by Ada Scott
“In a minute,” Castellano says, pulling his chair out. “I need to make a quick call to one of my agents—and I could use a smoke break. Is the balcony private?”
“Of course,” Gorsky says cheerfully, pouring another glass of vodka for himself and passing the bottle around. “Caleb there doesn’t speak anything but English. Don’t mind him.” I glance over my shoulder only at the mention of my name, and he waves to me. “Make sure nobody kidnaps our friend, will you?” he says in thickly accented English, and I give a curt nod and open the door for Castellano as he walks out.
He closes the door behind him just enough that it’s ajar, and I stand at the opening, my back to him so I can face the group of gamblers as they get up and stretch their legs in the break.
The rich men start fawning over Gorsky and his little displays of wealth, and I watch them as he takes turns indulging them, but my ears are tuned to the balcony as I hear Castellano get on the phone.
The first words I hear are in French.
“...it’s going quite well, in fact, I could walk out of here with a Frederick Sandys pencil piece,” he says, half-laughing. “It might be polite to let him keep it, though. He must have given himself a headache scrambling to buy it up from whatever auction at the last minute. The man’s taste is...well, he’s Russian.”
I suppress a smile.
“Still,” he continues, “it might be nice to get our hands on something original for a change. When this deal goes through, maybe we can go legitimate too.”
Now that’s an odd thing to say. There’s a pause as the person on the other end of the line rattles off something back.
“Yes, yes, we don’t have to worry about that. The Russians are practically eating out of my palm, they wouldn’t know a forgery if it had a barcode on the back. I don’t foresee any problems getting them to play along as long as we need. You stay focused on upholding your side of the bargain, I’ll worry about keeping Gorsky ignorant.”
The hair on the back of my neck stands on end for a moment, but I’m as still as a statue. Castellano goes on to talk about what sounds like travel arrangements, but my mind is hung up on what he was saying about the art.
Originals? Our work? Forgery?
I don’t have to know much about art dealing to know there’s something going on, and I think I know what it is. Castellano is well known in the city, but he hasn’t been around a long, long time like the Russians have been. I did a little vetting on Castellano before he showed up tonight, and his records are clean. Too clean for someone dealing with mobsters.
My jaw sets. This is a setup. Castellano isn’t an art dealer…
He’s a forger.
And that means this art deal is going to take the Russians to the cleaners and make Castellano and his friends a very rich man.
I hear a tap on the glass behind me, and I step aside to let Castellano back in with a nod.
“Thanks, Lurch,” he says with a wink as he makes his way in. He’s over a head shorter than me. I let him pass without so much as a word.
I can’t play my hand too early. What I just heard Castellano saying is incriminating, and I bet if I so much as got a hold of that phone of his I’d have enough evidence to make Gorsky put a hole in his head right here and now.
But as it is, I have no proof. Hell, for all I know, I just heard the wrong part of a conversation. Besides, if I come forward now, I’m going to have to explain to Gorsky how I know what they’ve all been talking about when all they know is that I’m an American mook who’s strong and decisive enough to rise through the ranks as fast as a foreigner can.
Outing myself would make me look like a threat right now. It’d put a target on my back instead of Castellano’s.
So I hold my tongue and keep acting like a silent guardian as the men sit back down and settle into another round, big money going back and forth throughout the night.
And I got a chance to think about how to take things into my own hands.
Later that night, once everything’s over, I shake my jacket off as I step into my hotel room and roll my shoulders back, unbuttoning my white shirt and breathing a sigh of relief.
The place is about what you’d expect from a classy hotel in Vegas. Modern furnishing, good lighting, great views. All gray and white, everything looking crisp as if it were out of a factory that same day. There’s nothing homey about the place, but it’s comfortable.
I kick my shoes off and let my shirt fall to the ground on my way to the bathroom. I look at myself in the mirror and see my reflection wearing a white tank-top and five o’clock shadow. I run hot water and splash it in my face, then decide to shower off when I realize the smell of cigarette smoke is thick in my hair.
As hot water runs down my hardened body, I go over my plan.
The grand opening of the art show will be happening soon. If my hunch is right, that means Castellano will be showing off a gallery full of high-dollar forgeries worth a fraction of what the Russians think they are. Gorsky won’t be any the wiser, and he’ll buy the pieces at an astronomical price. When he tries to sell them to private collectors, their inspectors will spot the forgeries in a heartbeat, and nobody in their right mind will buy them. Gorsky won’t just be out millions, he’ll be humiliated in front of the whole city’s crime scene.
And Castellano and his associates will be long gone before Gorsky even realizes what’s happened.
It’s not a bad plan, if I’m not giving Castellano too much credit. If I were a different man, now would be a good time to get in on the action and help Castellano out.
But the thrill of hunting down an art forger is too good to resist. Money that hasn’t been worked for is poison, and Castellano is just another rich fuck robbing people blind.
I need proof, though. If I want to bust this operation, I have to prove without a doubt that the goods Castellano’s dealing are fakes.
I’ve got to see them for myself.
Once I towel off, I make my way to my laptop on the desk and sit down, adjusting the white towel that covers my manhood and pushing wet hair out of my face. This may be Vegas, but art exhibitions are still classy events. I can’t just show up in a suit alone—I’d look like the hired muscle I usually am, and I’d look suspicious if I started snooping around.
I need someone to take with me. A date.
Relationships are a pain in the ass, though. I’ve got enough problems without worrying about all that. I like my life simple and straightforward, and this lets me do that. Besides, even if I wanted to play the long game, it won’t work for this event. It’s too soon, so I don’t have time to sort through the dating scene.
So it’s got to be an escort. Simple, professional, and easy to cut ties with once all this blows over. I don’t think much of it. All I need for the night is a girl who’ll look nice and take a hefty paycheck.
I start looking. It takes a little bit of digging to find the high-class escorts that people typically get for functions like this.
After about twenty minutes of searching, I pause and blink to make sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
“Innocence for Sale…?” I mutter under my breath as I browse through the site. I narrow my eyes. Looking into it further, it turns out to be some high-dollar service to buy a girl’s virginity. Damn. You really can put a price on anything.
There seem to be a couple live auctions running at the moment, one of them for a girl named Jane that catches my eye even with a blurred photo. I click through to her bio page.
I sit back in my chair and cross my arms, staring at the blurred picture. She looks happy enough. She’s not exactly an escort, either, so she might be even less conspicuous to bring along than the real thing.
To my surprise, I see in her little bio paragraph that she’s an art student, an artist in her own right and an art historian. A smile crosses my lips. Icing on the cake. My old plan begins to fade as something new takes its place. Having someone on my arm who knows art could be an even bigger and better opportu
nity for me, and I kick myself for not thinking of it sooner. If I don’t hear anything sketchy, maybe she can spot something. At least it covers another angle without drawing attention on me.
Then I see her price, and my eyes go wide. She’s...not cheap, that’s for damn sure.
Why does that make me more interested?
I shouldn’t be able to afford a price like that. A military man turned mafia enforcer. Six figures on an escort should be way outside my price range.
But I have a pot of money that not even the mob knows about. Especially them, in fact. And it runs deep. I can afford her and then some.
I narrow my eyes and try to picture what she’d look like without the blur. She’s stunning, there’s no doubt about it. She’d turn heads at the art gallery...and I’m not sure I wouldn’t be one of those heads giving her my attention. That means she could be trouble.
And yet, I start the Innocence For Sale vetting process. I send off all the required information and wait.
The person behind Innocence For Sale, Ada, and I share some correspondence back and forth, confirming my details, and a week later I’m verified to her satisfaction, so I use my new login credentials to get to Jane’s live auction. Once again, my eyes go wide, and not only because bidders have pushed her price up even further since last week.
On my laptop screen is a face I recognize. It’s her. It’s the waitress from the club last month. I saw her only once and heard she quit, but she’s one of those rare beauties a man is lucky to see once or twice in his life. It’s surprising to see her in this line of work, though. She didn’t strike me as the type cut out for it. Then again, looks can be deceiving.
Then, I place a bid on the art major named Jane.
Jane
All day I’ve been checking my messages, my email, the mailbox, just in case I get a response from Innocence For Sale. At first I was just expecting to get an email, but then I remembered that they did in fact send me a mysterious letter in the mail anonymously, so who knows what kind of message I’ll get in reply? Maybe they’ll use a skywriting plane. Or a carrier pigeon. Singing telegram, perhaps. Either way, I’m keeping vigilant. I need them to answer me. I need them to say yes, that they’ll accept me and hook me up with some stranger who wants to take my virginity for a steep, steep price. I need that money.
This morning, I woke up to the horrible sound of my grandpa coughing up a storm across the house. It was barely six in the morning, and the noise was so loud the neighbor’s dog started barking. Unable to just lie in bed and not do anything, I got up and went to my grandparents’ bedroom with a bottle of water and an aspirin. When I got there, Grandpa was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring sadly down at the carpet. Granny was already up and about, wearing a giant fluffy pink robe over her nightdress.
With slippered feet, she came over to me and gave me a hug.
“He’s alright, dear. Sorry to wake you,” she said quietly, taking the water and aspirin from me. “You go on back to bed, Janie. I’ll make breakfast in an hour or so.”
With a nod, and one last worried glance over at Grandpa, I relented and went back to my room. But I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing with dark thoughts and worry.
I still can’t believe this is happening. My tall, strong, stubborn grandfather becoming weaker and quieter by the day.
All morning I keep a close eye on him, just waiting for him to start wheezing again. I know at any moment he could get sicker and have another cardiac event. He could go back into the hospital at any time. I know Granny is doing her best to put on a brave face, and so am I, but it’s hard.
She’s been keeping busy, baking cookies for a community bake sale and pruning the garden. She’s had a pot of homegrown tomatoes simmering on low heat all day to make her own pomodoro sauce. I swear she does laundry even when there’s not a dirty article of clothing in the whole house. And she keeps me busy, too, giving me errands to run and little chores to do around the house. It’s the kind of thing I hated when I was a moody teenager, but nowadays it just makes me feel helpful and distracts me from my worry for just a little while.
Of course, today I am considerably less keen on distraction. I want to be at home just in case another letter arrives. I’ve been watching my phone like a hawk, with the sound turned all the way up so I couldn’t possibly miss a notification. Still, despite how badly I want this money to save my grandpa, there’s a big part of me that dreads getting an affirmative answer. Because then it will be real. It will be happening. I’ll officially be the kind of girl who sells her body for money.
But…in this situation, who could blame me? I don’t have any better options at the moment. I’m not a business genius. I don’t have an eye for electronics, so I can’t just engineer some amazing invention that will make millions.
I’m an art major.
My dream is to be a museum curator with my own artistic pursuits on the side. I’ve been studying art since I was a kid when I got fascinated by a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I thought it was the real thing, but Gran told me it was just a fake. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated with the scandals of the art world and thrown myself into becoming an expert. I won’t have any fakes in the museum I curate.
I want to live my life surrounded by beautiful, original, thought-provoking images and sounds. Which is a lovely dream, I think, and all my professors tell me I have a knack for recognizing the history of a piece. I smile as I think about my last assignment where my professor tried to trip me up with a forgery. I knew almost right away. There’s hope for me in the art world. But the problem is…that’s not where the money goes. Even if I do become a world-renowned art expert, I still need to finish my degree before a reputable art museum will consider hiring me. And I don’t have years to wait around.
So if I can’t make money selling my art history skills, I can absolutely make money selling my virginity.
I keep telling myself that someday this whole episode of my life will just be a blip on the radar, something to scoff at and think, “Wow, what a strange time.”
Right now, though, I have to get an answer from IFS first.
I’m at the supermarket, winding up and down the aisles with a handwritten list from my grandmother in my hand. “Pasta… where’s the pasta aisle?” I murmur to myself. She’s making her famous spaghetti tonight, my grandpa’s favorite.
Just as I’m reaching for a box of spaghetti noodles, my phone rings loudly from inside my purse. I nearly knock all the products off the shelf in my haste to answer it.
“H-Hello?”
“Jane Appleton?” says a velvety female voice.
“Yes, that’s me,” I reply, confused.
“My name is Ada Scott. I’m calling in regard to your profile with us at Innocence For Sale. We’d like to set up a meeting with you to discuss your becoming an IFS girl.”
My stomach twists with sudden anxiety as I force myself to stay calm. It dawns on me the seriousness of who I’m speaking with.
“We’d like to spend some time with you this week in person to go over a series of paperwork and prepare you. We pride ourselves on taking good care of our girls, making sure everyone is comfortable and prepared for the task at hand. We'll need to get your hair done, and a full body wax, as well as have you meet with our style consultant. Then we can get your photoshoot done and set up your auction. Does this sound okay to you so far, Miss Appleton?”
I hesitate, worried about how rushed it all seems. But then I remember how time-sensitive my need for money is, as well. The sooner the better, really. “Yes, ma’am. That’s okay,” I reply.
“Wonderful,” she says warmly. “Okay, Miss Appleton, to give you more details about what you can expect. We will talk with you about sexual health, personal safety, seduction techniques, and more. There will be an exam prior to your date. As I mentioned before, our lines of communication will remain wide open if you should have any questions or concerns. I assure you that every bidder on our site has been thoroughly and scrupulously b
ackground checked and researched. We clear every single one of our clients to make sure he is safe, clean, and responsible in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our girls. You are our utmost priority. Understood?”
“Understood,” I reply, already feeling a little bit better about the whole thing. They’re clearly professional, and not at all skeezy like I’d feared, given their business.
The woman continues, “Now, as described on the site, you will spend a week with your bidder, during which time you must make yourself available to any and all advances by your client in keeping with your pre-agreed sex acts. Refusal to engage in acts chosen beforehand will result in forfeiture of your fee. However, I must stress to you again how seriously we take your personal safety. You will have a simple gold-diamond necklace containing a panic button and tracking device. If you feel you are under threat, you need only press that button and the security detail located nearby at all times will descend upon your location to help. Miss Appleton, you will never be alone or abandoned during this process. Help will always be just a button away. You can feel completely safe.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, genuinely relieved.
“Of course. It is also very important that you make sure your schedule is completely cleared during the time of the booking. Your family and friends will no doubt wonder where you’ve disappeared to if you leave without a trace, so you should concoct a credible story as to where you’ve gone. Say you’re taking a vacation. Taking a long road trip. If that seems too outside of your personality, you can tell people you’ve contracted a minor but very contagious illness and you need a week at home alone with no visitors to recover. There is no universal cover story we can offer you because, of course, every one of our girls is different, with different backgrounds and personalities. However, we fully believe in your ability to pull this off. You have been selected carefully by our team, and we have no doubt that you are a good candidate for our company.
