They didn't say my name.
They never do, not for girls like me.
They just pulled me off the wall.
Rough hands. Gloves like sandpaper. One gripping my arm, the other pressing between my shoulder blades until I stumbled forward, breath catching on nothing. My feet dragged across the floor, stubbing into uneven concrete, but I didn't ask questions.
There's no point asking.
In Section 9, you get used to silence answering everything.
We passed at least three rows of girls. I could hear them breathing — shallow, shaking — the way prey breathes when the shadow falls over them, but I couldn't tell if they were afraid for me or relieved it wasn't them.
Maybe both.
They didn't take me to the testing rooms.
Didn't turn toward the med wing either.
No buzzing lights. No metal tables. No restraints.
Instead, they took me through a set of doors that hissed open on their own. I could smell soap before I felt water. Not the usual raw bleach and iron. This was... floral. Chemical sweetness masking something rotten.
And then I was stripped.
They didn't explain. Didn't warn me.
Just tore the uniform from my body, yanked my hair loose, and shoved me beneath a torrent of water so cold I gasped and bit down on my own tongue.
Someone laughed.
"You'd think they'd be used to this by now," a woman muttered.
"She's blind. Maybe she thought it was rain," another replied.
Their voices echoed in the tiled room. I counted at least four sets of boots. None moved gently.
They scrubbed my skin until it burned. Washed places that hadn't seen soap in months, maybe years. Pulled my hair so tight I could feel the follicles scream. I stood still, fists clenched, pretending I was somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere where being clean didn't mean being claimed.
I knew what this was.
I'd heard the other girls whisper about it.
"The red rooms," they called it. "The packaging floor."
It's what happens before they send you to the vampire who will own you.
I thought it was just a rumor. A story to make our reality sound less like a cage and more like a funnel — narrowing down toward one singular monster.
Apparently, it was real.
They dried me roughly. Hands slapping across skin, not bothering with modesty because that's not something they think we're allowed to keep. Then they dressed me in something soft and thick — satin, I think. Too expensive for my skin. The weight of it felt wrong.
Wrong because it meant something.
Girls like me don't get fabric like this unless we're being delivered.
One of them tugged a comb through my hair again. Another placed something cold around my wrist — a metal band that clicked into place and hummed softly.
A tracker.
A tag.
A label.
"Careful," one of them murmured. "This one's marked. Sovereign's seal came through ten minutes ago. Direct transfer."
"She's blind," someone else said, like it excused something.
"She's his now."
I didn't ask who he was.
I knew.
The Sovereign.
The monster in velvet.
The king who didn't bleed. The voice at the top of the chain. The nightmare the other nightmares bowed to.
And now I was boxed and bathed and gift-wrapped for him.
Like meat on a silver platter.
They placed me in something like a pod — cushioned inside, humming faintly beneath me. I felt the jolt as it lifted from the floor. An air transport. Not meant for someone like me. Not for a defective. Not for a blind girl with nothing but bones and silence to her name.
There was no goodbye.
No explanation.
Just the sound of a seal locking shut.
And then I was airborne.
Alone. Wrapped in someone else's silence. Heading toward a place I don't think people come back from.
I pressed my hand to the inside of the pod.
It didn't matter that I couldn't see where I was going.
I could feel it in my spine.
Wherever he was — whoever he was — he'd just made the first move.
And I… I was already too far from home to run.