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 avideo 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 forme, andonly 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 medo not go, where billionaires park their private jets and buy second homes they visit twice a year—so I can sell my body, myboundaries, 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.
