The Private Collection

The eviction notice was taped to my front door, a stark red rectangle against the peeling beige paint. The words were printed in a bold, unforgiving font: FINAL NOTICE. PAY OR VACATE.

My stomach dropped, the same way it did every time I saw one of these. This was the third one. The final, final notice, I guess. I’d been juggling for months—selling my mom’s old jewelry, picking up extra shifts at the diner until my feet were numb, eating ramen noodles until the salty taste coated the inside of my mouth even when I was drinking water. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

Tears pricked at my eyes, hot and useless. I ripped the paper from the door, the tape pulling off a fresh strip of paint with it. Another thing my landlord could take from my security deposit, if there was even any left to take.

Inside, my apartment felt like a tomb. Boxes were half-packed in the corner, a monument to my failed attempts to be proactive. I sank onto the lumpy sofa, the eviction notice crinkling in my fist. I had seven days. Seven days to come up with three months of back rent or find a new place to live, which required a security deposit I didn't have. It was an impossible, suffocating math problem.

That’s when I saw it. My laptop was open on the coffee table, still on the job search website I’d been staring at until three in the morning. My eyes scanned the screen, blurry with exhaustion and despair, until they landed on a listing I’d previously skipped over.

Night Lab Technician – Aeterna Labs.

The description was vague. “Private research facility seeks a detail-oriented and discreet individual for a full-time night position. Phlebotomy or lab experience preferred, but not required. Generous compensation package.”

“Generous” was the word that snagged my attention. I’d scrolled past it before because “private research facility” sounded like something that required a degree I didn’t have, a remnant of the nursing school life I’d had to abandon. But now, “generous” was a siren’s call. I clicked on it. The application was short, almost insultingly so. Name, contact information, previous employment, and a single question: Are you comfortable working in a solitary environment with minimal oversight?

I typed “Yes” and hit submit before I could second-guess myself. I didn't expect to hear back.

My phone rang less than an hour later. An unknown number.

“This is Clara,” I answered, my voice rough.

“Aeterna Labs,” a man’s voice said. It was deep and smooth, without warmth. Not unkind, just…neutral. Like a machine. “You submitted an application.”

“Yes. Just now.”

“We have an opening. The position requires absolute discretion. Can you provide that?”

The question was so direct it threw me. “Yes, of course.”

“The hours are ten p.m. to six a.m. The work is precise. Repetitive. You will be handling sensitive biological materials. Does that bother you?”

“No,” I said, my heart starting to beat a little faster. This was moving too quickly.

“Come for an interview. Tonight. Nine p.m.” He gave me an address in the industrial district, a part of town most people avoided after dark. There was no room for questions. He simply stated the facts and then waited for my compliance.

“I’ll be there,” I said, a knot of unease tightening in my gut.

The interview was even stranger. The building was a sleek, windowless block of black stone, utterly out of place among the crumbling warehouses. A security guard who looked like he could bench press a car let me into a spartan waiting room. The man who interviewed me—he never gave me a name—sat behind a large metal desk in a dimly lit office. I couldn't make out his features clearly, just a silhouette of broad shoulders and an unnerving stillness.

He didn’t ask about my C- in chemistry or why I’d dropped out of school. He asked if I had a strong stomach. He asked if I was afraid of the dark. He asked if I had any close family or a significant other who would question my late hours. My answers were short, honest. No. No. And no.

His head tilted, a subtle shift in the shadows. “The salary is ninety thousand dollars a year, to start.”

I stopped breathing. That was more than double what I would have made as a nurse. It was enough to pay my rent. It was enough to get my life back. It was too much.

“Why so much?” The question slipped out before I could stop it.

“We value our employees’ discretion and commitment,” he said, the answer telling me nothing at all. “The position is yours, if you want it. You would start tomorrow night.”

I thought of the red notice crumpled in my pocket. I thought of the shame of calling my aunt to ask if I could sleep on her couch again. I thought of the crushing weight that had been sitting on my chest for a year.

“I want it,” I said, my voice stronger than I felt.

A faint smile seemed to touch his voice. “Good. Be here at ten p.m. tomorrow. Your supervisor will meet you at the entrance. His name is Julian.”

The next night, I pulled into the same empty parking lot in front of the black stone building. The ninety-thousand-dollar salary echoed in my head, a mantra against the rising tide of anxiety. Ninety thousand dollars. Ninety thousand dollars. It was the only thing that kept my hand from shifting the car back into reverse and speeding away.

I walked to the imposing, seamless door, my footsteps the only sound in the dead quiet of the industrial park. A small, glowing panel was the only break in the smooth surface. My watch read 9:59. I waited, my breath held tight in my chest, until the numbers flipped to 10:00. Then, I pressed the button.

There was no buzz, no click. Just a faint hiss as the heavy door slid sideways into the wall, revealing the man standing on the other side. Julian.

He was tall, more so than I’d expected. He wore a perfectly tailored black suit beneath a stark white lab coat that looked so crisp it might cut you. His hair was black, styled with a severe precision that matched the rest of him. But it was his stillness that stopped my heart for a second. He didn’t move. Not a flicker of an eye, not a shift in his weight. He just stood there, a statue carved from marble and shadow, watching me.

His skin was pale, almost luminous in the sterile light of the entryway, and his eyes were so dark they seemed to absorb the light around them. They fixed on me, and I felt a sudden, prickling awareness of myself—my cheap jeans, the slight tremble in my hands, the way my ponytail was probably coming undone. It felt like he could see the eviction notice still crumpled in my purse.

“Clara,” he said. His voice was the same as the one on the phone—a low, resonant baritone, completely devoid of inflection. It wasn’t a greeting. It was a confirmation of a data point. “You are punctual.”

He stepped back, a single, fluid motion that was both economical and graceful. “Come in.”

I hesitated for a fraction of a second before forcing my feet to move, stepping across the threshold. The air inside was cold and smelled faintly of antiseptic and something else, something metallic and clean. As I passed him, a wave of cold radiated from his body. We didn’t touch, weren’t even that close, but the chill was so distinct it made the hairs on my arms stand up. The door hissed shut behind me, sealing us inside, the sound of the outside world vanishing completely.

“I am Julian,” he said, turning to face me. “Your supervisor.”

“Hi,” I managed, my voice sounding small and thin. “It’s nice to meet you.” The words felt stupid and inadequate. Small talk had no place here.

He didn’t reply. His dark eyes swept over me in a slow, deliberate appraisal. It wasn’t leering or suggestive. It was something else, something far more unsettling. It was analytical. He was cataloging me, from my worn-out sneakers to the nervous pulse I could feel beating in my own throat. I had the distinct and terrifying sensation of being an insect pinned to a board.

A long moment of silence stretched between us, thick and heavy. I fought the urge to fidget, to fill the quiet with nervous chatter. I had a feeling he was testing me, waiting to see if I would crack under the weight of his silent scrutiny. I met his gaze, my heart hammering against my ribs, and held it.

Finally, a corner of his mouth tilted, a microscopic movement that wasn’t quite a smile. It was more like an acknowledgment.

“Here,” he said, his voice cutting through the silence, “we value precision, silence, and above all, discretion. You will not speak of what you see or do within these walls to anyone. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” I said, the word coming out as a breath.

“Good.” He turned away from me then, his back straight and rigid. “Come. I will show you the facility.”

He led me down a long, white corridor. The floors were polished concrete, gleaming under recessed lights that cast no shadows. There were no windows, no doors, just the seamless white walls stretching into the distance. The silence was the most unnerving part. In the hospitals I’d trained in, there was always a hum—machines, ventilation, the distant beep of a monitor, the squeak of shoes. Here, there was nothing. The air was still and dead, the silence so absolute it felt heavy, pressing in on me.

We stopped at a thick steel door that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. To its side was a keypad and a small, dark screen. Julian pulled a black keycard from the breast pocket of his lab coat and handed it to me. It was heavier than it looked, cold and solid in my palm. My name was printed on it in stark, simple letters: CLARA REED. There was no photo.

“This is your access card,” he said, his voice echoing slightly in the sterile space. “It will grant you access to this corridor and the main laboratory. Nowhere else. Do not attempt to use it on any other door. Do not lose it. Do not take it from the building.” He paused, his dark eyes finding mine. “Ever.”

I nodded, my throat too dry to speak. He placed his own card against the panel, which glowed green. Then he pressed his thumb to the dark screen below it. A soft chime sounded, and with a heavy, grinding thud, the lock disengaged. He pushed the door open, holding it for me.

The room on the other side was vast and even colder than the hallway. It was the main lab, but it looked more like a showroom for futuristic medical equipment. Everything was stainless steel and glass, arranged with a geometric precision that felt inhuman. Centrifuges, analyzers, and machines I didn’t recognize sat silent and gleaming. There were no stray papers, no coffee mugs, no signs that actual people worked here. It was pristine to the point of being sterile, not just in a medical sense, but in a spiritual one. It was a room without a soul.

“Your station is over here.” He guided me toward a long counter against the far wall. A single computer terminal sat there, its screen dark. “This is where you will process and catalog new acquisitions.”

He stood beside me, his presence a palpable force in the empty room. I was acutely aware of the space between us, of the chill that seemed to emanate from him. I risked a glance at his face. In the harsh, white light of the lab, his features were sharp, carved from stone. His skin was flawless, so pale it was almost translucent, yet there were no visible veins beneath it. He looked like a classical statue, beautiful and entirely without warmth.

“The work is simple, but it requires your full attention,” he continued, his gaze sweeping across the silent machinery. “You will verify the integrity of the sample containers, log their alphanumeric codes into the system, and place them into the designated refrigerated storage. You will follow the on-screen prompts exactly. There is no room for deviation or improvisation.”

He turned to face me fully, and I had to fight the instinct to take a step back. His proximity was overwhelming. “Our clientele is… particular. They pay for a guarantee of quality and, more importantly, of anonymity. The codes you log are the only identifiers we use. The donor’s identity, the client’s identity—that is information you will never have access to. You are not to seek it out. You are not to speculate. Your curiosity, whatever you may have of it, ends at this door.”

His voice was low, a calm, even tone that was somehow more menacing than a shout. He wasn’t just giving me instructions; he was drawing a line, and the consequences of crossing it felt terrifyingly real. The ninety-thousand-dollar salary didn’t seem so generous anymore. It felt like payment for a secret, for a piece of my soul.

“I understand,” I whispered.

“I hope you do, Clara,” he said, and the way he spoke my name made a shiver trace its way down my spine. “Because a breach of discretion is not something we tolerate. This facility, our work, it all depends on absolute silence. From everyone.” He held my gaze for a moment longer, his eyes unblinking, and I felt like he was looking straight through me, weighing my ability to keep my mouth shut, to be the silent, solitary worker they were paying for.

He gave a single, sharp nod, as if satisfied with whatever he saw in my eyes. Then he turned and walked to a large, stainless-steel refrigerator that stood against the wall like a silver monolith. He opened it with his keycard, and a plume of frigid vapor billowed out around his feet. From inside, he lifted a metal transport case and placed it on the counter next to my terminal with a soft, solid thud.

“Your first consignment.” He unlatched the case. Inside, nestled in perfectly molded foam, were ten blood bags. They were standard medical issue, but the blood within them was a uniform, dark crimson, almost black in the lab’s harsh light. There were no hospital labels, no donor names, no blood types—just a single, small tag on each one with a long string of letters and numbers printed in severe black type.

He tapped the computer monitor, and it flickered to life, displaying a simple login screen. “Your user ID is your last name. Your password is the eight-digit code on the back of your access card. Memorize it. Do not write it down.”

I did as he said, my fingers feeling clumsy on the keyboard. The system that loaded was stark and minimalist, just a series of empty fields against a black background. A single cursor blinked expectantly.

“Take the first sample,” he instructed, his voice low and close to my ear. I flinched, not realizing he had moved so near. The cold from his body seemed to seep right through my sweater. “Scan the code with the handheld scanner.”

I picked up the scanner, my hand trembling slightly, and aimed the red beam at the tag on the first bag. The machine beeped, and the code—something like XG77-B4-K910-V—instantly populated the first field on the screen. Below it, other fields filled automatically: volume, date of acquisition, hemoglobin concentration. But everything that would give it a human context was missing. No name. No age. No medical history. Nothing.

My eyes scanned the screen, looking for a place to input more information, for a link to a donor file. In nursing school, we’d been drilled on the importance of a patient’s history. It was everything. Here, it was actively, deliberately erased.

“There seems to be no field for donor information,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady and professional.

“That is correct,” Julian said. His tone was flat, offering no explanation. “The system contains all necessary data. You will verify the container’s integrity, confirm the code has been logged correctly, and then place it in the storage unit.” He pointed a long finger toward a different, larger refrigerated vault.

My gaze drifted to a grayed-out tab at the top of the screen labeled CLIENT ASSIGNMENT. Almost without thinking, my fingers moved the mouse, the cursor hovering over it. It was a reflex, the ingrained curiosity of a trainee wanting to understand the full process. I clicked.

A single, blood-red box popped up in the center of the screen. ACCESS DENIED.

I snatched my hand back from the mouse as if it had shocked me. My heart hammered against my ribs. I didn’t dare look at Julian, but I could feel his eyes on me, cold and heavy.

“As I said,” he murmured, his voice a silken thread of warning, “your curiosity ends at this door. Log the samples, Clara. Nothing more.”

He didn’t move for another full minute, just stood there in the crushing silence, watching me. I focused on the screen, on the blinking cursor, my face burning with shame and fear. I clicked ‘Confirm’ on the entry, the sound of the key clicking unnaturally loud in the quiet room. Then I carefully took the blood bag, its plastic cool and heavy in my hands, and walked it over to the designated storage unit. I placed it on the shelf, my movements stiff and self-conscious.

When I turned back, he was gone.

I looked around the vast, empty lab. The silence rushed back in, a physical weight. He had moved without making a single sound. I saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, at the far end of the lab, closing silently. His office, I presumed.

Left alone, the strangeness of it all began to sink in. I went back to the counter and picked up the next bag. Scan. Click. Store. Repeat. The process was mind-numbingly simple. It was the context that made my skin crawl. Every bag was a person, a life, reduced to an anonymous code. This wasn't a blood bank. It was a library of secrets, and my job was to be the silent, unthinking librarian. The pay was for my complicity, for my willingness to not ask questions. Ninety thousand dollars a year to check my conscience at the door. I could do that. I had to.

I worked steadily, falling into a rhythm. Scan. Click. Store. The motion was hypnotic. With each sample I logged, the eviction notice in my purse felt a little less powerful, its sharp edges softened by the promise of a paycheck. I could ignore the cold, the silence, the unnerving intensity of my new boss. I could ignore the fact that I was handling human blood with less identifying information than a carton of milk at the grocery store. I could ignore the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had just stepped into a world where the normal rules didn't apply, a world that operated in the shadows just beyond the edges of the one I knew.

I focused on that thought, on the numbers in my bank account slowly climbing, and pushed through the rest of the consignment. Scan. Click. Store. The silence was absolute, broken only by the soft beep of the scanner and the quiet hum of the refrigerators. It was a silence that pressed in, that made the ringing in my own ears feel like a scream.

The hours bled into one another, marked only by the slow crawl of the digital clock on the computer screen. 4:17 AM. 5:38 AM. 6:12 AM. I never saw Julian again. I assumed he was in his office, a silent, unseen presence at the edge of my awareness. The feeling of being watched never quite went away.

Finally, there was only one bag left in the transport case. My shift ended at seven, and I was almost done. Relief washed over me, cool and sweet. I could get through this. I could come back tomorrow and do it all again. For ninety thousand dollars, I could be the perfect, incurious employee.

I reached for the last bag, my fingers closing around the plastic.

And I stopped.

It was warm.

It wasn't just room temperature. It was warmer than that, radiating a gentle, living heat that felt utterly wrong. My heart gave a painful thud against my ribs. I snatched my hand back, staring at the bag as if it were a snake. The blood inside was the same deep, opaque crimson as all the others. The alphanumeric tag was identical in its stark formatting. But it was warm. It felt like it had just been drawn from a vein seconds ago.

My mind raced, trying to find a logical explanation. Had it been packed incorrectly? Left out? But the transport case was refrigerated. It had been sealed when Julian brought it out. I tentatively touched one of the other bags I’d already shelved in the storage unit. It was cold, the plastic stiff and slick with condensation. Just as it should be.

I looked back at the last bag. The warmth was impossible. It defied the laws of thermodynamics. Blood cools. It cools quickly. For this to feel the way it did… it would have to have its own internal heat source.

A wave of nausea rolled through my stomach. I thought of Julian’s warning, his voice like ice. Your curiosity ends at this door. This was a deviation. This was something I should report. But the thought of knocking on his office door, of presenting him with this impossible, illogical problem, terrified me more than the warm bag itself. I could picture his cold eyes, the flicker of annoyance, the quiet disapproval that would feel like a physical blow. He’d see it as a failure, a crack in my composure on the very first night.

My hand trembled as I picked it up again. The heat was undeniable, a soft, pulsing warmth against my palm. It felt alive.

Just do the job, Clara.

My own voice in my head sounded desperate. I forced myself to move, to go through the motions. I scanned the code. The scanner beeped, oblivious. The numbers appeared on the screen, neat and orderly, a stark contrast to the chaos erupting in my mind. I clicked ‘Confirm.’

My movements were stiff as I walked to the main storage vault. The bag felt heavy, wrong, a secret I was now complicit in keeping. Opening the heavy stainless-steel door, a blast of arctic air hit me, making my eyes water. I placed the warm bag on the shelf next to the others, half-expecting it to hiss as the cold hit it. It didn’t. It just sat there, an anomaly nestled among the cold, uniform rows. I closed the door, sealing it inside.

My shift was over. I logged out of the system, wiped down my station with a sanitizing cloth as instructed in the online manual, and gathered my things. The silence of the lab felt different now. It felt heavier, filled with the question I hadn't dared to ask.

I walked out through the series of secure doors, my access card beeping obediently at each checkpoint. The reception area was as empty and silent as it had been when I arrived. I didn’t see Julian. I didn’t see anyone. I half-expected an alarm to go off, for him to appear and demand to know why I hadn't reported the anomaly. But nothing happened. I pushed through the final glass door and stepped out into the pre-dawn gloom.

The air outside was cool and damp, smelling of asphalt and the promise of rain. My car was the only one in the small, private lot. As I drove away from the sleek, featureless building, my hands were tight on the steering wheel. The city was still asleep, the streets empty, the sky a soft, bruised purple. It was my favorite time of day, that quiet moment between night and morning. But the peace of it was gone.

All I could think about was the impossible warmth of that last sample. It was a detail that didn't fit, a loose thread in the sterile, controlled fabric of Aeterna Labs. It followed me all the way home, a prickle of unease at the back of my neck. It wasn't just the secrecy or the coldness of my new boss anymore. It was the feeling that I had touched something that broke the rules of the world I thought I knew. And I had taken that something, that impossible, living warmth, and locked it away in the cold and the dark.