Chapter One
Paige
It came as a whisper in the shadows. Barely more than a rumour passing from lips to ears after dark via alcohol-loosened tongues. It was a shiver on the wind around our university campus. A proposition bubbling just under the surface of our sweet little seaside town.
Sixty days of utter submission.
No safe words. No limits. No holds barred.
Sixty days of your body being used like a ragdoll for any man stepping up for his turn.
And then you were free to go, no further dues, thanks and goodbye.
The opportunity paid well. Really, really well.
Money shouldn’t be enough. Not for anyone — that’s what the rumours said. The demands were rough, dangerous, sleazy and not for consideration by anyone with even a scrap of self-respect.
I’d heard just snippets before the rumour finally reached me in full sentences, hissed in my direction by my drunk dorm-mate, Pippa, after too many wines at happy hour.
“It’s really going on,” she assured me and the rest of our gathered student huddle in the women’s toilets. “Carolyn Lane’s older sister signed up and went through with it. She came out with enough cash to buy an apartment and a brand new car, but apparently it was bad. Real bad. The things they did to her…”
How my eyes widened at the stories.
Tales of a seedy haven for rich men’s twisted games, recruiting right here amongst us and dishing out shit so bad that the girls either side of me were pulling faces long before Pippa was through with the details.
The protests came quick and easy from their mouths, dismissing the sanity of anyone signing up for sixty days of that crazy shit.
“Not me. No way. Not for all the cash in the world,” said Emma as she reapplied her mascara.
Her friend Katie plucked the stick from her fingers to reapply her own. “Too right. You’d have to be sick or desperate to even think of signing up to anything with those disgusting freaks.”
And maybe Katie was right. Maybe you would have to be sick or desperate.
But as it turns out, I was both.
At approaching nineteen years old, my life was nothing more than a hellhole. It was no secret that I was amongst a whole heap of students on campus having it especially rough that term. Money was tight from loan handouts, and jobs were hard to find in winter by the sea when the tourists had long gone. I’d tried my best to land a job through the months since arriving there, but around those parts landing a position wasn’t so much a case of what you knew as who you knew. Well-connected parents and tight bunches of friends made job prospects a game of handshakes and back-patting rather than a decent resume.
Still, tight finances from the student life weren’t the only cause of my troubles. Those I could’ve handled on a tight budget of canned soup and cheap white bread happily enough until graduation.
The real issues in my world came from the older sister living twenty miles up the coast in a much busier city centre. My older sister, Phoebe May, was the ultimate reason for my choice of university, having chased her across country and leaving nothing more behind than the drunk of a father who’d rattled a fist in my direction as I said my goodbyes.
It was a sense of duty, not just affection, that drove me to try to save the girl I’d lived my life with.
Phoebe was bunked up with a much older boyfriend, and that much older boyfriend had opened a big host of debts in her name to pay for his crack habit, and hers along with it.
Some of the debts would be settled in the courtroom, but plenty of others would be settled in the back alleys after dark. She told me so through body-shaking sobs at every opportunity she got, but even then she’d go crawling right back to him for more.
Her weaknesses didn’t matter. She was my sister, and she was all I had that really meant anything in this world. A very dim light in a very dark tunnel. One that needed far more money than I had a hope in hell of getting together, and fast.
I guess that’s what made me insane enough to listen to the seedy sixty-day stories with wide open eyes as my thumping pulse picked up pace in my temples.
“Carolyn Lane’s sister really signed up for this sixty day stuff?” I asked as Pippa let up for breath and lipstick.
She pressed her lips to even out the shade, then nodded. “She sure did. What a filthy cow. I wonder if Carolyn herself will be following in her footsteps for an apartment of her own.”
Carolyn Lane was in my psychology lectures every Monday morning. I knew her sister was local. I’d seen them together down at the ice-cream place by the pier that summer.