Secrets After Dark

by Sadie Matthews

  ‘Beth?’ His smile has faded and his dark brown eyes are worried. ‘Come on, I can read you. What is it?’

  I try to speak but somehow I can’t, not immediately. Gathering all my strength, I manage to say in a strained voice, ‘And Anna? How is she celebrating?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he replies. ‘We all drank champagne at dawn when the deal was signed, and then I came home to sleep. I left her with Andrei and the rest of the team and haven’t seen any of them since. What is this?’

  ‘What story did you tell her, Dominic? After she saw us arguing in Albany? How did you explain that to her?’

  He goes quiet and drops his gaze. Then he says, ‘Okay. I had to tell her about us. There was nothing else I could think of that would sound at all convincing.’

  When I respond, my voice still has that unnatural, high, strained tone to it. ‘And was she surprised?’

  ‘That’s the funny thing – she wasn’t surprised. She said she’d guessed about us that night in the catacombs. She saw us kissing in the tunnel without our masks on – remember? We took them off in the private dungeon and didn’t put them on again until we were almost back.’

  ‘So she already knew.’ I try to link this with all the facts and circumstances. Was Anna spying on us all night? A picture of her floats into my mind: she has her arm about my shoulder and is showing me her muddy evening shoe. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She found it very amusing – or at least, she seemed to. You never can quite tell with Anna. There’s a lot going on under the surface. She laughs sometimes, and I think it sounds more like a snarl. She’s very intense, one of those people who feel things deeply and passionately. Sometimes too passionately for her own good.’ Dominic is suddenly lost in thought, staring into the middle distance.

  He’s imagining her. She’s alive right now in his mind, as we’re talking together.

  I’m angry. I want her out of our lives and gone. But first, we have to get to the bottom of all the secrets and mysteries that have plagued us over the last few weeks. I turn to face him. ‘And what exactly did you tell her about us? Did you mention the games we like to play? Did you tell her about what happened before you left, with the whipping experiments that ended up in The Asylum?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ he snaps back. ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Then it’s very strange,’ I say, ‘that she knows all about it.’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ he replies swiftly. ‘She can’t.’

  ‘Dominic, she does. She sat me down in Andrei’s bedroom and told me exactly what had happened between us.’ I know my eyes are accusatory, but I can’t help it. James told me to stay calm when I talked to Dominic, but it’s hard. He’s already denied telling her when I know it must have been him. Who else could it possibly be? I go on: ‘I didn’t tell her. I’ve never even told Laura the extent of what happened between us. Even James, who knows more than anyone else, doesn’t know it all. You know, and I know... and Anna knows. So, are you going to carry on denying that you told her?’

  His brown eyes flash. I can see anger sparking in them. Have I already pushed him too far?

  But I need answers, dammit!

  ‘Well?’ I ask.

  He stares straight at me. He’s gone a little pale and his expression is set. ‘Of course I didn’t tell her.’

  ‘Then how does she know?’ I demand, my voice rising.

  ‘I don’t have any fucking idea!’ he barks, and gets to his feet. He looks frustrated. ‘Are you sure she didn’t just make a lucky guess and you filled in the blanks and assumed she knew it all?’

  ‘Give me some credit, of course I didn’t. And I didn’t admit anything when she came out with it either.’

  He fixes me with a steady gaze and says, ‘I didn’t tell her, Beth. You have to believe me.’

  I look up at him and there must be something in my expression because he says, ‘What? What is it? There’s something else, isn’t there? You’ve got another reason for believing her, I can read it all over your face.’

  ‘All right.’ There’s no point in keeping it back. ‘She... she knows about the marks on your back.’

  He gapes at me, stunned. He looks genuinely astonished. At once I’m certain he’s not pretending, and a wave of relief washes over me. Dominic shakes his head. ‘She knows?’

  I get up too, agitated, unable to stay sitting down. ‘Yes. She took great pleasure in telling me she knows.’ I can’t quite say the rest. Not yet.

  A strange expression passes over Dominic’s face and he goes very still. When he speaks, his voice sounds odd, almost distorted. ‘She told you something, didn’t she? She’s said something awful, something that changes how you feel about me.’

  My eyes fill with tears. ‘How did she know all those things, Dominic? How?’

  He looks at me like a lost boy. ‘Beth, I’m telling you, I don’t know! Now, what did she say to you?’

  I walk to the window, lean on the sill and look out. Across, very close, is the opposite block of apartments and I can see right into the one directly over from this. It’s where I stayed when I came to London during the hot summer months. It was through that window I first glimpsed Dominic and wondered who he was. The sitting room is empty but one lamp glows gently on a side table, casting a soft light that shimmers over the silver-lacquer walls. Celia isn’t there. If she were, I’d be tempted to go straight to her, pour out my heart and ask for her advice. I wish for one moment I was back there, on my first night in London, broken-hearted from my split with Adam, unaware of all the delight and torment that awaited me if I just looked out of the window. Knowing what I know now, would I look?

  That all depends...

  I turn around and face Dominic, who’s standing in the middle of the room watching me. A part of me bleeds for him, because his previous happy mood has completely vanished, all the joy gone. But then, if he can’t explain how Anna knows those private things, what am I supposed to think?

  ‘She says –’ my voice comes out low and monotonous, as though I don’t want to invest any of this with emotion ‘– that you and she are lovers, and that she put those stripes on your back by thrashing you herself. Before you made love.’

  Dominic makes a kind of gasping noise of disbelief, his eyes wide. Then he begins to laugh, in a loud, forced way. ‘Oh, come on! God give me strength, you don’t believe that shit, do you?’

  I just stare at him. I can see his passion rising. He stretches out his arms, palms upturned as if in supplication.

  ‘Beth – you don’t... you can’t... believe her!’

  ‘I don’t believe her but...’ I shake my head almost frantically. I can’t stop going round in circles over this. My fists clench. ‘How does she know?’ I cry loudly. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. How does she know?’

  He strides towards me and grabs me, one hand gripped around each upper arm, and almost shakes me in his frustration. ‘I’m not her lover, all right? Once, a long time ago, something almost happened between us but it was strictly physical, and once I started to get close to her, I didn’t like what I saw one bit. I don’t mind her at a distance; she’s amusing and very good at her job. But I’ve never been able to connect with her, she’s too weird and flaky for me. Honestly, Beth, she’s unstable but people can’t look past that because she’s such a knockout with that gorgeous body of hers. They only see that and they don’t want to see what she’s really like. But she’s an optical illusion. Look at her hard and that beauty disappears and you see what’s underneath.’

  As he speaks, I picture Anna sitting on the bed as she was the day before yesterday. That scarlet smile became infused with malevolence, the green eyes sparkled with something hostile and destructive. I know what he means when he describes the beauty disappearing, like an angel looking up and revealing a devil’s face.

  I say nothing. Dominic stares furiously into my face for a moment, his dark eyes glowering and pleading at the same time. Then he lets go of my arms, walks to an armcha
ir and sits down.

  ‘Okay,’ he says in a dull, almost defeated voice. ‘I’ll tell you about me and Anna.’

  A cold chill somersaults through my stomach. Oh God, no. Is this it? His confession? I don’t want to hear it if it’s going to make my worst fears come true, and yet I will do nothing to stop it. I have to listen. I have to know.

  I sit down on a chair by the window and wait to hear what he’s going to say.

  He begins in a quiet, even way. ‘When I first met her, I was dazzled, just as everyone is, I admit that. I was single and so was she, and we were attracted to each other. One night, after we’d done some big deal and made a lot of money, we went drinking together. Sometimes success like that can give you the most incredible high: you feel powerful, reckless... horny. That’s how Anna and I both felt that night and we got drunk together.’

  ‘And you slept together,’ I say in a steely voice.

  He silences me with a look. ‘Actually we didn’t. I almost wish we had, because then none of this might have happened. As we got drunker, we got more uninhibited. We started talking about sex and she told me some pretty wild things. She loves sex, maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met, and she’ll do anything if she thinks it will excite her. But she’s never been submissive. When I told her about my... character, she was very turned on. She wanted me to initiate her into the master/slave relationship. She was fascinated by the whole thing.’

  ‘You must have liked that,’ I say, trying to keep my voice neutral while inside I feel like I’m dying with every word he says. So Anna wanted him to be her master? How could he resist that? I imagine that beautiful body bent over, exposing a lithe, smooth back, ready for the lash.

  ‘I took her to The Asylum,’ he goes on, almost as though he hasn’t heard me. ‘We were going to go to the dungeon and take it from there. But—’

  He stops and stares into space, remembering.

  ‘But?’ I prompt.

  ‘Something stopped me. Something in her eyes. I had the distinct feeling that she was unstable and that I could unleash something very dangerous in her. The dungeon is a place where we look into the dark heart of our imaginations and make our fears come true. But all the time, we keep a part of ourselves in the real world, the part we access through the safe word or through the voice that tells us that this situation isn’t a true one. We might feel like we are giving ourselves entirely to our fantasy, but we’re not. There are people, though, who lose the ability to distinguish between the fiction and the reality. They want to take it as far as it can go. Maybe they enter a place that lies on the farthest boundaries of what human beings can stand. Maybe they go further even than that. I knew, suddenly and without a doubt, that Anna is one of those people. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk opening her to those possibilities.’

  I’m hardly breathing. I think I understand what he’s saying to me. He is very calm now, and very serious. He looks at me, and I am suddenly filled with love for him. My Dominic. His darkness is not so very dark. His fantasies might be of control and domination but he is kind, loving and understanding. He’s a world away from a person like Anna. ‘You tried to save her from herself.’

  He shrugs. ‘You make it sound very noble. But I also lost my desire for her. My connection with her vanished and I couldn’t go through with it. So it never happened.’

  ‘Then why is she saying all this now?’

  Dominic looks uncomfortable. ‘Beth,’ he says awkwardly, ‘I should have said this earlier, I know that. But I honestly thought that it didn’t matter and that it wouldn’t impact upon you.’

  ‘What is it?’ I demand, the fear that had subsided lurching into sickening life again. ‘Tell me, right now!’

  Dominic sighs. ‘Okay. The truth is that Anna never got over the fact that I turned her down and didn’t want to sleep with her. I think she saw the lust die in my eyes that night, and I don’t think she’d ever seen that before. I became a challenge for her. For months I fought off her attentions. She was completely tireless in her attempts to seduce me, you’ve never seen a woman try so hard. When I kept refusing, she was both incensed and excited. I almost considered sleeping with her just to give her a rest, but by then, it was impossible. I had no taste for it. I didn’t desire her, and she knew it.’ He smiles in a bewildered way. ‘We were trapped in a vicious circle – the harder she tried, the less I wanted her and so the harder she tried. I thought that eventually she would give up and go away, and for a while it seemed she had, when she and Andrei started sleeping together. She loved that whole game she was playing with him, pretending to be an aristocrat so that he could get off on the idea that he was despoiling a real lady. She’s from a perfectly respectable background but she’s no duchess, that’s for sure. Andrei only saw that sweet exterior and smoky eyes, and heard that come-to-bed-and-fuck-me-for-ever voice. And that was enough for him.’

  ‘So she was over you?’ I ask. I hardly dare speak in case I interrupt his flow, but I have to know.

  Dominic gives me a wry look. ‘Not exactly. She told me that she was sleeping with Andrei to make me jealous. And she said that if I didn’t give her what she wanted, she’d have me sacked.’

  ‘She threatened you...’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dominic shrugged. ‘But it had no effect, of course. I’m not afraid of Anna, no matter how crazy she is. I knew Andrei wouldn’t do anything on her say so. He doesn’t take orders.’

  ‘So that was why you didn’t want anyone to know about us,’ I say slowly. It’s beginning to fit together at last.

  He nods. ‘I didn’t want to make the whole situation worse. Getting away from Dubrovski also meant getting away from her. And escape was so close, why make trouble for myself? So it made sense to keep us under wraps.’

  As I consider this, I feel calmer. That makes sense to me. And it fits with what I’ve seen of Anna’s behaviour. ‘But,’ I say, frowning, ‘you had to tell her when she saw us that day in Albany.’

  He nods. ‘Yes. Like I said, she claimed to have known already, after the catacombs.’

  Look at my shoes! Anna is pointing to her mud-caked stiletto, she’s throwing back her head and laughing, she’s toppling and nearly falling on me. I shake my head to clear the memory.

  ‘That makes sense in hindsight,’ Dominic says, ‘because for the last week, Anna’s been saying strange things to me – about you.’

  ‘Really?’ An icy finger of fear creeps around my neck and down my back. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Stuff about you and Andrei.’

  ‘What stuff?’ I sound calm but inside I’m churning up with guilt and fear. I hear Anna’s voice again. Don’t you want to know who fucked you in the caves, Beth?

  Oh my God. What has she said? I suddenly realise with a horrible swoop in my stomach that the lies can work both ways. Lies about him. And lies about me.

  Dominic is looking straight at me, his gaze candid. ‘She said that you two were getting close and that she thought Andrei was interested in you, and maybe you were interested in him. I didn’t believe her, of course. I knew it was another of her little ploys to make me jealous.’ He gives a short, sharp, mirthless laugh. ‘She even said she walked in on you two kissing in the kitchen.’

  I open my mouth but I can’t speak. A violent red flush sweeps into my face. As he sees it, Dominic’s face changes and his expression becomes puzzled, uncertain.

  He says slowly, ‘She’s lying. Right?’

  I can feel that my cheeks are crimson now. I know I must look beyond guilty. ‘We didn’t kiss,’ I say, but it comes out stuttering and implausible.

  ‘We didn’t kiss,’ he repeats. ‘We.’

  ‘We didn’t!’

  ‘I would expect you to say I didn’t kiss him. Not we didn’t kiss.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ I say, my fear making me sound defensive and even more guilty. ‘The fact is, we didn’t kiss. I didn’t kiss him.’

  ‘But you almost did. Didn’t you?’ He’s staring at me, hurt and anger on h
is face.

  Shit, how do I explain? How can I tell him that I was busy telling Andrei to get lost when he moved so close, froze me with his nearness, and then went to put his mouth on mine? It’s so clear in my mind and yet I can’t seem to get the words on to my lips, and I know that however it comes out now, I look and sound guilty. ‘We didn’t kiss,’ I repeat stubbornly. ‘I’m not interested in Andrei Dubrovski, I swear on my life.’

  Dominic stands up, puts his hands in his pocket and begins to pace the room, like a barrister cross-examining a witness in the courthouse. ‘Maybe there’s more to Anna’s testimony than I gave her credit for. She said you were flirting with Andrei. And he gave you jewels – some ruby earrings worth thousands, apparently. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes – but I tried to give them back—’

  ‘Did you?’ His gaze moves to my ears and he sees the rubies glinting there. A horrible change comes over his face and he spits out, ‘Just not hard enough, I suppose.’ His voice is dripping with scorn. ‘I can’t believe you’re actually wearing them now. His gift to you. You wear them to see me.’ He pulls a hand out of his pocket and he is holding a box, square, brown and edged in gold. A jewel box. A ring box. ‘I was going to give you this tonight.’ He laughs bitterly and tosses it on the sofa. ‘But I guess it wouldn’t have seemed much after what Andrei can give you, right?

  I leap to my feet as well. How has everything turned like this? Fury rushes through me. ‘When did this become about me? What about you?’ I can see the little ring box discarded on the sofa. Even though it’s tiny, it seems big enough to contain all my lost dreams. I feel as though everything is slipping away in a landslide of angry words, suspicion, fear and guilt.

  ‘I guess it became about you when I found out that you’re in the habit of kissing Dubrovski and taking his presents.’ Dominic’s voice is cold and his expression stony.

  ‘I didn’t kiss him!’ I yell. ‘The earrings were a thank-you for my work and I only got them today, that’s why I happen to be wearing them! They are not a secret indication of my passion for your boss, for crying out loud!’