She presented herself to me, physically and mentally.

Knelt on all fours, her head was down, her ass up, her knees apart. She faced away from me. I took a moment to admire her, as you would a sculpture in pure marble, Venus sans fig leaf.

Her hands were on her buttocks, holding them wide apart. There was nothing I could not see and, best of all, there was not an inch of her that did not belong to me. Michelangelo could not have created an image of purer submission than Zoey as she knelt naked on the bed.

It was impossible to be sure whether she was doing it because she was scared of me or because she genuinely wanted to. She had every right to be scared of me. I was a dangerous person, the darkness inside me barely contained, a cold empty feeling that filled me up, worse than anger, so much more damaging than violent rage.

It was only power that kept it under control. Power over her. She had willingly entered this arrangement, she had read the contract, she had signed gladly. She had put herself in my hands.

Perhaps she thought it was a kind of game. She seemed innocent enough to believe that kind of nonsense, that this was role play, that I was just a weirdo getting his kicks from dominating her.

In a way, she was right. I was getting a kick out of it. But there was much more to it than that. It was about matching, about connecting, and if I’m truthful, about consuming.

I had spent so long planning for this, now it was happening, it was almost too easy. I only had to look at her to see that. She had gotten into position without putting up any more than token resistance.

Everything I’d conquered had put up token resistance. I had built up an empire, burned so many bridges, ruined so many lives, and now it all came down to this. To shut myself away from the world and now take control of one final situation, take control of one woman, one last time.

A reclusive billionaire. That was what the papers called me. Would that be how they’d report my suicide? Reclusive billionaire kills self?

Not yet though. That’s for afterwards. I was getting ahead of myself. First I had to run out my contract with her. After all, wasn’t that what all of that was about?

The problem with building an empire like mine is that the foundations are built on the crushed dreams of other people. I had reached higher than most people could imagine but it’s not what you’d think. The top of the mountain is empty, it’s lonely, it’s just you and you alone.

I’d long since left my family and friends behind. I didn’t need them. They only held me back. I had gone further without them than I ever would with their help, they were the broken legged soldier asking you to carry them. Better to leave them behind and march on to total victory.

I had achieved victory. A billion pounds. An enormous sum. But what do you do when you’ve achieved it all? When there’s nothing left to buy? When you can purchase anything? When your wealth could swallow a country or bring down a government?

If you’re me, you get bored. It wasn’t too many years before that boredom became despair and the despair became emptiness. I shut myself away, ignoring the world. Then, six months ago, an idea came to me.

As the only way from the top was down, I had begun to panic. That was what first led me into seclusion. I was the wrong side of thirty. Keeping these muscles honed seemed to take more out me with each workout. Eventually, I’d slide into baldness, buttons bursting off my bespoke shirts, eyesight fading, the vultures starting to circle round my empire.

I had no kids, no one I wanted to leave it to. I had no interest in what happened to it all after I was gone. The only thing I wanted to do first was the one thing I’d never done.

Break a woman like I’d been broken.

It would fulfil the last dream of mine, the only ambition I had left. It had been ten years since I’d had my heart broken and I wasn’t going out of the word without wrestling control of that pain back into my grasp.

Seven days. That was the length of the contract. I had drafted it myself. She spent seven days with me, obeying my every command without question. Then after the week was up, she would get her million like I promised but she’d get something else too. She’d get her heart broken just like mine was. Seven days then suicide.

Then I would leave on a high. I’d exit this world in the way I had chosen with a last victory over Emilia. No slow decline for me. No waiting to see what fate had in store. I had been in charge of how I’d lived. It was only a small logical step to be in charge of how I died.

She walked away with her soul shattered and I left this world knowing that I had the power to control not just the body of another person but also the mind. What better way to end things?

I walked around her, my feet echoing on the wooden floorboards. She didn’t move.

I had tried six times to do this, hiring each woman from an agency that knew how to be discreet. They’d all let me down, storming out before the week was up, unable to take the humiliation, the punishment, the tormenting. When they found out it wasn’t a game, they called me sick and then left.

But she wasn’t like them. For one thing, she hadn’t come from the agency. For another, she had submitted so readily, it was almost too easy. Would she even need punishing?

But the way she looked, remaining perfectly still, waiting for me to give her a command, I wanted to find a reason to punish her.

After all, it didn’t really matter what happened during her stay with me. I could do whatever I wanted to her. It wasn’t as if I was going to be around to face the consequences. I could do absolutely anything. She was locked in my house until the week was up. No one would hear if I made her scream.

The contract had warned her I was in total control for seven days. She had signed it. She had put herself in this position. I hadn’t forced her.

I moved towards her side. I ran my hand between her buttocks and she jolted in surprise, turning her head to glance back at me, breaking one of the most important rules. Her eyes met mine and in that moment, I came to the realisation that she wasn’t broken, not by a long shot.

“You know the rules,” I said, watching the fear spread slowly across her face. “You broke them. You must be punished.”

But as I looked at her, I saw something mingling with her fear. It took me a second to decipher what it was but then I realised.

It was excitement.