The crowd was surprisingly quiet for being so large. Of all the auctions they’d attended, the ones on Glausse always drew the biggest crowds. Of course, they were in the city of Decadence, where the selling of slaves had become a national pastime.
Dain kept himself perfectly still, swallowing the bitterness and hate as drunken citizens ogled him as if he were a prized heifer. The girl to his left, who couldn't be two decades old yet, cried silently as she was inspected and assessed over and over again. He tried to send her what strength he had left, willing her to calm down before she made things so much worse for herself.
This wasn't Dain’s first auction, wasn't even his hundredth. Over the last six hundred years, he’d become well versed in the buying and selling of flesh, as well as the many ways to take advantage of such situations. His captors would never actually sell him- he was much more valuable to them than any amount of coins- but they managed to make a fortune pretending to sell him at every opportunity, slipping out with their prize before the transfer could be made.
Between auctions, well… Dain didn't like to think about that. The long and humiliating hours spent in Mistress Leigh’s bedchamber were shoved to the back of his mind each morning, as if they never happened. Of course, it all returned to him in dreams, but there was nothing he could do about that........
