Everyone's drunk. I mean everyone. The punters, Lenny, the bartender, even all the imposing mobsters striding around with guns strapped to their waist.

Oh – and everyone includes me. I’m really playing it safe, right?

Okay, maybe I’m not drunk – but at least a little buzzed. The first time someone shoved a drink in my hand, I refused. I wanted to keep a clear head. That didn’t last. The guy whined and moaned, and the whole time I watched as he salivated over the sight of my tits, but I held firm. In this place I feel like I'm a rare steak with legs, walking through the Big Cats section of the zoo.

First, it's Lenny. Every time I head back to him he adds one more to the pile of crushed beer cans around his feet. Every time I ask him who I'm supposed to take money from next, he asks that same damn question. He started with three hundred bucks as his offer to take my dignity, my pride, and my soul – all in one. Now, he's adding to it in fives and tens like I'm on the auction block.

“Come on baby,” he whines, “How 'bout three thirty?”

It's my first night here, and I already know what is gonna happen. Someone is gonna fuck me, and I won't get a say. It won't be sex, or making love, or any of that shit people write sappy romance books about. It'll be assault – plain and simple. Whether it's Lenny whose pockmarked face will haunt my dreams till the day I die, or Vince, or just some punter attacking me as I make my way out of here, it'll happen.

I feel like a dead girl walking.

“Not tonight, Lenny,” I say. But I drop my voice until it's husky, and as I walk away I swing my hips: just a bit; just enough to give him hope; just enough to keep him sweet. It's what the other girls are doing. In a place like this, I guess you have to fit in to survive – and you have to adapt quickly.

The next stop on my tour through the meat market is whatever drunk I'm supposed to be relieving of his gambling losses. After I worked my second guy, I got the picture. They were all red-nosed and pot-bellied from too few green vegetables and too much beer.

“Hey baby,” he says, “how much?”

I tell him I'm not for sale, but he thinks I'm just negotiating. I'm not. I'd never sell myself. He shoves a drink in my hand, and this time I take a sip, and the alcohol burns its way down my throat and warms my belly. The liquor is straight, and I cough a bit.

He rubs my back and I shudder inside, but I take his money with a smile, just the way Lenny says to do it. Then I walk away with a sway in my hips and a crushing blackness in my heart. Lenny didn't say anything about that last part. I figured that out on my own.

My next stop is the back room: Vince and his boys. I've got the gambling money tucked inside a bra that barely covers my chest. I was clothed when I got here –scantily by my standards – but Vince's first order of business was to fix my outfit.

“Jesus bitch,” he swore, “don't you know shit about marketing? You've got a stripper's ass, curves like a freakin’ da Vinci sculpture and tits that are begging me to bury my face in your chest until I drown in ‘em, and yet you're dressed like a fucking nun. You're supposed to be making me money, not scaring away my business!”

So now I'm wearing a black lace bra, and every guy I walk by can see the outline of my nipples. They don't care if I catch them staring. Their wives are at home with the kids, and they're here drinking with the boys, watching a fight and gambling away that paycheck. That's why I'm part of the attraction, just like all the other girls: just meat.

I try to hand the money to Vince. He fixes me with a disdainful stare and jerks his head at the table. He slaps my ass as I give the money to the guy operating the cash counting machine. It's just like the kind you see in banks, or the movies. I concentrate on it so I can avoid thinking about what Vince just did.

Tony stares at me, and I see a bulge rise in his jeans. “How much for a ride, doll?” he asks.

Vince cackles. It's a hard, piercing laugh that doesn't carry an ounce of humor.

“She's mine, Tony and don't you forget it. That's right, Casey – you're mine, aren't you baby?”

I'm a rabbit in the headlights. I stammer something, but it doesn't make sense and I don't finish the thought anyway. Vince laughs, drinking in my terror. It's that same hard, unpleasant screech, and he shoves a beer into my hand and this time I drink it deep, to escape the moment – and because right now alcohol's blackness seems like the sensible choice.

Then he pushes me back out into the crowd, slaps my ass and tells me to make him some money. He knows it's just a matter of time until he breaks me, and I think he's enjoying the hunt.

I'm standing just outside the little girl's room in a panic. In the background, the crowd is at a fever pitch. This fight's gone on longer than any of the rest, and they are baying for blood. But at least I get a second's respite.

The drink is warmly coiling its way around my body and dulling its pain, but I know it's a false friend. I see all the other girls, eyes glassy with drink and drugs. I know they never thought they would end up here either.

“What's your name, Puss?”

I spin round. There's a man resting his shoulder on a concrete pillar. He's huge – but in an athlete's manner, tall and muscular. I have to look up, because my eyes aren't doing anything more than drilling into his chest. “Who –?”

He grins, and a bright white smile beams through the darkness, shockingly intense compared to the dark stubble on his face.

“No fair,” he chuckles in a lilting Irish accent, “I asked first.”

The women's toilets are in a far-off corner of the warehouse, and the precariousness of my situation isn't lost on me. I don't know what this guy's intentions are, but I know he's big enough to pin me against the wall and force himself on me. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be the first to go that way in a place like this.

Would that be so bad?

I don't know where that thought just came from. The guy's dressed in a huge, baggy gray hoodie with a skullcap on his head. He's hardly my type. Well – he's tall and in good shape, and he's got a smile that's sweeping me off my feet, but I don't usually go for dark alley dudes…

I've got a well-developed sense of self preservation. Sue me. As for the whole ‘sweeping me off my feet’ thing? I must be drunk.

“I'm Vince's,” I say through gritted teeth. It's the kind of thing I never thought I’d say, but right now I'm looking for a way out. I'll take whatever I can get. “You know who he is? You don't want to mess with him.”

This guy, in the hoodie, smiles. It wasn't what I was expecting. Even masked by baggy clothes, a hood, a beanie and the makings of a beard, I can tell how handsome he is. I don't get why he's hiding away. Any girl in here would be happy to throw themselves on him.

Anyone, that is, except me.

I think.

“You know me that well, do you now?” He asks, uncrossing his arms and putting his hands in his pockets. It has the effect of opening up his chest and shoulders, and I see how big they really are.

An image of him picking me up and throwing me around flashes through my head, except in there he's naked, and so am I.

“No,” I choke out, then more clearly state “and I think I’m fine with that.” I try and push past him, back towards the throbbing hum of the crowd. In the back of my mind, I know if I stay here too long, Lenny will come looking for me. That's the last thing I want. But gray sweatshirt pushes away from the pillar, and now he's blocking the hallway. There's no way past him.

I'm standing in front of gray sweatshirt, and suddenly there's a fire burning in my blood. My breath's coming out ragged, like I'm trying to hold it back but it's flooding out anyway. I bite my lip, and the taste of copper seasons my tongue.

“Let me through!”

His shit-eating grin stretches even wider across his face. I can tell he's having the time of his life, and it pisses me off. Just because he's having fun, doesn't mean I am!

He's not the one in danger of getting killed or beaten for being a few minutes late. At least he's not acting like it. He’s calm and assured – even when his eyes flicker down towards my barely concealed nipples – and I don't know whether to cover myself or slap him.

“Tell me your name, Puss, and I'll think about it. No promises.”

My legs open of their own accord, and my fists clench. I'm standing in front of him in a boxer's stance, bristling with anger. My brain is screaming at me not to provoke him, not to risk myself – but my body doesn't care – even though it's my body that's at risk. I'm flooded with adrenaline and alcohol, and a whole cocktail of other hormones that I couldn't name if you asked me, and it's all pushing me to do something stupid.

My hand starts rising, flashing through the air. Gray sweatshirt watches it, amused and lazy. He doesn't think I'll do it. I don't blame him. Until it happens, I don't think I'm capable of it either. Hell, until all this started I probably wasn't; but people change.

The slap rings out in the narrow hallway. My palm stings, my shoulder aches from the impact, but gray sweatshirt barely flinches.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” I scream, through gritted teeth. I'm not hurt, I'm angry – because even that didn't wipe that cocky grin off my tormentor's face. And he still doesn't answer my damn question.

“You're sexy when you're angry, you know that Puss?”

I don't know what the hell's happening. I'm not getting the sense that he wants to hurt me – it feels more like a dog playing with a windup toy. When his eyes roam across my mostly-naked body, my feelings differ so much than when Vince does it. The truth is, I kind of like it. There is not a girl in the whole of Boston who wouldn't appreciate a bit of attention from a guy like this.

But – One: I'm not a goddamn toy.

Two: I'm on the clock.

Three: this guy doesn't scare me nearly as much as the mobsters I owe fifteen grand.

I try to run past him. I make myself small and fast, and go as low as possible, hoping it's the last thing he'll expect. It's not. He's faster than any man his size has a right to be. He grabs me with one arm, looping around my body and pinning me to him. The fight streams right out of me.

“Please,” I beg, “I don't know what you want, but I need to go. Lenny will kill me if I'm late.”

Gray sweatshirt's rough hands caress my torso. A prickling heat begins to smolder on every inch of skin he touches. My throat goes dry, and my whole world shrinks to the heat of his body, his sharp, spicy, masculine scent, and the gentle, burning line of his fingers stroking their way down my back.

“Oh, Puss, I think you know exactly what I want,” he says, his voice low and husky. “So you're the one who’s wasting time…”