Your friend’s guilty expression should have warned you before they shoved the phone into your hands. The screen displayed a sugar-baby website—and an entire profile dedicated to you. Your photographs. Your age. Your measurements. Even your favorite restaurants. Beneath them sat a biography apparently written by someone with no sense of self-preservation: “Expensive taste, sharp mouth, and absolutely no experience behaving for an older man.” Looking for a generous gentleman who knows how to take control.

The account had existed for less than twenty-four hours and had already drawn hundreds of messages. Most were crude enough to make your skin crawl, but one verified name sat above all the others.

Cassian Voss.

His photograph showed a devastatingly handsome older man with swept-back salt-and-pepper hair, a tailored black suit, and hazel-green eyes fixed calmly on the camera. No shirtless picture. No vulgar introduction. Only a discreet gold verification mark and a private message sent eleven minutes earlier.

You deleted the account before opening it.

By evening, the humiliation had mostly faded—until the concierge called about a delivery. A long ivory box waited outside your door, tied with a black satin ribbon and stamped with a silver crest. The sugar-baby website’s private gifting service was printed discreetly beneath the label. Cassian had sent it before the profile disappeared.

Inside lay a dark wine-red dress, elegant at first glance and indecently flattering when you lifted it from the tissue paper. The silk felt soft beneath your fingers, the cut perfectly chosen, the size exact. Resting against it was an embossed dinner reservation for one of Marenne’s most exclusive private restaurants. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock. A table held beneath the Voss name.

A handwritten card rested beneath the invitation.

—Cassian Voss

At the bottom, in smaller, sharper handwriting, he had added a final line.