Free Dangerous Secrets by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

making love, he and Katya. Once was never enough with her, he’d found, so as he lay next to her, his cock had been still half erect, still slick from her. The room smelled of her perfume and their sex.
    He wanted her, endlessly. They’d been lovers for a year, and he knew he could have her as much as he wanted, but the wanting was always there. The first, frantic desire, where he’d bedded her as often as he could, for hours a day, had subsided a bit. Not because he desired her less, but because he knew she was his. All he had to do was reach out a hand, and she was there.
    Katya, his beautiful Katya, had been lying on her stomach, sated, rosy, smiling. He lay next to her on his side. One hand propped up his head, the other lay in the small of her back. He was composing a poem in his head, an ode to woman, for it seemed to him in that moment that Katya embodied every beautiful, desirable woman who had ever walked this earth.
    The smell of woman was in the air, and he knew generations of men had lived and died for that smell, the smell of slick, hot love.
    Idly, he began to compose an “Ode to Woman,” a poem that had simply welled up inside him. The first poem in his life that had come to him perfect and complete and whole in one simple rush.
    He had been touched by the gods that afternoon.
    The words had come, powerful and golden, in perfect cadences. He didn’t need to write them down; the words were etched in his heart as they came to him. He beat out the rhythm of the poem with his forefinger, against the swell of Katya’s perfect white buttock, like the beat of a song, the music of poetry against the skin of his woman.
    She’d known what he was doing. Of course. Katya knew him, knew him down to his soul. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been able to pluck the words from his head.
    His finger tapping the cadences of the words on her soft skin, he’d just ended the poem, the best thing he’d ever written, when the harsh knock sounded at the door.
    He hadn’t even been given the time to get up, put his clothes back on, armor himself with dignity. The KGB goons kicked his door down and, weapons drawn, dragged him away from a screaming Katya.
    This is impossible , he thought frantically. No! Russia has changed! The world has changed! The Berlin Wall has just come down! he screamed, before a rifle butt in the head felled him.
    He shook his head, stunned. This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. Gorbachev had introduced glasnost, perestroika. Russia was, finally, opening. The long Stalinist nightmare was over.
    And anyway, Vassily was no dissident. He was apolitical. A writer. A writer of the New Russia, with no agenda other than creating great literature. He was lionized amongst the intelligentsia, a New Russian, a man freed from the shackles of the past.
    But the men who broke down his door were throwbacks–brutal brutish men, coming out of the murky hallway like orcs out of a dark cave, out of a darkness before time.
    This was a mistake. He was Vassily Worontzoff. Dry Your Tears in Moscow was a best seller. One of his short stories had been made into a film that had won a Leone d’Oro in Venice. He’d been interviewed on TV, on a number of the brand-new channels that were opening Soviet society up. He hobnobbed with the new businessmen, with the media darlings.
    They’d named him a Chevalier de la République in France.
    He had to contact someone, get this cleared up, he thought, as the goons tossed him his pants, then dragged him, bare chested, into the hallway.
    And then his heart stopped, simply stopped, when the third officer went back into the house and dragged a screaming Katya out into the hallway.
    His gaze locked with hers.
    The great Soviet scorpion was dying but its poison-tipped tail still had the power to sweep lives away. He would be accused of anti-Soviet propaganda—such a huge joke when the Soviet Union was falling apart. Daily, pieces of it were breaking off, like floes