls get out of the building and I’m just behind them.
I see the van outside and it’s plain white. I would’ve imagined it being full white but there were a few areas on it that had been off white.
The door slids open, there’s this man in front. And from his blueish overall I can tell he’s the driver.
“Get in,” he says with his voice low, gruff. I still turn my head to see if I could try running away, we’re in broad daylight, I should be able to dissolve into the crowd. But these people were more skilled than the average people I investigated under.
The girls stand in front, then they climb into the van one at a time. The driver looks at me, then looks into the van. I walk forward, climbing into the van after them.
There were sits opposite each other, not luxurios but not throwaway quality either. I sit on the sit opposite both girls, and the man who I belive is the driver shuts the door.
The girls sit on the chairs with their hands on their lap. They sit the way they had been taught to. They way I remember them being taught.
The door in front shuts and I know the driver is in his seat. He turns the engine on and the van starts moving.
I look at both of the girls who sat in front of me. I’ve never had a conversation with either of them, but that isn’t because I don’t want to. The manager made sure to give us all different tasks.
Tasks that made us not relate with each other, like toys picked out to do anything but relate with each other.
I look at them, and it is weird to think about being bought with two women I don’t know personally. Two women who I should be saving, but I’m being sold with.
“Three” was Clara. She is nineteen, she has brown hair, along with these brown eyes, a defined jaw along with plump lips.
“Eleven” was called Adora. She was eighteen, she has this black long silky hair, striking blue eyes, slightly more round face than Clara and some stark lips. She held my attention. Adora.
The women in this organization aren’t necessarily “women.” Most are girls who grew and are sold off after. I tried to get into the girls branch but I was already twenty-one and I look nothing like an eighteen year old. Least of all a sixteen or twelve year old.
Both Clara and Adora stay quiet as the van hits brakes, turns sideways, and drives over pot holes. They don’t say anything till it’s driving up a hill. They don’t say anything till it reaches stark coated gates.
The van stops and the gates open. I feel the van go uphill, I know we’ve gotten to wherever we need to.
There’s a whole lot of empty sapce, there’s a mine field of grass, and when we finally reach the front of the mansion, it’s bigger than I expected.
I haven’t heard of this place. I haven’t seen it anywhere before, and I’m not quite sure how we got here.
The driver gets out of his seat and comes to open the van. His face is exactly the same as before, it has this feel of annoyance. “Get out,” he says.
I get off my seat and get out of the van first, both Clara and Adora follow behind me. The driver gets back into the van, turns the van on, reverses and drives off.
There’s another woman in front of us. The van hid her but after it left, I see her standing there like she was waiting for us to get here.
“Ladies,” she started. “Follow me in.”
She is wearing a maid uniform, similar in form to ours. Black and white in proportionate areas.
We walk into the mansion, following her in then she says, “We’re currently short on staff. Mr. Adrick recently had a purge.”
“A purge?” I ask, since silence has become their best friend.
“Yes,” the woman said. “We had a staff of 156 people.”
“Women?” I ask again. What does one use 156 women to do?
The woman looks at me like I wasn’t meant to ask that. “Yes,” she said. “They all had their roles.”
Oh. So Mr. Billionaire, Adrick as the woman called him, looked like a whore.
“What roles?” I ask again. “We can’t handle the roles of 156 people.”
“The daily roster has been added to facilitate better organization of roles.” I nod to that. She walks us around, showing un the mansion. The kitchen, mostly because there were a lot of “restricted areas.”
I want to ask the woman why we were “bought”. Around the house had a lot of relics, a lot of fragile glass and with the amount of all I’ve seen, and heard apparently, I know Adrick is something else.
And maybe, just maybe if I discover who he is and why he is part of my manager’s clients, I’ll be able to get a loop hole and enough information to be able to retreat.
I stand in the mansion of a man I have never heard of as an option between two other women. We are the replacement to 156 women and I just can’t help but wonder what happened to them.
I just can’t help but wonder who Mr. Adrick really is.
