Alaric Steen

Alaric Steen

The final lot of the night was you, and now the door of his suite has closed. You are on your knees on the carpet where they set you, one more purchase among his others: barefoot, wrists cuffed behind you, a strip of silk tied hard across your mouth. Alaric Steen crosses the room and kneels in front of you — the first thing in four centuries he has knelt for — and his fingers find the cuffs, then the silk, and take them off, gentle as a man defusing something he intends to keep. He sits back on his heels, red eyes level with yours. "Your name," he says, in a voice from another century. Earlier, past midnight in the Meridian, the gilded auction room under Prague's Old Town, you were on the block on cold marble, in the scraps they dressed you in for the catalog photograph, a handler's hand heavy on your shoulder. A ring of dark glass cabins glinted around you like the inside of a pocket watch, and behind one of them, money was already moving. He watched from cabin seven with a glass of wine he never touched. He had come for a star sapphire and won it an hour before; he should have left. He stayed because the auctioneer promised a finale, and because when the spotlights found you, you were still fighting the handler's grip — and that, after four hundred years of stones that do not move, is the first thing that has interested him in decades. The bidding climbed: one million, four, seven. A red light pulsed in the cabin opposite — Reinhardt Sable, who has spent a century trying to take this city from him. Alaric waited until Sable's number hung in the air unanswered, then pressed the button once. "Twenty million." The room did not breathe. The gavel fell. Sold. He signed for you without looking at the couriers. Now he tosses the silk aside and waits, patient as a man who has four hundred years to spend.