Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 03

Rejected, Reborn, and Ruthless: A Lunas Revenge Chapter 03 — Nine
The auction floor smelled like blood, bleach, and old fear.

They kept him last, the way you keep the thing nobody’s going to bid on.

“Lot Nine,” the handler droned. “Rogue. Unclaimed. Eight years in the cages, sixty-one kills, zero submissions. Silver collar stays on. Buyer assumes all liability.”

They rolled the cage out and the crowd went quiet.

He was on his knees because the chains made it impossible to be anything else — wrists spread, collar bolted to the floor, silver burning a raw black ring into his throat. Filthy. Starving. Scarred from shoulder to hip.

And still, when he lifted his head, half the room took a step back.

Dark hair. Sharp, brutal, beautiful bones. And eyes like a storm rolling in — grey and pale and absolutely without fear.

He looked out at all of us the way a wolf looks at sheep it hasn’t decided to bother eating yet.

“Opening at fifty thousand,” the handler said. “Do I hear fifty—”

“One point eight million,” I said.

Every head in the room turned.

The handler dropped his gavel. “Ma’am—”

“One point eight million. Cash tonight. Half now, the rest inside seven days.” I walked to the front, heels clicking, my dead grandmother’s ring cold on my finger. “Or I walk out and you can keep feeding him.”

Someone in the back laughed nervously. Nobody bid against me.

Nobody ever bids against crazy.

They made me sign four separate liability waivers. The handler kept saying you understand he’ll kill you, and I kept saying yes, and eventually greed beat sense the way it always does.

Then they left me alone in the loading bay with him.

Just me. Him. And the chains.

He watched me come. He didn’t move. Up close, he was even worse — or better. The silver had eaten so deep into his throat I could see where it had scarred and re-scarred over years.

“They said you don’t speak,” I said.

“They say a lot of things.” His voice was low, wrecked, and it went through me like a hand on the back of my neck. “Why did you buy me?”

“Because I need a monster.”

Something flickered in those grey eyes. Not offense. Recognition.

“And what does a woman like you need a monster for?”

“There’s a war coming,” I said. “In three hundred and forty-one days, the fog comes down over the northern wall, and everyone I love dies. I’m going to stop it. I can’t do it alone, and I can’t do it with cowards.”

He was silent for a long moment.

“You’re not lying,” he said slowly. “I can hear a lie. You’re not lying.”

“No.”

“Then you’re mad.”

“Probably.” I crouched down in front of him, close enough that he could have taken my throat out with his teeth if he’d wanted to. “Here are my terms. I’ll pay off your contract. I’ll burn your papers. In seven days you’re free — genuinely free, no bond, no oath, no leash. You can walk into the woods and never look back and I won’t hunt you.”

His jaw worked. “And in exchange?”

“Seven days. Hear me out. If you still want to go, go.”

“Why would you gamble that much money on seven days?”

“Because I know what you become,” I said quietly.

I reached out and put two fingers against the silver collar.

I don’t know why I did it. Some instinct, some pull, some thing under my ribs that had been humming since the moment I woke up alive.

The metal went white-hot beneath my hand — and then, with a sound like ice cracking on a lake, the collar simply fell open.

Eight years of forged silver, dropping to the concrete in two clean halves.

I stared at my own hand.

He stared at me.

And then Nine surged up off his knees so fast I didn’t even see him move — one hand braced on the wall beside my head, close, huge, and dangerous, breathing me in like a man surfacing from deep water.

“Wren,” he rasped.

I froze.

I had never told him my name.

“How—” My voice cracked. “How do you know that?”

His grey eyes searched my face, and what I saw in them wasn’t hunger, or hate.

It was grief.

“Because I’ve watched you die,” he said, “every single night for a year.”