Under the Billionaire's Shelter - Jamie Knight Page 0,72

was a mutual erotic behavior, involving people who get off on hurting people who want to be hurt.

For me, it was about having complete control over those who wanted to be controlled, who got a thrill out of being entirely under the power of another whom they trusted not to actually harm them. The distinction between ‘hurt’ and ‘harm’ was extremely important for people like me.

The ads were running everywhere. My online show was getting coverage in traditional media. It was a coup if there ever was one. But I had a history of doing the impossible. The only way to know the limits of the possible is to go past them. It was the secret of my success, as they say.

I was skeptical at first. The studio had come to me rather than the other way around. Basically, their number crunchers had realized I would draw ratings by name alone and my kinks had been an open secret for years, which gave the whole thing a whiff of sex and scandal. A whiff turned into a stench when it came down to the actual format and promotion.

Still, I went with it. The studio tried to pay me, but I turned them down flat. The last thing I needed was more money. It wasn’t even the sex that was the seller. I liked sex quite a bit and wasn’t about to turn my nose up at it, but to be honest, I did quite alright on my own and didn’t need the show to get me women.

The clincher was when the producers allowed me to pay the one million in prize money from my personal account. The CEO, one of my good buddies, agreed to match any donations I made to a charity of my choice. It was likely to upset the shareholders to no end, even with the positive press that would have come had they bothered to promote it in the adverts.

The onus was put on the sex and money aspects. Not that I didn’t understand it. I had learned quite a lot about effective promotion while building my publishing empire from the ground up.

I couldn’t get home fast enough. The workout was a necessity for my sanity, but there was still a lot of work to do before I could rest my weary head. I did my best to doze in the back of the limo.

Once I was in my large, marble tile shower, the water cascaded down like a warm blanket, washing away the work and worry of the day in preparation to pile on more. Life was a cycle more than a straight line. The trick was plotting the pattern so that you knew when a curve was coming along the way.

There was a near plague of silk amongst the rich. I had seen it enough times to know. Silk shirts, silk sheets, silk robes. For the life of me, I’d never understand how the corpses of worms became such a popular fabric. Give me fleece any day of the week.

Wrapped snugly in a high thread count robe made of what else but silk, I opened a bottle of Guinness and headed towards my home office, the very seat of my power, from where I ran my entire empire.

Pushing the button for the automatic blinds, I basked in the cool moonlight as I booted up the custom-built PC tailored for the work I had to do. I used to have a second machine for video games and the like, but an opportunity to use it didn’t come up nearly as often.

A dear friend had gifted me with a first edition of As I Lay Dying by none other than the mighty William Faulkner and that was it. The little bit of free time I had was thereafter dedicated to literature. My freshly built library numbered nearly 1,200 titles, mostly esoteric, all in print, every last one of which I had read from cover to cover at least once.

Digital print may have made up a major part of my business, but I was still an anarchist in some ways. The majority of my similarly extensive record collection was on vinyl.

Likewise, I was really sticking to my guns when it came to what was in the contract for the show. I knew enough about how executives and producers worked not to give them any more control than was absolutely necessary. I wasn’t trying to keep the power for myself so much as preventing the show becoming what