A Shatter In The Dark: Daughter of the Unnamed

I was bartered for less than a stallion, flesh exchanged for a ledger debt, signed not with ink, but with the damp print of my mother's trembling thumb. I was 9. She didn't weep. I did.

The man who took me did not ask my name. He renamed me "Aunya" as if I were the ghost of a girl, already spent. He told me that silence was more valuable than obedience, and beauty more profitable than virtue. In his house, the mirrors did not reflect, they recorded. They remembered bruises even when the skin...