I unwittingly discover my daughter engaged in an illicit liaison. What I discover shocks me, but rather than stopping it, I find myself transfixed by what I find happening before my eyes.
At 14, Danny should have aged out to a work program in the 1870s from Eli Phillips's Iowa farm orphanage, but Eli takes too much sexual pleasure from the boy. While Eli is absent, his wife, Sarah, sells Danny to male brothel suppliers Meachem and Grant to take Danny west. Danny's goal is California, so he willingly goes with them and serves the men they sell his body to. Landing in Colorado, he's short of his goal, wanting to go to the coast and a man who will love and protect him.
Angela Candelema is a beautiful, intelligent young woman with a smile for everyone and big dreams for the future. Edward Pembroke is a pathetic pervert who can only dream of having a girl like Angela, but who has the means and desires to humiliate and destroy girls like her.
Guido Sarto-Reutter is a fourteen-year old son of a Venetian-Austrian aristocratic family, that, in 1920, is both in poverty and riddled by scandal because both Guido's father and grandfather have, for years, been bedded by a Vienna baron in his castle. Guido is in a Venetian charity school for sons of families in straits like his run by a count who is pimping the boys. Guido has no trouble falling in with this demand, and the count has found a possible buyer for the boy.