Chapter One: One Night for a Price

LUCY'S POV

"Your sister has three days, Lucy. After that, I can't promise you anything."

The doctor's words followed me down the hospital stairs, each step echoing them back like a verdict.

Three days.

That was all the time my little sister had left before they stopped her treatment.

I stood outside the main entrance with a crumpled bill in one hand and the last of my money in the other. The evening traffic droned past. Somewhere nearby a vendor was calling out his prices, cheerful and loud, as though numbers were harmless things. I counted what was in my purse again, then counted it a third time, as if the notes might multiply if I looked at them hard enough.

They didn't.

I was still short.

By a lot.

*Please, Lucy. Don't let them send me home.*

Molly's voice replayed in my head, small and frightened. She had whispered it that morning while I stood in the corridor, smiling at her through the glass that separated her bed from the rest of the world. She had pressed her palm flat against the pane, and I had pressed mine to the other side, and neither of us had said what we were both thinking.

I had promised her I wouldn't let them.

I had no idea how I was going to keep that promise.

My mother was useless. She had been useless for as long as I could remember, drifting through our lives like a guest who had never intended to stay. My father had probably spent whatever he'd managed to scrape together that week on drink. And the handful of people who knew us well enough to lend money had already learned to find something interesting on the other side of the road whenever they saw me coming.

I couldn't even blame all of them.

My mother's reputation had gone ahead of me since childhood, a shadow I was never allowed to step out of. My father's drinking had turned our house into a place no one wanted to visit. People looked at me and saw their opinions of my parents before they ever bothered to learn my name.

I was tired of it.

More than anything, I was tired of being poor enough that strangers could decide whether my sister deserved to live.

By the time I reached our little house, the sky had gone dark and the streetlight at the corner had begun its usual stuttering. The door groaned when I pushed it open. The air inside smelled of stale cooking and cheap liquor. My father's shoes lay by the entrance, one on its side, which meant he'd come and gone again.

I had barely set my bag down when someone knocked.

Three slow, deliberate raps.

I opened the door to find Mrs. Whitmore standing on the step. She was the woman who sometimes found temporary work for girls in our neighbourhood, and tonight she was dressed far better than usual, in a pressed blouse and good shoes, a small leather handbag tucked beneath her arm. A faint trace of perfume reached me, expensive and out of place against the smell of our house.

"Lucy," she said, looking me over the way a trader examines goods. "I've been looking for you."

"If it's about the cleaning job, I'll take it."

Her eyes slid past my shoulder, checking the empty room behind me. Then she stepped closer and lowered her voice.

"It's not a cleaning job."

I frowned. "Then what is it?"

She hesitated.

Mrs. Whitmore never hesitated. She was a woman who said what she wanted in the same flat tone whether she was offering bread or bad news. The pause stretched just long enough to tighten my stomach.

"There is a man looking for company tonight," she said at last. "He's willing to pay more than you could earn in several months."

I stared at her.

"No."

"You haven't even heard the amount."

"I don't need to."

"Two hundred thousand."

My mouth closed.

The sound of it settled in the room like something heavy dropped from a height.

Two hundred thousand.

It was enough to cover Molly's immediate treatment. Enough to buy us time to figure out what came next. Enough to make the doctor's face change when I walked back into that hospital.

I hated myself for how quickly I did the calculation.

"Who is he?" I asked, and my voice came out thinner than I wanted.

"A wealthy man. He doesn't want trouble, and he doesn't want his name discussed afterward."

"That sounds suspicious."

Mrs. Whitmore's mouth curved, though it wasn't quite a smile. "Most things that pay well do."

I looked away.

On the wall behind her hung the cracked mirror my mother had never bothered to replace, and in it I caught a glimpse of a girl with tired eyes and a worn dress, standing in a doorway with a hospital bill clenched in her fist. I barely recognised her.

I wanted to tell Mrs. Whitmore to leave. I wanted to close the door and pretend I was the kind of girl who could walk away from an offer like that without wondering whether her little sister would receive another injection tomorrow.

But I wasn't that girl.

Poverty had cured me of her a long time ago.

"What exactly does he want?" I whispered.

Mrs. Whitmore did not soften her answer. I suppose that was her one honesty.

"One night. His room, his rules, and no promises beyond the money."

My fingers tightened around the bill until the paper bit into my skin.

I had spent nineteen years being judged for things my parents had done. I had swallowed insults the way other children swallowed vitamins. I had gone to bed hungry, and I had stood in other people's doorways with my pride folded small in my hands, asking for help I knew they would refuse. I had survived all of it.

Yet somehow, this frightened me more than anything that had come before.

Perhaps because this time, there was no one else to blame. No parent whose mistakes I could point to. No cruel stranger who had pushed me here. If I said yes, the choice would be mine, and I would carry it for the rest of my life.

Somewhere across the city, Molly was lying awake in a narrow bed, listening to the machines hum, believing her sister would fix everything.

*Three days.*

I closed my eyes, and her face was there waiting for me. Her small hand against the glass. Her whisper.

*Please, Lucy.*

When I opened my eyes again, Mrs. Whitmore was watching me with the patience of a woman who already knew my answer. She didn't push. She didn't need to. The silence between us did it for her.

"When?" I asked.

"Tonight."

The word landed softly, and it still felt like a door closing.

"I need the money before morning," I said. My voice sounded strange to me, steady and distant, as though it belonged to someone braver.

Mrs. Whitmore nodded once.

"Then get dressed."