Outlaw's Promise(9)

Hay had said there would be thirty coming but there were closer to eighty men. They filled the whole room aside from the small stage. At least ten Blood Spiders were there to keep the crowd in line but that didn’t keep them quiet. The noise was deafening: cheering and baying and stamping, all of it directed at me.

They were calling me every obscene name under the sun, already dissecting my body, my face, my red hair. It was almost a relief that they were all yelling at once because some of it was drowned out and—

“Good tits!”

—I could—

“She a natural redhead?”

—just hear—

“She take it up the—”

—fragments. I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to block it out, and felt myself dragged up onto the stage. Hay must have raised his hand for silence because the crowd went quiet.

“You know why you’re here,” he told them. “You know the consequences if you go running your mouth off. Let’s get down to business.” He pulled out a stopwatch. “Each of you gets sixty seconds to look her over. Ask what you want, but no touching until you buy her.”

Buy her. Jesus, this is real. I opened my eyes.

The first guy who came up on stage had intricately-shaved stubble and a gold chain around his neck: a pimp? A gang leader? He moved so close that I could feel his body heat. I tried to back up, only to find the blond biker’s hand on my back.

The guy began to walk around me. I could feel his eyes on my hips, my ass, my legs. He moved my long red hair out of the way to inspect my neck—apparently, that was allowed—and I felt the warmth of his breath on the sensitive skin there. Then he came around to the front and gazed for a long time at my breasts. I felt like an insect under a microscope. I wanted to run away and hide, wanted to scream at him to stop looking! But the blond biker was right there behind me, ready to discipline me. All I could do was stand there submissively and watch the bulge in the guy’s pants swell as he imagined what he was going to do to me when he owned me.

“Time,” said Hay, clicking the stopwatch.

I was shaking. I wanted to throw up. And that was only one man.

The next man wore a suit and pushed his glasses up his nose as he threw questions at me. Was I a virgin? No. Did I have any diseases? No. Had I ever had a baby? No.

The third man I was sure I recognized. He was in his fifties, with sandy-blond hair, and the too-tight shirt collar was familiar. My stomach twisted. One of my teachers, from high school? God, please no.

He grinned at me. He wouldn’t stop grinning, whether he was looking down my dress or looking down the length of my back to my ass. That’s when I remembered where I’d seen him: at a town meeting, fielding questions from reporters with a laugh and a wink.

He was Teston’s chief of police. My heart sank: now there was no hope at all.

It went on and on. Some tried to touch me: the bikers yelled at them or threw them off the stage. When a man grabbed my breasts for the fifth time, the blond biker broke his fingers as an example to the others, and after that it mostly stopped.

There were loud ones and quiet ones. The loud ones weren’t so different to the over-aggressive guys who yell at women in bars, the guys who sometimes won’t take no for an answer.

The quiet ones were terrifying. I could feel the wrongness radiating off them. They’d lick their lips and look at me with a mixture of lust and absolute hate, as if I was responsible for every woman who’d ever belittled them. These were the guys you read about in newspapers, who keep a woman locked up in their cellar for years.#p#分页标题#e#

There was a third type. Just two guys out of the eighty or so, one in his twenties and one in his fifties. They looked embarrassed to be there and, when it neared their turn, they looked up at me with expressions that were almost shy.

It’s funny how your perspective changes, when you’re really, really scared. As each of those two guys examined me, I found myself smiling at them. When the second one accidentally touched me as he craned around me to look at my ass, he apologized and I said quickly, “It’s okay.”

Then I caught myself. What?! No it’s not! What am I doing?

And that’s when I realized I wanted to be bought by one of them. I was actually being nice to them, just because they were better than the alternative. I wanted to throw up. After just a half hour on stage, I was so scared that I was practically selling myself.

At that moment, two men in suits with identical, close-cropped hair walked in and climbed up onto the stage, ignoring the waiting line. “Volos is outside,” said one of them.

The crowd went deathly silent. I saw my step-dad take a long, shuddering breath. Even Hay went pale and stepped back out of the way. Whoever this Volos guy was, everyone was petrified of him.