Chapter 71 Coast.

Chapter 71: 71 Coast.

"Oh," he said simply. "I see."

"Do you?" I pressed.

"Budget concerns?" he asked, shifting his tone from sales pitch to practical assessment.

"A bajillion dollars," I replied flatly. "Assume no budget limitations whatsoever."

Bradley nodded emphatically, his demeanor completely transformed. "Last question then." He looked to his left, then his right, then leaned in and spoke in a husky half-whisper. "You with the FBI? You have to tell me if you’re a cop."

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but Lord help me, I was along for the ride. "Fuck the man."

Bradley beamed at me with approval and smiled. "Right this way, sir," he said, leading us toward the back of the showroom. "I’m gonna knock your fuckin’ dick off."

I made cautious eye contact with my girls, but we followed him past the standard displays into a curtained-off section marked "The Omega Project." Once inside, Bradley checked to ensure no other customers had followed, then pulled a cord to close the curtains behind us.

"What I’m about to show you isn’t advertised—not here, not anywhere," he said in a lowered voice. "This is a specialized mattress developed by Russian scientists in response to NASA’s invention of memory foam in 1966. This shit... it ain’t your grandpa’s fuckin’ memory foam, though, you got me?"

I nodded. "I got you, Bradley." Ayra and Elsa—maybe Juniper—grabbed my arm as though seeking protection.

"Technically speaking, it’s... well, let’s just say it’s more illegal than meth and murder combined, but it’s so fuckin’ rare the cops around here don’t know what they’re looking for, so we can afford to keep it for discerning clients like yourself."

He gestured to a plain, unmarked mattress. "Make no mistake. This shit will change you. They did an experiment when it was invented. Sleeping on this baby reversed aging, cured prostate cancer in one dude, too. I think they said it increased the volume of semen in your nuts by like 584%—crazy shit. Lying on this bad boy will make your toes curl and your eyes roll back in your head."

Elsa—definitely Elsa—narrowed her eyes, looking up at me and licking her lips like she wanted to say something inappropriate. Before she could decide which personality would speak, Ayra blurted out: "Master is very good at making us do that!"

Bradley’s eyes widened as he looked between the two women. "He’d fucking better be to land you two—" He caught himself. "I mean! Anyway, the material is so rare that we can match it to just about any size imaginable. It’s all pieced together per order, not mass produced."

This sparked an idea. I pulled out my phone and quickly navigated to the blueprint of my house that I’d saved during my initial move-in. I zoomed in on the master bedroom and showed it to Brad.

"Can you just make it fill the floorspace of this room?" I asked.

Bradley examined the blueprint, measuring with his eyes. "Yessir, I can. When do you need it by?"

"Tonight."

He laughed, then realized I wasn’t joking. "That’s... impossible. We’d need to fly in a team of Russian mattressologists, half of whom are currently locked away in Siberian gulags and only released on special assignments. There’s no way we can have it by tonight."

I met his gaze steadily. "What amount of money will turn that frown upside down?"

Bradley hesitated, then named a figure he clearly thought would be absurd: "Three million, I guess."

I cocked my head and sized him up. "One million."

"Two point-five-million."

"One-point-six," I countered.

He groaned, then fired back. "Listen—two-point-two is as low as I can go without getting on the phone with the Kremlin."

I extended my hand without hesitation. "Done."

His jaw dropped, but he recovered quickly and shook my hand firmly. "I’ll, uh, make some calls."

While Bradley stepped away to arrange for the emergency deployment of Russian mattress scientists, Ayra bounced excitedly in place. "We’re getting a new bed! Master is so generous!"

Elsa-Juniper observed me with an unreadable expression. "I gather that was an exorbitant amount of money to spend on a bed," Juniper’s influence noted. Then Elsa seemed to take over: "But entirely appropriate for accommodating royalty such as myself. If I am to be impregnated someday, it should be on a three million dollar bed. Perhaps we should have requested gold threading as well."

"The bed is already illegal enough without adding precious metals," I muttered, wondering if I’d lost my mind completely. Three million dollars for a mattress. But then again, what else was I going to do with lawsuit winnings while awaiting an interdimensional invasion?

My secret? I’d invested most of my winnings anyway and made another million every month or two. I chuckled as I thought about all the good times that would be had on this bed and decided that splurging was the right call. Wait, what was that part about semen volume?

---

Later that evening, a nondescript black van of enormous size pulled into my driveway, with a black truck following behind it. Six men with shaved heads, thick-framed glasses, and terrifying prison tattoos emerged. They spoke in hushed Russian as they unloaded sections of what would become our new bed from the truck, and pieces of the frame from the van.

I’d sent all three women to hide in the guest bedroom, not wanting to explain Juniper’s serpentine lower half to the delivery crew most of all. From behind the closed door, I could hear Ayra’s excited whispering and occasional shushing from the others.

The installation took just under three hours, during which I was not allowed to enter my bedroom. I heard power tools, cursing in Russian, and at one point what sounded suspiciously like an AK-47 going off, but the crew foreman assured me everything was proceeding exactly to plan.

Finally, the Russians packed up their mysterious tools and departed with stern warnings not to adjust internal pressure settings for at least twelve hours. One of them handed me a small remote control with Cyrillic lettering that I couldn’t read, then offered a terse bow before leaving.

Once their van disappeared down the driveway, I opened the guest room door. "Coast is clear."