Rose Meadows was a stripper. She didn’t want to be a stripper, she had never intended to be one, but that was the way things were and there was nothing she could do about it. If there was one thing life had taught her in the ten long years since her father’s brutal death, it was that you couldn’t always control what happened in your life. There were other forces at play, dark forces, and they often had the last word over your destiny.

Rose had never spoken to anyone about what had happened to her. She didn’t tell people how she’d ended up in this place and how it made her feel, she didn’t talk about the nightmares that would keep her up in the middle of the night in a blind panic. Who would she have spoken to? She had no one. She was as isolated and alone as a young girl could be.

But if she had been able to talk to someone about it she would have said that along with the humiliation and the embarrassment of being forced to strip every day, there was also a feeling of power to it. There was an intense thrill to being up on the stage in front of all those men. There was a lustful sort of pleasure to being the center of their attention, to having all those hungry eyes feasting on the exquisite details of her body, lusting after her beauty, desiring to touch her, to be touched by her. She had learned that as with so many other things, there was a tainted pleasure to the pain.

When the lights came on and the music started there was nowhere else in the world that could give her that thrill, that sense of being wanted and adored, as the stage of the strip club. Despite everything that had happened to her, the terrible chain of events that had led her life to this desolate place, dancing gave her a rush of adrenaline like nothing she’d ever experienced. And while she deeply hated the men who had taken her to this place, who had reduced her to near slavery, she never transferred that hatred onto her customers. She bore no ill feeling toward the men who came in to watch her dance. In this place, this isolated, desolate bar at the very ends of the earth, the customers were the only friends she had.

If there was someone to talk to, and if she was being completely honest, she would have said that sometimes she even liked dancing. She didn’t know if that was something she should have been ashamed of, she was being forced to dance in the sleaziest, most sordid bar imaginable, under the very worst conditions, but that was the truth. She kind of liked it. And after all she’d been through, all the horrible things that still happened to her on a near daily basis, she needed something that gave her pleasure. If it wasn’t for the dancing, she would not have survived.

She knew it would come as a shock to most people. They’d be surprised to learn that a stripper could actually enjoy her job. Most people thought of dancers as the very lowest of the low, the very bottom of the social order. They thought of dancers as the poor, desperate and naive girls that they so often were. And they thought of them as whores.