I grin to myself.  ‘The woman doctor who delivered Sorab said she always puts in a couple of extra stitches.  “For your husband” she said.’

Blake chuckles.  ‘That should be made standard practice.’

I rest my chin on his chest.  ‘Why did you get drunk today?’

He sighs heavily.  ‘Because today I had to make a very, very difficult decision.’

I raise my head up onto my palm and look into his eyes.  ‘Involving your mother?’

He brings a finger to my lips.  ‘Shhh…’

I sigh and drop my head back down.  All these secrets.  Why can’t he just trust me and tell me.

His voice is a whisper.  ‘It’s a funny thing smell, isn’t it?  Do you know the thing I missed most after you left?’

‘Sex?’

‘Sex?  I slept with hundreds of women.’

I feel searing pain at his words.  ‘In the beginning I had them all; brown, black, yellow, redhead, blonde, you name it.  Got myself wasted and bedded them all.  Then I began to be a little more discerning.  They had to look like you, at the very least, from the back.  If I drank enough and kept the lights dim, then I could fool myself that it was you, but the second I woke up, I knew: it was not you.  They all—every single one of them—smelled of stale sex.  No one had your smell.  And I would practically run out of the door.’

His words, if they are meant to console or flatter me, have the opposite effect.  I don’t like the thought of all the women he has been with paraded before my eyes.  Everything he has had with me he has had with others.  There is nothing special just between us.

‘Fuck my smell!  Is there nothing we can do together that you have not done with anyone else?’

For a moment he simply looks at me as if pleading with me to recant.  I don’t.  A bitter expression crosses his face.  He sits up.  Almost I can believe that he is no longer drunk, but stone cold sober.

‘Get on the bed,’ he says.

I obey immediately.  This Blake reminds me too much of the old Blake.  Far away and distant.  Cold.  A stranger.  I am almost regretting my request.  He gets up, goes to the drawer where all the sex toys that we never got around to using are kept, and pulls out a vibrator.  This one is not big like the black and orange one that he humiliated me with.  It is white, shaped like a missile, and of a modest size.  He shrugs his shirt off.

‘Lie down,’ he says.  His voice is clipped and quite scary.  This is not my Blake.  Yet, he is mine.  This Blake lives inside the Blake that I know and I want this Blake too.  This Blake is my opponent, but this Blake also holds secrets.  Secrets that I want.  I am not all light and he is not all dark.  To be whole, to know him completely I only have to embrace his darkness and make it mine.

Do I have sufficient bravery?

Of course I do.

I will take my torch and go where love takes me.

He puts the vibrator on the bedside table close to him.  Then he positions himself so his cock is over my mouth.  And I note the most surprising thing of all.  His cock is flaccid.  This does not excite him in the least.  He is doing this for me.  Slowly, he lowers his dick into my mouth.  I have never had it half-soft before and it is strange in my mouth.  But it makes me determined.

I begin to suck so hard and so well and it grows quickly in my mouth to double its size.  He takes the vibrator and inserts it into my slick vagina.  He twists and turns it a few times inside the slippery walls, then removes it, and puts it into my hand.  I take it, surprised.  It is not switched on.

‘Go on.  Fuck me,’ he orders.

But I am paralyzed.  This is neither sexy nor erotic for me.  I don’t want to do it, and I can see in his eyes that this is unrelished territory for him.  He takes my hand and, positioning it over his rectum, pushes my hand hard upwards.  There is no real lubrication.  Only the juices from my own sex.  I see him jerk and wince with pain.

‘Suck me and fuck me hard.  Use both hands,’ he commands, his voice clipped, foreign.

But I cannot.  It is almost impossible for me to hurt him.

‘Harder,’ he growls, his eyes hard, unrecognizable.  This time I obey.  With both hands.  As hard as I can.  Only when I embrace his darkness…  I see him straining with the pain and the undeniable dark pleasure.  I know because I have already experienced it.

I suck so hard my lips and mouth start to hurt, but I know somehow this is very important.  Once or twice he pushes so deep into my throat, I gag and choke.  Finally, I see that he is near.  He is coming.  He starts to strain and clench.  I increase my speed, and he is almost there.  Always, at the point of climax he calls my name.  This time he does not.

‘Don’t, Daddy,’ he cries instead.  His voice is high and strange, that of a frightened child.

I freeze, my mouth full of meat.

Twenty-seven

So does he, but the climax is greater than us; his horror, his shame, his secrets, his pride or my shock.  He buckles as hot seed shoots into my throat.  I extract the vibrator out of him, and he pulls himself out of my mouth.  He is moving away from me.  But I catch his hand.  He stops, still on his knees, and looks down on me.  Hauteur in every line of his face.

‘Blake?’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.  You wanted something I have never done with any other woman.  You have it.’

‘No, I mean about your father.’  I still remember our conversation a year ago when he refused to condemn pedophiles, saying God made them that way and it was up to God to condemn them.  ‘Your father sexually abused you, didn’t he?’

‘My father didn’t do it for sexual gratification.’

I frown.  ‘What do you mean?’

‘’He did it to cement his control over me.’

‘What?’

‘He has made me the person I am today.  He had to teach me discipline.  Our ways are different from yours.’

My mouth hangs open.  Is he on the same planet as me?  Teach him discipline? Our ways are different?  ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Blake?’

‘You won’t understand.’

‘Damn right, I don’t.  Your father raped and brutalized you when you were a child, and you think that is a form of discipline?’

‘My education was…vigorous and difficult, very difficult.  I would not wish it upon anyone else, but without it I would not be fit to implement the agenda?’

‘What agenda?’

‘Without our banking services illegal drug trafficking would stop in a heartbeat.  Without our economic policies there would be no poverty or starvation.  Without our money wars would never be fought.  By necessity we have to be cold and callous.’

For a few seconds my mind goes blank.  These people are monsters who deliberate train their children to be monsters too.  ‘Did your father discipline your two brothers too?’

‘Not Quinn.’

‘Why not Quinn?’

‘Quinn was never meant to lead.  Only Marcus and I will take over the helm of the empire.’

‘Are you planning to do that to our son?’

‘No.  Never.’  His eyes have become pained, but again, closed to me.  The secrets are swimming on the surface.  I cannot understand them.  There is more.  What the hell is he hiding?

I play my last card.  ‘Is your father Cronus?’

The change in him is so instant and so violent I can hardly believe my eyes.  He crouches on all fours, like a cat, his face very close to mine, and his fingers flat against my mouth, but it is what is in his eyes that causes me to feel the first real frisson of crawling fear.  They are desperately pleading with me as he shakes his head.  I understand the silent plea.  Say no more.  I begin to tremble with real fear.  What is it that is so terrible that it has put that expression into his eyes?

What dangerous secrets is my lover hiding?

I remember again when he said in Venice the walls are thin and might even have ears.  He is still looking at me with that same expression of anxiety that I might decide not to obey his silent plea.  When I nod slightly, he says coldly, callously, ‘Meine Ehre heisst Treue.’