The man had been waiting on the bed, almost expressionless, looking out of place. She came over and sat beside him as she’d been trained, and took his hand.

“Do you speak English?” he asked.

“I do.”

“Do you read it?”

He palmed a note into her hand and she looked down. It was a folded piece of paper. “Read it later,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s help,” he said, and his eyes slid away from hers. It was almost as if he was ashamed of himself.

A good actor, she thought. “What do you want me to do?”

“Read the note.”

“No,” she said. “Now. What do you want me to do now?”

His face creased with pain. “Can you dance?”

She put the note deep in one of her slippers as she undressed for him. He was strange, but many of them were strange. Uncertain of themselves, wanting to be led, needing permission to vault out of their guilt so they could have what they’d paid for. Only Duffy and Brennan had taken her for a whole week and had availed themselves of every vile impulse they had. But the rest could not say what they wanted; some did not know, even. Only their lusts overcame their horror at themselves. So many of them, she could see, could never have had a woman the way they wanted, unless they paid. Here, no one could say no to them. That’s what this place was: a place where you got what you asked for, no matter how romantic, no matter how depraved. The girls had been trained to please. Even when there was just a couple of them, one was always coiffed and made up and glassy-eyed with vodka, and the other was starving. There was demand for both. The ones in the dresses, who sometimes slept on the upstairs beds, eventually made the transition to broken-down and filthy. The ones who started beautiful would tell the ones who didn’t that it was better to be beautiful, just like in the real world. For the ones earmarked for abuse and torture, it was always good to be a little beautiful, but also not too capable of putting up a fight. Their men had agendas. Some of the girls didn’t come back.

The man, who told her his name was Henry, didn’t want to go to bed. So she danced for him and he watched with a paralyzed expression on his features. She danced for him, telling him if he wasn’t pleased, she would be punished. After fifteen minutes had expired, he knocked on the door to leave. Gene had come on shift and he regarded this “Henry” with a sly look, saying he must have been desperate if he only lasted a quarter of an hour. And Larysa had been taken back to her room in the dungeonlike space below the bedrooms.

She took the note out when she was securely locked in her cubicle.

My name is Henry. A man you know as Caleb Merton came to me. He is a friend of mine. He gambles, and he came here, but he didn’t know what was really going on here. I will come back tomorrow. I will help all of you if I can.

Her heart had sped at reading these words, but she knew well enough not to trust what she was told or what things seemed. There was no limit to the depravity of the men who had found this place. If he came back, she would see what he was made of.

She kept the note to herself, reading and rereading it that night. Right now, there were two others down in the dirt-walled “dorms” where the girls were kept when they were not upstairs, servicing the paying customers. Timmy was no longer there: she had been delivered up to someone for their personal use. That, or she was gone. Bochko took girls back sometimes, as he had already done once with Timmy. If a girl needed to be disciplined, they became Bochko’s wife for a period. Larysa had heard that sometimes the girls who were punished did not come back. But Timmy had come back once; maybe she would again.

At night, they pressed their mouths against the dents in the dirt where there was space at the ends of the walls and talked. No one knew how it had all begun; none of the original girls were still here. But the one who had been there the longest knew what had happened to some of them, and knew what would happen to most of them. Her name was Cherry. The other one was called Star. They had shared their real names as well, which they kept like secret coins and never used. There was a form of communal knowledge they had that had been passed down. They knew that above them was a farmhouse on a country road that no one lived on for five or six kilometres in either direction. Only three rooms in the rear of the house were in use: a living room, a bedroom, and a sort of guestroom that looked like an office. The casino itself was down the mouldy-smelling tunnel they brought them through blindfolded if they ever had to take a girl out. They had dug out the back of the house’s basement into the raw dirt and made the three cubicles there as well as a fourth, big enough to hold all three of them. It had come down through the broken telephone that the machines used for the job had been “borrowed” at night from a construction site at a town nearby. But no one knew if that was true or not. It was hard to imagine how this place had been built, but clearly the ground had never been broken in the open. Imagine creating this place in secret, Larysa thought. But this part was a house, which meant there was an exit to the outside closer than the one at the end of the tunnel.

The capacity of the downstairs pen was four; they could manage four girls at a time. If one vanished, another would appear to take her place. Larysa had replaced the one called Gina. Gina had been another of Bochko’s favourites. Cherry had already expressed her belief that Bochko chose which girl he wanted and then set her a test she would fail. Then she’d have to be punished.

As he’d promised (or threatened), the man called Henry came back the next day. This time, Gene was on duty. He let her into the room where Henry waited for her. Now he was in the bedroom, proper, with its high, four-poster bed. The wall that she presumed had once held a window had been planked up with gypsum.

She stood as far away from him as the room would allow, staring at him. He looked harmless to her now; his expression was of honest concern. Finally, she sat on the end of the bed and motioned with her head that he should sit as well.

“Did you read my note?”

“There is no reason to save me,” she said.

“You want to be here?”

“We have to be careful,” she said, “they are watching us.” She slid forward off the end of the bed and kneeled in front of him, spreading his legs. She undid his belt and she had to hold him down on the bed with her forearms to keep his whole body from shooting forward off the mattress. She clasped his thighs hard and said, “Don’t move.”

“Please, I –”

He had responded to her touch. He couldn’t hide that he was like all the others. She lay her hand in his lap. “How do you think you can help?”

“I can get the police to come. Just tell me how many girls are down here. Who has weapons and how many are there?”

She laughed inwardly. Bochko would kill her for just telling the number of girls. “I know nothing,” she said.

“I won’t hurt you, Kitty. But I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.” Her eyes were briefly on his. “Upstairs, they were bidding on others. Where are the other girls?”

“There is no other girls. There is only me.”

“Jordie – Caleb – said he was asked if he had a preference …”

“There is only me,” she said.

“I have to call the police.”

She raised her head off his lap. His face hovered like the moon against the dark ceiling. She felt cocooned with him. “If you tell police, I will be dead before they come. I promise you this. At first trouble, they shoot.” She felt him tense up beneath her again. “How I can trust you? Huh?”

He lowered his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “What am I doing here?”

“I thought you are saving my life. You want? To save my life?”