He blinked. Larisa Vostov’s colorful expression for the rough sex she loved had always seemed shocking to him. A good Saturday night for her would involve him throwing her around the room, slapping her, choking her almost to the point of her losing consciousness, and finishing off with a simulated — but damned realistic — sexual assault. Afterward, she’d smile blissfully at him through her new bruises. She had always worn heavy makeup, but he had worried that one day he’d break her jaw or cheekbone, and the world would think he was abusing his wife.
And that was the thing about marriage, he thought. A man marries the woman who suits him when they marry, but what if the man changes? When he’d met Larisa ten years ago, he was full of anger and bitterness about his divorce and hatred for his first wife. On the advice of friends, he’d taken up martial arts and had tried to exorcise his demons on a heavy bag or in the cage, but it hadn’t helped. Then Larisa came, and what she wanted in bed
A decade ago, he was the man for her and she was the woman for him. But today? The pressures of his advancing career took up more and more of his energy and time. And Father Time did his part, the lessening of testosterone and the physical changes of age had made him much less of a sexual beast. The rapprochement with his first wife and reconciliation with his older children had contributed to ease the former rage within his heart. Life had changed him, he thought. He was a kinder version of his former self.
Perhaps too kind, he thought. His political opponents had begun to point out what they considered weakness in his leadership. Their first bullet point was his so-called failure to retaliate against the American president when the U.S. Navy, in broad daylight, had stolen the Iranian submarine testing the new Russian fast reactor, then gone on to sink three of his frontline attack submarines in their escape with the test vessel. But there were damned good reasons for what he’d done — risking an escalated war with the Americans and NATO made no sense, not over an old Iranian sub with a reactor that was certainly revolutionary but nowhere near disclosing the deep secrets of the Russian Republic. And the three Russian subs lost, hell, one of them blew itself up from a design flaw, the second crew escaped, and the third had been taken down by, of all things, a Russian-designed torpedo, but with limited loss of life. He should attack the Americans for
But even if that political problem got solved, his present personal problem was starting to become a more pressing crisis. He remembered the divorce, when his first wife, Evelina, had broadcast lies about him in order to gain advantage in the court system, and to ease her rage over his affair with Anastasia Inessa, his former aide. If Larisa decided to go down the road that Evelina had, it would not end well for him. Larisa would certainly out him for all that rough sex, omitting that she’d instigated it and loved it. He considered his options. He was at a rank and station now that with a few words and hand gestures, he could make Larisa disappear. He smirked — if only he’d had that power ten years ago. Evelina would lie in a forlorn, cold grave where no one would ever find her. But he couldn’t do that to Larisa — Larisa was the mother of his six-year-old daughter Anya, and he would do
