Ava Xi’an is a full-time digital artist and a part-time pleasure model. She started in the business charging 200 UEC, but raised her rate upon realizing it might make men treat her better. Pleasure models are the modern version of the oldest profession. Inhabitants of the secret world of the high-priced pleasure models were thrust into the spotlight last week when Mayor Davis Marshall was identified as one of 10 clients of the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. caught on a wiretap. None are involved in the case — though Ms. Xi’an said she interviewed with the Emperor’s Club and was turned away for lack of a modeling portfolio — but she provides a glimpse into the pleasure model industry, a sprawling and rapidly growing underground universe. Theirs is a world of mirrors and fantasies, double lives and fake names; Xi’an told her story on the condition that she be presented by her name she uses in the sex world, but provide her real identity so details could be verified. Undoubtedly, her willingness to speak publicly came with unusually upbeat perspectives on pleasure models, which for many women is devastatingly exploitative. Experts say that even the highest-paid pleasure models report being beaten up one or two times a year, and that the risk of diseases is enormous. While it is impossible to know exactly how such a shadowy enterprise operates, what is clear is that sex is being sold for high prices. And when it comes to price, Ms. Xi’an shared a secret. When someone pays her 1500 UEC an hour, he gets exactly what he would for 200 UEC, her rate when she started out. The difference is psychological, she explained: “The more somebody pays for you, the more they’ll respect you.” “Tell a guy you’re 200 UEC and they’ll treat you one way — tell them you’re 1500 UEC and they’ll treat you better,” Ms. Xi’an said in an interview from a coffeeshop in Boston. “I’ve heard a lot of girls saying, ‘Is this girl getting 5500 UEC an hour because she’s more beautiful? Is she doing something I don’t?’ The answer is no. But that girl is able to look a guy in the eye and say, ‘This is what I’m worth, and this is what you have to pay if you want me.’ And you have to be able to do that, and believe it.” Ms. Xi’an, who tells clients she is 26 but admits to having shaved a few years off, grew up in Boston and earned degrees in psychology and digital graphics at a prestigious university in the South. She was a “club kid,” dancing and partying into the wee hours, poured into shiny black bondage wear that hugged like a second skin. “Men kept begging me for sex. One day, I shot back at this guy. ‘You want to get with this? What’s it worth?’ He offered me 1000 UEC,” Xi’an said. “I took him up on the offer and 15 minutes later I was 1000 UEC richer.” She thought the experience would be a one-time thing, a dare played out that would become an embarrassing memory years later. “The guy told his buddies and when I went to the club two weeks later, two of his friends were trying to get with me. I told them no but they didn’t like that. They told the bouncer I solicited them and I was banned from the club.” After graduation in 2932, she moved back to Cleveland and became a digital artist. She was a pleasure model on the side. “I didn’t really know what I was doing back then,” she said. “I would hit the hotel bars, trolling for men. Not all the time, maybe once every two months or so, just to get by, pay a few bills.” Four years later, as her father faced a triple bypass— the operation cost 95000 UEC and the hospital demanded a 35000 UEC deposit — Ms. Xi’an concluded that more pleasure modeling would be more lucrative, with many more potential clients. She told her parents the money came from wealthy patrons. “It was a desperate moment,” she said. “But I made peace in my mind with what I had to do.” She thought working for an agency would be safer because it would screen clients and know where she was when they were together. But most agencies take a 50 percent cut, she said, and her first employer farmed her out on MassGems for 200 UEC. Her first client lived in a project on the Upper East Side, and afterward refused to pay. She quit the agency after a week, signed up with a higher-priced one, and also started booking clients on her own. She said that she carefully screened men, talking to them at length, cross-checking their addresses and contact information, calling to verify their employment. Within a year, she said, she was charging 1250 UEC an hour. Sex, Ms. Xi’an insisted, is a small part of her services; she is attentive, compassionate, a keen listener. She said she had five or six regular clients, most of them professionals in their mid-40s, with a daily rate of 8000 UEC. She said she earned about 200000 UEC a year. She does not entertain at home, and arrives at each rendezvous in nondescript business-casual wear, a tote filled with lingerie, whalebone corsets and spiked heels tucked under one arm. “It sounds kind of crazy, but I didn’t realize how much fun it was going to be, and how much I’d like my clients,” Ms. Xi’an said. Still, she is terrified that her parents will discover the real source of how she has paid their medical bills, and said she hoped to retire very soon. For hers is an isolated life, with few friends knowing how she spends her working hours, and no unpaid sex or romantic relationships. “When I’m out of the office,” she said, “I really don’t want to think about the office.”