PROLOGUE

"Is there such a thing as a male companion agency? A premium one, I mean. Not those kept pets my ex-husband parades around."

The question slipped out of Sary somewhere between the smoke and the clink of ice in her margarita. Sunday night. Fifteen years of Sunday nights — the seven of us in my living room, professional masks off, laughing at the life choices of our ex-husbands.

Everyone laughed. Alcohol-fueled banter. The conversation rolled on to something else.

Except in my head, it didn't.

To them, it was a joke. To me, it sounded like a viable business model.

At my age, I was done with the theater of conventional dating. Done with the fragile egos of men who felt threatened by my bank account or the word CEO after my name. At the office, hesitation was a luxury I couldn't afford — one second of fragility and my entire leadership would be up for review. But behind my bedroom door, I knew I wanted the opposite. Closeness. Touch. The rare, expensive privilege of not being the one in charge.

I didn't need a loud love. I needed a calm one — deeply passionate, but with clear parameters. I would know my place; he would know his; we would both understand the rules of the game. An agency offering educated, emotionally intelligent men trained to provide premium affection, security, and absolute certainty — that would not be a bad product at all.

But things like that only exist in movies. That's what I thought, too.

Until exactly eight days later.

Toward the end of every month, my desk drowns in mail — private banks, quarterly reports, lifestyle concierge brochures. All of it passes through my assistant Wiwin's sorting system before it reaches me. That morning, a small black envelope sat at the very top of the pile, tagged with a bright pink Post-it — Wiwin's favorite color — in her neat handwriting:

Confidential. From Ms. Gio.

Inside: a minimalist matte black card. In the center, a single embossed magnolia. No phone number. An encrypted barcode on the back, and one line stamped in gold foil:

Bespoke Emotional, Social & Private Companionship for Executive Women. A sanctuary where you don't have to lead. High-trust. Invitation-only.

I read it twice.

Then I scanned the barcode. My screen went black before loading an elegant, heavily encrypted page. So. It was real. An underground agency operating well beneath the radar of Jakarta's elite — highly educated, psychologically trained men, for established women exhausted from driving their lives entirely alone.

In the middle of the screen, a gold button pulsed slowly. One word: [ Inquiry ]

I stared at that button for five full minutes. The risk assessor in my head went to work — reputation, exposure, worst-case legal scenarios. Pressing it meant deliberately opening a breach in a fortress I had spent twenty-five years building.

My fingertips had gone cold. The office AC, probably. My heart was doing something it hadn't done in years — not even pitching trillion-rupiah projects to foreign investors who would have happily eaten me alive. Fear, yes. A thin layer of it. Laced with something far more interesting.

I exhaled. This pride, this iron mask — it had become far too heavy to carry alone.

And above the fear, I saw what I always see: an opportunity. Sary wanted it. Rosa needed it. The seven of us had more than earned it.

My finger hovered above the screen for a fraction of a second.

Click.

A small smile I hadn't authorized crossed my lips. I opened the group chat and began arranging a meeting for the seven of us.

If we were going to do something this reckless, we were going to do it properly.

Together.