The Price of Pleasure: The Proposal. The Price of Pleasure, #1

Sebastian's life runs on a quiet, manageable script. A dental school scholarship. An Italian restaurant booked for Thursday night. A velvet box with two gold bands and the best intentions a young man can carry. He is ordinary in the most tender sense of the word - steady, responsible, quietly romantic - and he believes that steadiness is enough to hold the future in place. Then, in the span of a single evening, the script is torn apart.
His mother collapses. The diagnosis is leukemia. His father loses his job. The ring stays in his pocket, and the restaurant feels very far away. Broke, desperate, and unwilling to let his family drown quietly, Sebastian finds his way to the Narcissus Model Agency through a silver card he'd nearly forgotten. Otávio, the agency's enigmatic director, sees immediately what Sebastian cannot yet name in himself - and offers him something that has nothing to do with runways or university drawing classes.
The proposition is darker, more intimate, and infinitely more lucrative. Sebastian accepts without fully understanding what he is agreeing to. His first client goes by one name: Imperial. Behind the locked doors of a luxury penthouse, Sebastian encounters a man who defies every expectation - powerful yet fractured, demanding yet curiously vulnerable, willing to pay for proximity but desperate for something far less transactional.
What begins as an arrangement rooted entirely in necessity slowly tilts into something neither man has language for. And as the lies Sebastian tells his family multiply and his double life stretches thin, one question presses harder with each passing day: what is a man willing to become in order to save the people he loves?