Page 3 of Bought

Money would mean I could get out of this shithole of a city.

Money would mean I could get out of the entire fucking country and build a life for myself elsewhere.

Money would mean that I’d finally be safe.

All I had to do was get some billionaire nearly twenty years older than me to buy my virginity and take me home for the night.

Andre had finished seating people and then he moved over to the dais to begin his little intro, giving me a nod as he did so.

At last.

It was show time.

2

Tennyson

I sat back in the leather armchair as the lights in the auction room dimmed and Andre, Arcadia’s front-of-house manager, stepped onto the dais in the center of the room to begin his spiel.

I wasn’t listening.

Frustration gnawed in my gut, a constant, low-level burn that had been with me ever since Isabel had been born and hadn’t let up even though she was now twenty-three and an adult.

This wretched auction that Caleb and Atlas, my two oldest friends, had dragged me to was supposed to be a distraction, but with Isabel’s safety on the line, distracting me was an impossible task.

I never went to Arcadia’s auctions anyway, and I’d always made a point of not attending. I didn’t approve of them or the club itself, and I certainly didn’t approve of Caleb’s owning it. Not that he cared about my opinion. He was a man who did what he wanted regardless of what anyone thought.

I still wasn’t sure why I’d agreed to come here in the first place, especially when I had more important things to think about. Such as Isabel’s mother’s family, the Hamiltons, finally making the move I’d been dreading for years. They wanted to contact her, wanted to dig their claws into her the way they’d dug their claws into Juliana all those years ago, and I was determined to stop them.

I had to make sure they didn’t destroy Isabel the way they’d nearly destroyed her mother.

I’d asked Caleb to take over watching over Isabel because the relationship I had with her was fraught and she wouldn’t listen to me. Of course, there was a reason it was fraught and that was my fault, for many reasons. But the main issue Isabel had with me was the measures I’d put in place to protect her. Being my child was never going to be an easy role, not given the enemies I had. She chafed at those measures, I knew, but my job as a father meant keeping her safe and so that’s what I’d do.

That’s what my whole life was about.

I couldn’t lose her the way I’d lost her mother.

I shifted in my chair, the frustration continuing to burn like acid inside me. It was the inability to do anything, the lack of control I had over the entire situation that was eating away at me. A special kind of hell for a man like me, a man who liked to have complete control in all things.

It wasn’t that I’d done nothing. I had people at Fox Tech, my tech company, find out what they could about what the Hamiltons were planning, and I’d had Caleb take over keeping an eye on Isabel. He’d promised me he’d protect her, and I knew if anyone could keep her safe that wasn’t me, it was him. I’d known him since we were both fifteen and he was like a brother to me.

Yet even knowing Caleb was protecting her didn’t ease my frustration and worry.

“Relax,” Atlas murmured from the couch positioned beside my chair. “She’ll be fine. Think of the virgin instead.”

I didn’t bother replying. He had no idea what I was dealing with. Neither he nor Caleb were fathers. They didn’t know what it felt like to have your heart walking about around outside your chest, under threat, and there was nothing you could do about it.

The virgin was the least of my problems.

Then again, she was the reason I was here.

I didn’t approve of any part of this, not the auction, not the people avid for sex, not the virgin trying to sell herself off for money. Caleb had lectured me about his vetting process and the agency of the young women involved, but I still didn’t like it. That these young women were even considering auctioning off their bodies at all rankled. It told of a society fixated on youth and beauty, where women were told that taking control of their sexuality was a power move, when in fact they were simply buying into the lies they’d been fed by that same society.

It was reprehensible. If I’d had my way, I would have stopped the auction before it had even started. But Arcadia was Caleb’s baby, and he was protective of it. Besides, the young woman involved was expecting money from this farce, and I couldn’t in good conscience sabotage it for her.

I was, however, going to buy that virginity of hers, the way I’d bought the virginity of many other young women. For their own good, of course.

Andre had his sales patter down. He was slick — they all were at Arcadia; Caleb only hired the best — and the audience hung on his every word.