© WebNovel
On the night of his eighteenth birthday Chase Greene got snatched off the streets on his way home. He’d gone out with friends to celebrate with a movie and dinner downtown at his favorite place.
He hadn't seen his captors, they’d come up behind him and covered his mouth and nose with a rag and everything had gone dark.
When he’d woken up in a cage in a dark room, cold and scared. Looking around he saw other cages with other people in them. He crawled over to the bars of his cage, looking into the next that held a young woman.
“Hey,” he whispered, hoping to get her attention. Her head snapped up as she looked at him and he gave her a weak smile. “Where are we?”
The woman shook her head, eyes wide with fright. “They’ll get mad,” she said, voice wobbling.
Chase frowned, looking around again. “There’s no one here,” he scowled. “What is this place?”
The woman looked around quickly and crawled towards him, grabbing the bars of her cage. “They call it the warehouse. It's where they put us before they sell us.”
Chase blinked at her. “Sell us?”
The woman opened her mouth to respond but snapped it shut when the sound of a key unlocking a door filled the silence. She scrambled away from Chase and curled into herself in the corner of her cage.
Chase looked around as heavy footsteps sounded, descending stairs he couldn't see and coming closer.
Then a large man came into view, just barely visible in the dim lighting. He looked over at Chase and grinned, his teeth crooked and missing. “You’ll fetch a pretty penny,” he drawled, coming closer.
He reeked of alcohol and cigar smoke. The man nodded to himself and Chase’s stomach filled with dread.
“You can't do this,” he said weakly; the man raised an eyebrow at him and snorted. Chase scowled at him. “Just let me go, I won't tell anyone.”
The man snorted again. “We both know you're lying,” he sneered, kicking the cage with his foot. “Now hush up or I’ll make you.”
Chase didn't want to find out how so he closed his mouth and sat back against the cage bars farthest from the disgusting man. He watched him walk over to inspect the other cages.
When he was satisfied with whatever he was doing he left the same way he came and Chase looked around a bit more, trying to find a way to escape.
After a while of searching, he gave up, falling back against the wall of the cage again. He slid down to lay on the floor, staring up at the ceiling in defeat. He heard shuffling from the side where the young woman was being contained.
Chase turned to look at her, energy drained. The woman just watched him for a second before reaching through the bars, her hand balled into a fist.
Chase looked at her fist for a second before looking up at her. She just blinked at him expectantly, prompting him to hesitantly sit up and crawl over to her.
She turned her fist over and opened her hand to reveal a palm-sized stone. Chase looked at it for a second before giving her a weird look.
She smiled slightly. “It's a worry stone,” she explained. “You’ll need it when you meet your masters and whenever they decide to sell you again.”
Chase frowned at that but accepted the stone, holding it in his palm to look at it. It was a simple black stone with a dip in the middle. Chase looked up at the woman and held the stone close. “What’s your name?” he asked hesitantly.
“Kara,” she said, shuffling back into her cage. “My name is Kara.”
Chase nodded at her, slipping the stone into his pocket. “I’m Chase.”
***
Chase woke abruptly to the sound of his cage’s door scraping open, the shriek of metal against stone grating to his ears. He looked around quickly, disoriented. “What’s…?”
“Grab him,” someone said just moments before two rough hands grabbed him and pulled him up. He was shoved forward forcefully and he almost fell which prompted those rough hands to grab his arm tight.
He blinked a few times as his vision came into focus and he saw the man holding his arm as well as the man who’d spoken and there was someone else in the shadows. The speaker was dressed rather fancily and the man holding his arm looked like a bouncer.
Chase wanted to say something but the man in the shadows stepped forward with a roll of duct tape, rope, and a cloth.
The shadow man handed the rope to the bouncer as he rolled out a strip of the silver tape and stepped forward to grab Chase’s head and tape his mouth. His wrists were quickly bound and the cloth was wrapped over his eyes so he couldn't see.
He was manhandled a bit more before being shoved forward again, being blindly led around.
He didn't know where he was or where he was headed until they stopped moving and he was shoved down on his knees. Feedback from a microphone filled the silence followed by murmurs that he couldn't make out.
“A fine specimen,” he heard the earlier speaker say. “This one’s young and mouldable. Let's start the bidding at one thousand dollars, do I hear fifteen hundred?”
Chase listened helplessly as the man auctioned him off, his stomach plummeting deeper and deeper with every addition to the price. If he cried a little no one had to know, the blindfold would soak up his tears anyway.
By the end of the auction, the price was nearly thirty thousand and Chase had started dissociating. He felt like he was floating as he was pulled up into a standing position and led off of what he could only assume was a stage.
He stumbled forward with the bouncer’s rough hand on his arm again, leading him away to be collected by his buyer.