Chapter Forty

The sex between Zmeya and Dominique had lasted thirteen hours already.

Not thirteen straight hours—the sessions were interrupted by many radiophone calls and meetings Zmeya had to run. And no real sex. Not quite yet.

But that’s how it worked. As she’d explained it to him, sex meant much more to her than the act itself. She called it tantric sex, where all aspects of one’s lustful desires are discussed first and at length to heighten the pleasure that would eventually come.

It got off to a bizarre start. Dominique had turned Zmeya’s cameras on him as if he were a common criminal and made him confess to all his fatal encounters with women over the past few years, including names and descriptions. One turned out to be the daughter of a Politburo member.

Then he took video of her as she dressed up, stripped down, and bathed. She obeyed all his commands but always stopped short of taking that one last step.

As promised, she’d used the tip of her hunting knife on his arousal. But these episodes were surprisingly short, because Zmeya would pass out whenever he spotted even the tiniest drop of blood on her blade. His reaction had been so odd that Dominique had asked him, “What did your parents do to you?” He’d replied, “Not my parents, just my father.”

She’d let him watch her have sex with one of the Cuties, and then with two of them at once. And he’d filmed the encounters. Because of Dominique, he’d let all participants live.

But now, just before midnight, he declared the long mystical foreplay was over. It had to be—because he couldn’t think of anything else to do but the act itself.

And neither could she.

Zmeya was sitting in his darkened bedroom, staring at the unpainted walls. Not moving, barely breathing, he was trying very hard to push the rest of the world out of his head for a little while.

This was it, finally. Dominique came into the room naked. No knives, no cameras, no other people. Just them, having sex. Making love.

He’d never wanted anything more.

She slipped under the sheets with him, smelling like a flower and wearing bright red lipstick. His favorite.

“Count to ten,” he whispered to her.

She did as he said. Then she asked him why.

“This is your perfect opportunity to murder me,” he told her. “Dark, secluded, a good escape route. No one would stop you from leaving. But I suppose if you were really an assassin, you would have killed me by now.”

“That’s not very romantic,” she said dryly.

“What did you expect?” he asked, pulling her naked body closer. “That ‘tantrum’ thing was strung out over half the day. Are you sure that’s the way it’s supposed to go?

“Some people do it over the course of weeks,” she insisted. “And besides, you kept getting distracted by answering the phone and taking meetings.”

He sighed deeply. “I’m sure this is how Nero felt.”

She leaned even closer to him. His heart began racing.

“How about giving me credit for keeping my half of the bargain?” she said. “I’ve done all you’ve asked.”

“Where’s the credit you owe me for keeping mine?” he shot back.

She found and squeezed his manhood. “On the way,” she said.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he replied, but he was beginning to pant.

Using her other hand, she put on another layer of red lipstick.

“Those people up in the stadium,” she said, gyrating a bit. “You’ll let them go, right?”

Zmeya was standing at attention to the point that small capillaries were bursting at different points throughout his body. The minor knife wounds from earlier were threatening to bleed again. He would have agreed to just about anything.

Except that.

“Not part of the bargain,” he replied, his head back, eyes closed. “You’ll have to earn it.”

She tied her hair back to get it out of the way.

“Then I hope your constitution is strong enough to handle what’s coming,” she said, taking him in both hands.

“I’ll die a happy man if it isn’t,” he whispered.

Dominique had just begun to adjust herself on the bed when the radiophone rang.

It wasn’t the usual sequence of three rings. This was just a long constant bleating.

Zmeya was out of the bed in a shot. He ran to his desk in the next room, seeming almost desperate to answer the call.

Dominique stayed where she was, as she was. But she could hear every word he said and even had a partial view of him.

It was no ordinary conversation, not for the commissar. For one, Zmeya was hardly talking; mostly, he just listened. She saw him write a lot of things down on his desk calendar and even heard him say “yes, sir” a few times.

This wasn’t anyone in Moscow he was talking to; he would have addressed his very few superiors there as Comrade, not sir.

He also usually ended each phone conversation by hanging up on the other person. But not this time. He hung up only after saying good-bye.

He came back to bed with his shoulders slumped, mumbling, unable to look at her.

“Who was that?” she asked.

He rolled away from her and hugged the pillow. “That was my father.”