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relationships. Not as long as Dylan McAlister is still alive.
    But by this time, after four years of Lucien’s training, I’m skilled at lying. “I’d really like that,” I say. That part isn’t a lie. What follows is. “Let me give you my phone number?” I reel off a number to him, and he punches it into his cell phone and dials. The phone in my pocket rings, and I smile at him.
    “Now you have my number too,” he says in explanation.
    He kisses me goodbye. I let him. I stand and watch him drive off and then, I pull out the cheap burner phone, remove the SIM card and toss it in the trash. A swift twist of my hands, and the flip phone breaks into two. I toss each part of the phone in two different trash cans on my way back to Lucien.
    I’ll never see Marc last-name-unknown again. I tell myself it is for the best.
    ***
    “Are you listening to me, Jenny?” Madame Lorraine gave me a strange look and I realized I was zoning out on her again. I shook myself internally. I had to keep my head in the game. Truth be told, though I put a bold face on it for Lucien, I was petrified at the idea of this auction. I’d sworn I was done being someone’s sex slave. Yet this was the only way to get to Dylan.
    This auction is for consensual sexual submissives, I reminded myself in an effort to keep my fear at bay. This will be nothing like what Dylan McAllister did to you. But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? I couldn’t know. After all, Alexander Hamilton was an associate of Dylan’s. Perhaps he too got his thrills from kidnapping and raping women.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. I pasted a thoroughly fake, yet convincingly worried smile on my face. “I was just thinking about my sister.” Again, this excuse worked on Madame Lorraine, as I knew it would. After all, this entire elaborate auction she ran was her way of dealing with what had been done to her own sister so many years ago.
    She was far more idealistic than I was. I wondered if she really believed that if there were enough consensual slave auctions, men wouldn’t need to kidnap young girls from their homes and torture and rape them. Me, I was more cynical. I’d seen the dark side up close and it wasn’t something you forgot.
    I’d zoned out again. I took the address she gave me and I promised to be there at ten in the morning.
    ***
    In keeping with my cover story of someone who was watching every penny, I was staying at a cheap hostel on Khao San Road. Lucien, always cautious that someone might be watching our every move, was staying at a different hostel a few doors away from mine. I called him from a burner phone when I reached my room.
    “Well?” he asked me.
    “What?”
    “Are you all set? Are you ready?”
    For a few seconds, I wondered if Lucien actually cared. If I told him how afraid I was that I was about to be trapped again, would he tell me not to worry? Would he hold me and promise to find another way to get to Dylan? Would he assure me that everything would be okay?
    But I wasn’t naïve and I had no ability to delude myself.
    We all had ghosts in our pasts. Like Madame Lorraine, Lucien had a sister to avenge. Claire. She’d been taken the same way I’d been taken, abducted from a crowded parking lot by Dylan McAllister’s henchmen. She had been sixteen though, too young for what had happened to her. In keeping with the pattern, two years after her abduction, Dylan lost interest in her and sold her to a brothel in Saudi Arabia.
    She had killed herself the first chance she got and Lucien was forever haunted by her memory and his abject failure to save her.
    Lucien would never rest as long as Dylan was alive. He would never give up. This was why we’d made common cause, why he’d taken me and trained me so that I would be able to kill with the same fluid ease as he did. Because his thirst for revenge was matched only by mine. I burned with a need to make sure that Dylan McAllister suffered for what he put me through. A flaming compulsion to