Chapter 7
Scarletta
Istand in the lobby staring through the glass security door at the black limousine.
It's real.
This is actually happening.
The car is sleek and black and waiting. Engine running. Exhaust clouding in the freezing air.
I don't have to do this. I could turn around. Walk back up four flights. Lock myself in my blanket fort and pretend I never clicked that link.
Right. Back to your thrilling, adventurous existence filled with all those incredible opportunities and bright prospects stretching out before you.
My inner voice is particularly vicious tonight.
You've written about this exact scenario sixteen times. Every single one of them had a limousine. Remember "Claimed at Midnight" Chapter three? The car waiting in the snow while she decides whether to run?
She got in the car.
She surrendered.
It was the best decision she ever made.
Right. But that was fiction.
This is—
This is what you've been begging for in forty-seven stories. And now that it's here, you're going to chicken out?
My intellectual side kicks in, calm and rational and utterly unconvincing.
You're on step eleven. You gave them your entire sexual profile. Your address. Detailed sexual preferences. You got in the car three hours ago. You're already committed. Turning back now doesn't make you safe. It just makes you broke AND stupid.
The limousine idles.
Snow falls.
For the money, I tell myself.
Not for the sex.
For the money.
I push through the security door.
The cold hits me like a punch in the face. Wind. Snow. Idaho in December, brutal and unforgiving.
I take three steps toward the car and the driver's door opens. A man gets out. Forties, maybe. Clean-cut. Dark suit. He walks around the front of the limo with practiced efficiency and opens the rear passenger door.
He smiles at me. Warm. Professional. Like I'm a client, not a girl being delivered to—
Don't think about it.
He doesn't speak. Just holds the door and waits.
I gather what's left of my courage—which isn't much—and climb inside.
The door closes with a soft, final click.
I'm alone.
The interior is warm. Leather seats. Tinted windows. A screen built into the seat in front of me flickers to life as a video begins playing. Sleek production. Professional voiceover. A woman's voice, smooth and reassuring.
"Welcome to the Seventy-Fifth Annual Triple Xmas Auction. You are in professional hands."
The video shows the inside of the auction house. Not a dungeon. Not some dark basement.
It's gorgeous.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking snow-covered mountains. Modern architecture. Clean lines. A massive stone fireplace in what looks like a lounge. Everything is cream, and gray, and polished wood. Expensive art on the walls. Leather furniture arranged in intimate groupings.
It looks like a luxury ski resort.
"Your safety, comfort, and consent are our top priorities. All participants have been thoroughly vetted. All benefactors have undergone extensive background checks and psychological evaluation."
The video cuts to sweeping aerial footage of the property—snow-draped peaks rising behind a sprawling estate, massive windows catching the afternoon light, smoke curling from stone chimneys. It's gorgeous. Intimidating. The kind of place people like me don't belong.
"Your experience will be tailored to the preferences you indicated in your intake form.
Your buyer is under contract to adhere to your specific limits.
Are you ready to have the experience of a lifetime?
Are you ready to step into your future with enough money to never look back?
If so, simply knock on the privacy divider when you are ready to proceed. "
OK. Here goes nothing. I knock on the divider. Immediately, the rolls smoothly forward. At the same time, the screen begins playing another video. Same calm voiceover.
"You are being transported to The Cheyenne Club Estate in Jackson, Wyoming. Your driver will take you to the FBO at Idaho Falls Regional Airport. Flight time is approximately fifteen minutes. Please relax and enjoy the journey."
It's a very specific message. Not generic. Not something they play for everyone. Unless they only choose girls from Idaho Falls, and somehow I find that hard to believe. Girls as dumb as me don't exist in concentration—you need to spread that net wide.
I would not call this realization comforting, but it does speak to the details. They made the message for me, and only me.
The car glides through dark streets as my thoughts spiral inward.
Four hours ago, I didn't even know I was in debt.
I mean, I did. Theoretically. In the abstract way you know the sun will eventually explode. Every single moment of my adult life has been spent drowning in various flavors of debt—student loans, credit cards, overdue rent, the slow suffocation of never having enough.
But it existed in the background, ambient dread I'd learned to tune out like tinnitus.
Now, I'm on my way to Jackson—a place normal people like me do not go, where billionaires park their private jets and buy second homes they visit twice a year—so I can sell my body, my boundaries, and my sexual fantasies to the highest bidder for forty-four thousand dollars.
Forty-four thousand dollars that will evaporate the moment it touches my bank account, swallowed whole by the endless maw of debt I've accumulated through a combination of bad decisions, worse luck, and the fundamental inability to function like a responsible adult.
All right. Enough already, my snarky inner monologue snaps, sharp and defensive.
You've established the premise. You're poor, you're desperate, you're fucked.
You're dumb enough to get in a stranger's car, naive enough to sign a contract probably overflowing with fine print, and broken enough to think selling yourself is a viable solution to your problems. You're gonna be killed, probably.
Dismembered. Disappeared. You're long past cautionary tale and well into tragic ending territory.
Try and enjoy it, for the sake of fuck.
The chuckle burbles up out of me unbidden.
Sake of fuck. Only my writer brain—
The car stops.
I blink. Look out the window. We're not at an airport.
We're on the edge of a dark runway. A single building off to the side, all glass and steel, lit from within. Beyond it—
Oh God.
A helicopter.
Rotors spinning. That low, thudding sound that vibrates through your chest. Red and white lights blinking against the night sky.
The driver opens my door.
Cold air rushes in. Snow. Wind. The deafening roar of instant karma.
I don't move.
Get out of the car, Scarletta.
I can't.
You've come this far. Get. Out.
My legs work without permission. I climb out. Stand on the tarmac. The wind tears at my clothes, whipping hair across my face.
A man appears beside me. Dark coat. Headset. He's yelling something but I can't hear him over the rotors. His mouth moves. Words I can't process.
He gestures toward the helicopter.
I shake my head.
He grabs my elbow—not rough, just firm—and tugs me forward.
My feet move. One step. Two. The noise gets louder. The wind stronger. I'm walking toward a helicopter. I'm getting on a helicopter.
You're going to die. This is it. They're going to throw you out over the mountains and no one will ever find your body.
The rational part of my brain is screaming that this is insane. That normal sex auctions don't involve helicopters. That I should run. That I should—
The man opens the door and practically lifts me inside.
The interior is—
I don't know what I expected. Cramped seats and exposed machinery, maybe. Military transport. Utilitarian.
This is not that.
The space is tall enough to stand in. Cream leather seats arranged in pairs facing each other. A single chair positioned near the front. Large rectangular windows lining both sides. A closed door at the back that has to be a bathroom.
Everything is cream, and tan, and polished wood. Clean lines. Expensive materials. More space than seems necessary for one person.
Of course it is. Because billionaires don't fly coach.
The pilot turns in his seat. Looks at me. Points at one of the cream leather seats and then at the seatbelt.
"Buckle in," he yells over the noise.
I nod. Autopilot. I walk to the nearest seat—my legs shaking, my hands numb—and collapse into leather so soft it feels obscene.
The door closes.
The noise drops to a manageable roar.
I fumble with the seatbelt. Four-point harness. My fingers are clumsy. Frozen. Useless.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
The lights dim, the roar deepens, then a piercing whine as the helicopter lifts.
My stomach drops. The ground falls away beneath us and suddenly we're rising, tilting forward, and Idaho Falls spreads out below like a circuit board. Lights. Streets. Buildings getting smaller and smaller.
I press my face against the window.
The city shrinks. The darkness expands.
We're flying over nothing now. Mountains. Snow. Endless black punctuated by the occasional cluster of lights that might be a town or might be a ranch or might be nothing at all.
You're in a helicopter, my brain informs me, as if I've just woken from a dream and need the commentary. Flying to Wyoming. To sell your body to a stranger who will pay forty-four thousand dollars for twenty-four hours with you.
The helicopter banks left and my stomach lurches. I've got a death-grip on the armrests.
Below us, the world is dark and cold and completely indifferent to whether I live or die.
Just a few minutes later, a new cluster of lights appear below. Bigger than the scattered ranches we've been passing. More organized. Streets laid out in grids.
Jackson.
I press my face harder against the window, breath fogging the glass.
But the helicopter doesn't descend toward the town where the sun is just about to rise on the eastern edge. It banks left, following a valley that cuts deeper into the mountains. Away from civilization. Away from witnesses.