Free The Kaisho by Eric Van Lustbader

so wild that he had no choice but to cede control of their movements to her. It was all he could do to keep up with her. He felt her belly ripple as her nipples whipped back and forth across his chest. He felt the tremoring of the muscles on the insides of her thighs, and the vibrations of her hard, breathless grunts into his mouth.
    There was no rhythm, just a clawing, animalistic response of pleasure and, surely, of pain as she bit him deep enough to draw blood. With that, her ecstatic spasms began in her groin, spiraling outward until she shook and trembled as if in the grip of a terrible illness. She cried out, and tears flew from the corners of her tightly closed eyes. The dense cloud of her wet hair engulfed him as he felt her working her sex against him in stages, as she rose higher and higher in a series of orgasms that brought him over the edge. He felt her fingers on his scrotum, clutching urgently while she whispered incoherently into his ear, and he collapsed to the floor with her still clasped tightly in his arms.
    She was weeping uncontrollably, and he kissed her lips, her cheeks, eyes, forehead, and temples.
    “Justine, Justine, as soon as I get back from Venice, I promise we’ll go to New York.”
    For a long time she said nothing, her face buried in his shoulder, her mouth half-open as she tasted his sweat and blood. When, at length, she looked up into his face, he was sick to recognize the despair there. “Please don’t go, Nick.”
    “I—Justine, I have no choice.”
    “I’m begging you, just stay with me a few days. Take time off from work, from… everything. We’ll go away, into the countryside—to Nara, the ryokan you like so much.”
    “That sounds wonderful, but this trip is not of my making. I can’t—”
    “Just tell me what’s so important in Venice and I swear I’ll try to understand.”
    “An old friend of my father’s needs my help.”
    “Who is he?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “You mean you don’t know him?”
    “Justine, I gave my word to my father just before he died. I have a duty.”
    She shook her head, tears rolling down her cheeks again. “Ah, now we come to it. Your duty. Don’t you have a duty to me?”
    “Please try to understand.”
    “God knows I’ve tried, but this Japanese concept of giri, of a debt of duty, I most certainly do not understand. And, d’you know what? I realize now I don’t want to try anymore.” She rose unsteadily, stared down at him. “First it was your business, then your friendship with Nangi, then your trips to Saigon with Seiko. Now this—a duty to a father who’s been dead for years to help someone you’ve never even met. Christ, you’re as crazy as all the rest of them!”
    “Justine—”
    He reached out for her but she had already spun away from him, was fleeing down the hall. In a moment, he heard a door slam, but he made no move to go after her. What would be the point?
    Sadly, he got up, slowly dressed himself with wooden fingers. He went silently out the back door, through the whispering cryptomeria. The sky was misted gray, a soup thickened by swirling clouds that hung low like the robes, of ghostly daimyo from ages past. He made his way through the garden and, before he knew it, found himself ascending the slope filled with a copse of carefully planted ginkgo, ancient of ancients, their white trunks like sentinels, the vestiges of their copper bilobed leaves trembling like the fingers of an oracle.
    He had no conscious idea of where he was headed until he topped the rise and, below him, saw the lake. The water was invisible beneath the curling layer of nacreous mist.
    Father, Nicholas thought.
    He crouched on the boggy bank of the lake, looking into the mist as if it were an alchemist’s mirror that could break the barrier of time. In that mirror, he saw the Colonel and himself, younger and innocent, as the elder Linnear gave him the present of Iss-hogai, the dai-katana, the long samurai sword that, many years