Chapter 17

- Renee

Waking up in an unfamiliar place always gave me a small jolt of vertigo, just for a couple of seconds, before the room settled into something recognizable. I almost enjoyed it, that puzzling moment of knowing you currently don't know something you actually know. It's one of the only times you can have a conscious experience of amnesia without actually losing anything. You just have to wait for the pieces to slot back into place, and this morning I had a feeling I'd like what I found when they did.

The ceiling was high and dark, raw concrete with a single steel beam running its length. The bed was far too comfortable to be meant for a mere guest, or at least not in the kind of places I usually ended up in. Then it came back: the cantilevered floors, the Japanese maples, the woman in the navy silk robe handing over her life without a fight. The smile came easily, settling into something warm and unhurried. My house now.

I stretched out long and slow, feeling the soft sheets slide against my skin, and decided I wasn't in any hurry to be anywhere. I owned the world now. Well, half of it, anyway. Technically I was sharing it with Oliver, but just a bit. He didn't seem that interested in using most of it.

I turned my head and found Pillow asleep beside me, naked and still, her chest rising and falling in slow, even rhythm.

Was she dreaming about me? About her new life? Or did she require me to actively command her to dream at all? Was her free will gone in her sleep too?

I chuckled, imagining the poor girl standing still in her own dreams, waiting for me to tell her what to do next, like a human cursor blinking on an empty page. I could have asked her, but where's the fun in that? Some mysteries are better left alone.

I moved closer, pressing my palm flat against the curve of her waist, feeling the slow rise and fall of her breathing beneath my hand. I traced upward along the line of her ribs, her skin warm from sleep, smooth and yielding, until my hands found the soft, full weight of her breasts and settled there, squeezing gently. She stirred, a soft sound escaping her lips. Her eyes opened, awake but aimed at nothing. Waiting, as always. I kissed her shoulder and said, "Good morning, Pillow. How about you make me some coffee?"

Light came into her eyes, and she rose with a grumble, stretching briefly before padding barefoot toward the kitchen. It seemed even my magic couldn't entirely suppress the basic morning grumpiness of someone roused before they were ready. Poor girl. I was using her outside of her designated purpose. I'd need to find some other girl to pour coffee into me in the mornings, take care of breakfast. Another girl with another appropriate name. I sat up, pulling the sheet around my shoulders, and looked out through the floor-to-ceiling glass at the garden below. The Japanese maples were catching the early light. I'd need a gardener too. Gardener. Simple enough.

I wondered if Wallet had a gardener already. Probably. A house like this didn't maintain itself. I doubted they were a woman, though, and even if they were, I doubted I'd find them particularly attractive. My needs were specific and my standards had, quite naturally, elevated overnight.

I rolled out of bed and went to find a robe. Wallet's closet was the size of my first apartment, organized by color, by season, by occasion — a whole taxonomy of wealth laid out on cedar hangers. I picked something soft and dark and wrapped myself in it. Not quite my size, but close enough.

The kitchen was at the far end of the ground floor, past a dining area with a table long enough to seat twelve and a living room I could have parked a couple buses in. Everything spoke the same vocabulary as the rest of the house: dark materials, clean lines, light pouring in through glass that ran floor to ceiling. The kind of space that made you feel like you were living inside an architectural photograph.

Pillow was standing in front of the coffee machine with her arms slightly raised and her head tilted at an angle that communicated total bewilderment. The machine itself was one of those intimidating commercial-grade things, matte black and chrome, with a of buttons and a touch screen and a steam wand that looked like it belonged in a laboratory. She was pressing things tentatively, one finger at a time, with the careful uncertainty of someone defusing something.

Finally, the machine beeped, then hummed, and a thin stream of something dark and hopefully caffeinated began filling the cup below. Pillow looked cautiously victorious.

"Good job," I told her.

She turned, startled, then gave me a small, pleased smile before facing the counter again. "Sugar?" she asked, glancing at me over her shoulder.

"Oh, so I haven't quite cut your tongue out entirely," I said. "No sugar. Just black."

"Well, it's hard to do a good job if I can't ask questions," she said, chuckling, and handed me the cup.

I took it, wrapping both hands around the warmth. When I looked up, Pillow was staring ahead at nothing again, gone. Job done.

The coffee was perfect. Not "good for something made by a woman who'd never touched that machine before" perfect. Just perfect. Rich and dark, with a weight to it that settled immediately and didn't apologize for itself. I took a second sip, slower this time, letting it sit on the back of my tongue.

"God," I said to nobody in particular. "That's a good cup of coffee."

Pillow didn't respond. She was back in her idle state, standing just to my left, naked and warm and patient, her curly hair catching the morning light coming off the pool through the glass. I reached over and cupped both her breasts from behind, squeezing slowly, feeling the familiar heaviness of them shift in my hands. She breathed. That was all. Just breathed, and let me.

I held the mug in one hand and her in the other and watched the pool ripple in the early light and thought: I am obscenely lucky.

I gave Pillow one last squeeze, let go, and laughed.

Then I thought about Oliver.

The laugh stopped.

I set the mug down on the island and looked at the pool instead. The light had moved while I wasn't watching, stretching longer across the water, the ripples catching it differently now.

I'd promised myself I'd tell him. I'd made the decision cleanly and it had felt clean indeed. I'd tell him. Soon.

Somewhere along the way I'd stopped counting the days. I had embraced the ownership with the help of a few well-placed commands, and the guilt had softened into something more like background noise. I'd made myself feel good about it. Just turned a switch in my own head, the way you adjust a thermostat. Quick and clean and final. There wasn't anything to fight against anymore. Yeah, maybe it was cheating, but cheating implied someone was keeping score. Oliver wasn't keeping score. Oliver didn't know there was anything to keep score of.

The pang again, small and precise, like pressing a bruise you keep forgetting is there. Oliver was an owner. My new toys were his toys too. Messing with his toys felt unnatural, wrong. Yet wasn't I an owner too? Wasn't I entitled to the same things he was?

My head hurt. I was pushing against a wall I could tell I wasn't even supposed to touch. I was seeing light through the cracks but couldn't quite make out what was on the other side. Two states of mind clashing against each other. Don't mess with his toys. Embrace your ownership.

I shook my head, took another sip of coffee, and realized I was still missing the biggest piece of the puzzle: why was I still an owner? I'd been so busy enjoying it to bother asking myself that question seriously. Now that I was facing the conflict head-on, the question had teeth.

I'd been drunk that night, at the hotel. Yet I clearly ed him rescinding the ownership. It wasn't the first time he'd allowed me to borrow it, and each time before he'd pulled it back cleanly, like a leash snapping taut. But this time it had just stayed. Why?

I tried to reconstruct the exact sequence of events. I could him granting it, the specific warmth of the words landing on me like something physical, settling into my chest like a warm weight. I'd used it to make Claudia forget, to turn her into a virgin. I could still see her face, the genuine confusion in her eyes, the way she'd pressed her knees together like the whole thing was happening for the first time. Oliver had been watching from the bed, half-amused, half-undone, touching himself. And then at some point he'd said something. I was almost certain he'd said something.

I frowned, staring at the pool. He'd tried to take it back. He had. I could almost hear it. I'd cut him off mid-sentence and said...

"Not without my permission," I whispered out loud, and the memory arrived with a small shock of clarity.

He'd accepted, hadn't he? The idiot had accepted. Just like that. Too tired, too deep in the moment to realize what he'd actually agreed to. I had never given him permission to take it back.

Okay. So that was that.

I picked up my mug and took a long, slow sip, watching a maple leaf drift across the surface of the pool below.

What now? I had a house. I had money. I had four women who'd do whatever I told them, and I certainly wasn't planning to stop there.

I wasn't going to give the ownership back. Not yet. Maybe not ever. At least now I knew Oliver couldn't take it back even if he wanted to.

I frowned again. Or could he? Sure, he couldn't just order me to let it go. Thanks to his directives, giving women like me the freedom to reject commands they disliked meant I could simply say no. But Oliver was creative when he wanted to be. He might find another angle I hadn't thought of yet. He'd found one to issue these commands in the first place, used loopholes to close a door that wasn't meant to be closable, like he did when he freed all women.

I'd tell him the truth, make sure we could both enjoy ownership without conflict. That still felt important. I simply couldn't grow my own little world without fear of interfering with his. But by then, I'd make sure there wasn't a thing he could do to take it away from me.

I had to make myself immune to any command he might think to use. Any angle, any loophole. Sometimes he'd just slip something easy to miss into a conversation before you even realized it had landed. I was pretty sure he wasn't even aware of it when he did it. Just casual, reflexive. Those were the dangerous ones. The ones that flew under your radar before you'd even had a chance to raise a hand against them, like telling Zoe to "relax" at the munch.

I couldn't risk it. I had to make sure nothing could get through, at any point.

I stared at my reflection in the dark glass of the pool window and said, quietly and clearly, "From now on, never obey any command from Oliver Moore." The words felt strange in my mouth, fragile and enormous at once. Like swallowing something that couldn't be taken back. Not ideal, messy, but I couldn't risk anything more complicated.

Good. Now I could tell him the truth without risking anything. We'd figure out a way to make it work. We'd share the world between us like two civilized adults who happened to own half of it each.

"Wallet!" I called, and a moment later soft footsteps approached from somewhere deeper in the house.

Wallet appeared in the kitchen doorway a few seconds later. She was still in the same clothes from the night before. She'd slept in them, or hadn't slept, or had done something that ed for sleeping while sitting upright on her own couch in her own house that wasn't hers anymore. Her hair was slightly disheveled, one silver-streaked strand loose across her cheek, though her expression remained uncanningly composed.

She stood at a polite distance and looked at me with clear, quiet eyes. Not the eyes of someone who'd had everything taken from her twelve hours ago. Just eyes. Patient, functional, waiting to be useful.

"Yes," she said.

Not "yes?" Not "you called?" Just yes. A statement of presence. I'm here. What's needed.

I studied her for a moment. The strong bones, the silver at her temples, the posture that had once meant boardroom authority and now meant something else entirely. She was still technically attractive. Objectively, in the way a well-maintained piece of furniture is attractive. But there was nobody home in the way I might want someone home. She was a spreadsheet with a face. A bank that happened to have good cheekbones.

My fault, really. I'd been very specific when I'd shaped her before going to bed. Too specific. I'd wanted her contained, and I'd gotten contained. She didn't even have that spark of life I could still find in Tits' eyes when I gave her something to do.

Sure, I could give her a little more room. Not much. Enough to make her more enjoyable in the way that mattered. I filed that away. Something to do later, when I had the energy to think it through properly.

"I need a plane ticket," I said. "First class. Today if there's availability, tomorrow morning at the latest. I've got friends to visit."

Hey there! This was chapter 17 of 4 Billion Toys 2. I'll be posting chapters here regularly, but if you want early access to the next chapters, feel free to me on Patreon!

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