Auctioned While Pregnant: 99 Nights Of My Husband’s Betrayal Chapter 03
“God, the way he spoils her. My teeth hurt just watching.”
“God, if I were a woman I’d marry him on the spot.”
Claire buried her face in Julian’s chest, giggling. “Stop it, you’re embarrassing me…”
Julian’s hand was in her hair, stroking her with the kind of tenderness that made my stomach turn.
He leaned into the mic, his voice a smooth, low crawl.
“Relax. Whether she signs or not, you’re getting double.”
The crowd whistled. They hooted like animals.
I sat there, watching the scene as if my soul had already left my body.
I didn’t feel like a wife. I didn’t even feel like a human. I felt like a carcass being debated by vultures.
“Ms. Vance, sign. Or we stop playing nice.” The suit pushed the papers toward me.
I stared at the documents on the table. The white paper was blinding under the spotlights.
Then I flipped the pages.
The insurance riders were clear: $1 million for a toe, $30 million for a vital organ or a hand. The number written on the last page was 186 million dollars.
Every number was a blade. Every clause, a wound.
Yet I grabbed the pen without a moment’s hesitation.
I signed. Flipped. Then I signed. Every page. Every line. Every box.
If Julian wanted me destroyed, I would give him exactly what he asked for. But I would make sure the explosion took everyone in this room with him.
The suits went still. One of them leafed through the stack, his face pale.
“Ms. Vance, you’re… you’re insuring your whole body? Every limb? Every organ?”
I tossed the pen aside and looked at the host. “Let’s start. I’m bidding with this.”
The host’s smile flickered.
“Ms. Vance, let me be clear. We’re not some licensed auction house. ” A pause. He continued, “If you dare to stake your body’s insured value on this deal, once it’s settled, we truly dare to collect, by any means necessary.”
“We will cut the value out of your skin, Piece by piece. With a scalpel. Do you understand?”
“We collect your every limb and organ. “
“I know,” I said. I leaned my back against the cold, then I tilted my chin up. “You think you can’t?”
“Fine.”
A dark, hungry look crossed his face. He turned to the crowd.
“Bidding starts now.”
“Parental rights to the child carried by Lena Vance. Opening bid: three million.”
The crowd erupted.
“Five million!”
“Ten million!”
“Whoa, whoa! Don’t spend it all at once!” A man in the front row laughed, the same laugh I’d heard in the dark for a year.
Before, I’d thought it was just Julian getting excited.
A wave of nausea hit me so hard I nearly doubled over. These weren’t ‘men.’ They were the things that had crawled over me while I was blindfolded, thinking I was safe.
“I’ll pay ten million just to see her face when I take her home tonight!” he yelled.
“Twenty million!”
The laughter was like grease on my skin. I looked at them—every face in that room was a nightmare come to life.
My stomach turned over, once, hard, and then went still. The way it does right before you stop feeling anything at all.
“I’ll match that. No matter how high it goes.” I said.
The room went quiet. The kind of silence you find in a morgue.
“Are you crazy?” The man who bid twenty million stood up, his face twisted. “This is a bidding war, not a suicide pact, Lena!”