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Chapter 1
Chapter 1 – The Winning Ticket
Marcus Rowe had never won anything in his life.
Not the spelling bee in fifth grade, not the faculty chili cook-off, not even the fifty-fifty raffle at the VFW. So when Principal Delgado’s voice crackled over the intercom on the last Friday in April—“Congratulations to Mr. Marcus Rowe, winner of the Elysian Fields charity weekend!”—Marcus actually looked over his shoulder to see if someone was pranking him.
The faculty lounge erupted. Someone slapped his back hard enough to rattle the vending machine. Marcus managed a stunned laugh, cheeks burning. Elysian Fields. Even in central Illinois, people whispered about the place: five-star kink resort hidden in the Ozarks, invitation-only, the kind of weekend that cost more than his yearly salary and still had a two-year waitlist. And he’d won it with a five-dollar raffle ticket sold by the sophomore cheerleaders to fund new uniforms.
He spent the rest of the day floating. Students asked if he was sick; his AP US History kids swore he smiled during their pop quiz on the Teapot Dome scandal, which was basically a medical emergency.
That night he sat alone in the small bungalow he’d shared with Sarah until cancer stole her three years ago. The house still smelled faintly of her lavender candles. He poured two fingers of bourbon—the good stuff he saved for parent-teacher conferences that went sideways—and stared at the embossed ticket on the coffee table.
One weekend. Private cabin, meals, full access to every room, class, and scene Elysian Fields offered.
No plus-one required.
No judgment allowed.
He almost threw the ticket away. Sarah had been vanilla in the sweetest, most generous way; they’d never even experimented with fuzzy handcuffs. The idea of walking into a place built for power exchange made his stomach knot with equal parts guilt and curiosity.
But Sarah’s voice drifted through his head the way it still did sometimes, soft and certain: “You’re thirty-four, not dead, Marcus. Live a little.”
So he packed a suitcase, printed the confirmation, and two weeks later found himself buckled into seat 17A on a puddle-jumper to Springfield, Missouri, heartbeat thudding like a teenager’s.
The flight was half-empty. He stowed his bag, accepted a ginger ale from the attendant, and tried to read. The words blurred. Every time the plane banked, he caught his reflection in the window—dark hair too long, wire-rimmed glasses, the permanent five-o’clock shadow that made seniors call him “Professor Sexy” behind his back. He looked like exactly what he was: a nice, slightly lonely high-school teacher who graded essays on the weekends.
When the seat-belt sign dinged off, he reached into his jacket for his phone and felt something sharp. A single black feather—raven, judging by the iridescent sheen—lay in his pocket like it had grown there. Wrapped around the quill was a thin strip of crimson ribbon. On it, in scarlet lipstick:
Come find me. I dare you.
No name. No number. Just the faint trace of expensive perfume—oud and something darker.
Marcus turned the feather over in his fingers the rest of the flight, pulse skittering every time the plane hit turbulence. Someone on this flight knew who he was. Someone had slipped into his pocket while he was distracted at the gate. Someone was already playing.
He tucked the feather into his shirt pocket, right over his heart, and watched the Ozark hills rise to meet him.
