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The first time Balalaika surprised herself with her own ruthlessness, she was still smooth-skinned and fairly new to war, and she was still young enough to write – often – to a boy who’d kissed her gently and promised to cheer for her at the Olympics. She told him about how easy it had become, the crunch of bone and sticky sluice of blood under her hands, and she wasn’t especially surprised when she never heard from him again. (You can tell me anything, he’d said.)
Balalaika almost completely forgot about him by the time she turned thirty, of course. He was nobody unusual, and she only grew more ruthless in the intervening years. She’s proud of it, almost as proud as she is of her ability to harness her brutality. The latter is her best tool, and she has learned to mute it when she chooses and to broadcast it in every motion the vast majority of the time. It is the best way to draw a man into her service.
Of course, it usually doesn’t draw a man closer to her than that. For all but a very few, she absolutely ensures that it doesn’t – there is far too much risk involved.
Logically, that applies to Dutch, too. But he risks just as much by being involved with her, and that creates a balance: they will not betray each other, because they simply do not have enough to gain by it.
Besides, she enjoys what she has going on with him. She knows that he can wrap his mind around the combination of her and sex without thinking that it gives him an advantage, that he’ll understand that hitting her now doesn’t mean that he can cross her lightly when it all comes back to business. He won’t balk at giving her what she wants, of that she can be entirely assured. Before long she knows his limits well enough that she doesn’t even need to consciously hold herself back, can give over entirely to the simple animalistic brutality of sex and pain and struggle. It’s always exactly what she’s after, and he’s never obnoxiously smug about how hard she comes.
And as to what he wants out of the bargain, well, it’s not something that she’s exactly disinclined to give. It isn’t a game that she would come up with on her own, not with the illusions, but the pain is real enough and so is the arousal coiling through her – from hurting him, from the fact that he enjoys it, from the way that he gets off even more because she loves it so much. She doesn’t need to look as closely as she does to see exactly what this does to him.
She licks her lips and glances up in time to see him swallow. He moans when she hits him again, the shock of impact tingling up her arm as the crack echoes off the walls, and she doesn’t need to bother hiding her own indrawn breath. Fuck, but she enjoys this.