Inheritance
"His father's will left everything to her. Including him."
The lawyer reads the will in a voice like rust.
"...all physical assets, properties, and holdings to my wife, Vivian Cross-Ashford. Including—" He pauses, clears his throat. "Including my son, Marcus, whose citizenship contract I hereby transfer in full."
The room goes silent.
I stare at the lawyer. Then at Vivian—my stepmother of six years, sitting across the mahogany table in a black dress that strains against curves I've spent those six years trying not to notice.
"That's not possible," I manage. "He can't—I'm not—"
"In the Neo-London corporate zone, citizenship contracts are transferable property." The lawyer won't meet my eyes. "Your father purchased your contract from the state when you turned eighteen. He had full legal authority to bequeath it as he saw fit."
"But I'm his son."
"Stepson." Vivian's voice is honey over steel. "No blood relation. Perfectly legal."
I turn to look at her. She's watching me with those dark eyes—the eyes I've caught watching me for years, when she thought I wasn't paying attention. The eyes that followed me across rooms, lingered on my body, made me feel things I buried so deep I almost forgot they existed.
She's fifty-two years old. Thick in ways that make furniture creak and men stare. Her skin is pale cream, her hair a cascade of auburn threaked with grey, her body a landscape of curves that her mourning dress can barely contain.
And now she owns me.
"Everyone out," she says.
The lawyers flee.
The door closes with a sound like a coffin lid.
Vivian doesn't move from her chair. Just sits there, watching me, one manicured hand resting on the armrest while the other toys with the strand of pearls at her throat.
"You knew," I say. "You knew he was going to do this."
"I suggested it."
The words hit like a slap.
"Why?"
"Because I've wanted you since the day I married your father." She says it simply, without shame. "Six years, Marcus. Six years of watching you grow from a boy into a man. Six years of pretending I didn't see you looking at me when you thought I wasn't paying attention."
My face burns. "I never—"
"Don't." Her voice sharpens. "Don't lie to me. I saw you. In the hallway, when I came out of the shower. At dinner, when I wore something low-cut. At the pool, when I bent over to pick up my towel." She smiles, slow and predatory. "You watched. You wanted. And you hated yourself for it."
I can't deny it. Can't pretend that I haven't spent six years in a special kind of hell, living in the same house as a woman who made my blood burn with a desire I was never supposed to feel.
"So you asked my father to give me to you like furniture?"
"I asked him to give me the one thing I wanted that money couldn't buy." She rises from her chair, and I'm reminded again of how much of her there is. She moves toward me, and I smell her perfume—dark roses, expensive musk—and something underneath that's just her. "Your father was a cold man, Marcus. Calculating. He married me for my family's connections and I married him for his money. We both got what we wanted."
"And me? What am I?"
"You're my reward." She stops in front of me, close enough to touch. "For six years of a loveless marriage. For smiling at his parties and warming his bed and pretending I didn't feel dead inside. Your father knew. He knew exactly what I wanted. And in the end—perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of cruelty—he gave it to me."
I should run.
The thought pulses through my head even as my feet stay rooted to the floor. I should fight the will. Should find a lawyer. Should do anything except stand here while my stepmother looks at me like I'm something to be devoured.
But I don't move.
Because she's right. I did watch. I did want. And every time I hated myself for it, the wanting only grew stronger.
"What happens now?" My voice comes out rough.
"That depends on you." She reaches up, traces one finger along my jaw. I shudder. "I own your contract, which means I can do whatever I want with you. Sell you. Loan you out. Keep you locked in a room until I decide I want you."
"Or?"
"Or you can accept this." Her hand slides down to my chest, rests over my pounding heart. "Stop fighting what you feel. Stop pretending it's wrong. Your father is dead, Marcus. There's no one left to disappoint. No one left to perform for. Just you. And me. And six years of hunger that we've both been too afraid to feed."
"You're my stepmother."
"I'm a woman who wants you." She leans closer, her breath warm against my ear. "And you're a man who wants me. Everything else is just words."
She kisses me.
I've imagined this moment more times than I can count.
Late nights in my room, hating myself while my hand moved and her image burned behind my eyes. Mornings when she came down to breakfast in a robe that showed too much, and I had to leave the table before anyone noticed. Years of denial, of shame, of pretending that the most intense desire I'd ever felt was something to be suppressed.
None of my fantasies came close to reality.
She kisses like she's claiming territory. Her mouth is soft and demanding, her tongue sliding against mine while her hands fist in my shirt. She's not gentle about it—she's hungry, starving, making up for six years of starvation in a single moment.
I kiss her back.
Something breaks open inside me. All the guilt, all the shame, all the wrong that I've carried for years—it doesn't disappear, but it transforms. Becomes fuel. Becomes fire.
She's my stepmother. She's twice my age. She owns me now, literally and legally.
And I don't care.
"Vivian—"
"Call me what you used to call me." Her voice is rough. "When you were alone. When you touched yourself and thought of me."
I know what she means. The shameful, secret name I used in the darkness of my room, the name that made the taboo even more intense.
"Mother."
She moans against my mouth.
We don't make it upstairs.
We fuck on the floor of my dead father's study, surrounded by his books and his awards and the cold monuments to a life that never had room for warmth. Vivian pulls me down onto the Persian rug—worth more than most apartments—and strips me with hands that shake with six years of need.
"I used to imagine this," she gasps, pulling off her own dress, revealing more and more of the body I've dreamed about. Heavy breasts spilling from black lace. The soft curve of her belly. Thick thighs that spread wide as she pulls me between them. "Every time your father touched me, I closed my eyes and imagined it was you."
"That's fucked up."
"I know." She grips my face, makes me look at her. "I know it's fucked up. I know this is wrong. I know you should hate me for doing this. But I can't—I can't pretend anymore. Not now that you're mine."
I should hate her. Should feel used, violated, manipulated.
Instead, I thrust inside her, and she cries out—my name, not my father's, never his—and everything I've been denying for six years floods through me like a dam breaking.
She's wet and hot and she feels like coming home to a place I never knew existed.
She teaches me her body like it's a sacred text.
Where to touch. How to move. The spots that make her gasp and the ones that make her scream. She's not shy about what she wants—after six years of waiting, she has no patience for guessing games.
"Harder," she demands, her thick thighs locked around my waist. "I'm not going to break, Marcus. Harder."
I give her harder.
I give her everything I've been hoarding for six years. Every shameful fantasy, every suppressed urge, every moment I lay awake wanting something I thought I could never have.
She takes it all.
When she comes—and she comes three times before I finally let myself follow—she looks up at me with those dark eyes and says the words that rewrite everything I thought I knew about myself.
"Good boy."
After, we lie tangled on the ruined rug.
My father's portrait watches from the wall. I don't care.
"This is insane," I say.
"Yes."
"I should be fighting the will. Getting my freedom back. Not—"
"Not lying in your stepmother's arms, covered in sweat, already getting hard again at the thought of round two?" She laughs, low and satisfied. "You could fight it. I'd let you. I don't actually want a slave, Marcus. I want a partner."
"A partner who you legally own."
"A formality." She traces patterns on my chest. "I'll sign whatever paperwork you want. Give you your freedom, your inheritance, your independence. All you have to do is ask."
"And if I don't ask?"
"Then you stay." Her hand drifts lower. "Here. With me. In this obscene, fucked-up arrangement that we both know we want."
I catch her wrist. Meet her eyes.
"I should feel guilty."
"Do you?"
I search myself for the shame, the horror, the revulsion that should be there.
It's not.
"No," I admit. "I don't."
"Neither do I." She kisses me, soft and slow. "Your father spent six years making us both miserable. Call this our revenge. Call it whatever helps you sleep. But don't call it wrong, Marcus. We've wasted enough time on that already."
I stay.
Not because she owns me—she signs the contract over to me within the week, makes me a free citizen with a full inheritance. Not because I have nowhere else to go—I have money now, options, a whole world of possibilities.
I stay because I want to.
Because every morning I wake up next to a woman who looks at me like I'm the answer to a question she's been asking for years. Because every night she shows me new ways to worship her body, new depths of the hunger we share. Because the thing I spent six years being ashamed of turns out to be the thing that makes me feel most alive.
"People will talk," I say one morning, months later. "When we go public."
"Let them." She pulls me back into bed. "I've spent my whole life caring what people think. It made me marry a man I didn't love and spend six years dying inside. I'm done with that."
"What do you want now?"
She straddles me—all two hundred and fifty pounds of her, thick thighs spread across my hips, heavy breasts swaying as she leans down.
"I want you," she says. "Every way I can have you. For as long as you'll let me."
"And if that's forever?"
She smiles—slow, wicked, absolutely certain.
"Then we'd better get started."
I pull her down onto me.
And somewhere in Neo-London, in a mansion built on cold money and colder love, something warm and living blooms between the shadows.
My father gave her everything.
But I'm the only inheritance that matters.