Yugao cried out with pleasure and terror as he moved inside her and the blade pressed against her skin. He knew he didn’t have to force her; she would let him do anything to her that he wanted. But he needed violence to be satisfied. He would cut her if he chose. He had in the past. Even as she clutched him to her and heaved up to meet his thrusts, she screamed and cringed away from the sword. His face strained and contorted while he moved faster and harder. His gaze locked onto hers.
She whirled into the black vortex of his eyes. Flashes of memory illuminated the darkness. She was a young girl in her family home. Her father lay atop her; he clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries as they coupled. In the morning there was blood on her bed. Her mother cursed and beat her.
But those days, and those people who had hurt her, were gone. She clung tight to her lover. He flung back his head, shouted, and thrust deep into her as he released. Her own release shuddered through her in paroxysms of rapture. Wild, incoherent cries burst from Yugao as she felt her spirit touch his at last.
Too soon, even before her sensations faded, he rose from her. He knelt on the floor across the room, his back to Yugao, while she lay drenched with their sweat and shivering in the sudden chill of his absence. She crept over to him and laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. He gazed into space, ignoring her.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
A long moment passed before he said, “Coming here was a mistake.”
The reproachful tone in his whisper stung Yugao. “Why? It’s quiet and comfortable and private. We have everything we need.” She gestured at the bedding, the soft floor cushions, the brazier filled with coal, the bundle of food, the jars of water and wine.
“It’s not safe here. And I’d be better off without you.” He shrugged her hand off him.
Yugao had a sudden memory of her father fondling her sister Umeko on his lap while she watched, jealous and deserted. “But we’re meant to be together,” Yugao said, wounded by his attitude. “Fate has reunited us.”
He laughed, a sound like metal rasping against metal. “This kind of fate will get us both killed. You’re a wanted criminal. The police will be looking for you. You’ll lead my enemies straight to me.”
“No, I won’t!” Yugao was distressed because he thought her such a liability while she loved him more than anything else in the world. “I’ve been careful. They’ll never find us here. I would never put you in danger. I love you. I’ll do anything to protect you.”
She would hide him, feed him, and give herself to him no matter how he treated her. She was his slave despite everything she knew about him.
When she’d met him at the teahouse, she’d set her heart on winning his love. He was different from the other men there. Most of them had nicer manners than he did, but she cared nothing for them. She could lure them with one smile, one seductive glance. The weak, stupid fools! But he ignored her efforts to attract him. This made Yugao want him in a way that she’d never wanted any man. For the first time in her life she felt physical desire. She grew determined to have him. Whenever he came to the teahouse, she flirted with him for all she was worth. Sometimes she would take another man out to the alley, hoping to make him jealous. Nothing worked.
He usually traveled on foot instead of riding a horse as most samurai of his rank did, and once, when he left the teahouse, she ran after him. He’d stopped, turned on her, and said, “Get lost. Leave me alone.”
But that had only whetted Yugao’s desire. The next time she followed him, she took care that he wouldn’t notice her among the crowds in the streets. She spent days trailing him all over Edo. From a safe distance she watched him meet and talk furtively with strange men. She was curious to know what he did, and one night she found out.
It was a cold, wet autumn evening. Yugao followed him through the mist that hung over the city, along roads almost deserted, to a neighborhood near the river. He’d stopped down the block from a brightly lit teahouse and taken cover in the doorway of a shop closed for the night. She’d hidden herself around the corner. Shivering in the chill dampness, she watched him watch the teahouse. Customers came and went. Hours passed; then two samurai emerged from the teahouse and walked down the street past Yugao.
He slipped out of the doorway and stole after them.
Yugao’s heart beat fast because she knew something exciting was about to happen. The mist was so thick she could hardly see to follow him and the two samurai. They were shadows that dissolved even though they were but twenty paces ahead. Their voices drifted back to Yugao. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their tones sounded urgent, frightened. Their steps quickened to a run. Yugao hurried forward, but soon she lost them. Then she heard a muffled cry, which she followed to an alley between two warehouses. She peered inside.
A breeze blowing through the alley from the river dispelled the mist. A body lay crumpled on the ground. Farther down the alley, two figures grappled and flailed in a violent embrace. Yugao heard a scream of agony. One figure fell with a thud. The other stood motionless. Yugao gaped in shock. He’d been stalking those samurai, and he’d just killed them both!
Now he saw her. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Yugao realized that he meant to kill her so she could never tell anyone what he’d done. But she didn’t run away. His strength and daring awed her. Her desire for him burgeoned into a rampant hunger. Almost without conscious thought, Yugao moved toward him and opened her robes, baring her body to him.
He let the sword drop. He seized her and took her, against the wall of the warehouse, while his victims lay dead nearby. The brutality of the killings, and the danger that they would be caught, roused them both to a savage passion. For the first time Yugao experienced pleasure with a man. She didn’t care that he was a murderer. As they reached their climax, she screamed in triumph because she’d finally won him.
The next day, she asked him why he’d killed those men.
“They were the enemy,” was all he would say.
Later she heard about the murders from gossip at the teahouse. The two samurai had been retainers of Lord Matsudaira. He had issued an order that anyone with information about the murders should come forward. Yugao didn’t mind that her lover was wanted for such an important crime. She admired him all the more because he was taking on such a powerful enemy as Lord Matsudaira. She didn’t care why. She liked that he fought the people who’d wronged him. She gloried in having a man so brave.
But it soon became clear that she didn’t have him. After that night, they met often, always at cheap inns around Edo, and he’d taught her sex rituals he liked, but outside the bedchamber he ignored her the same as before. He never showed any affection to her. Desperate for his love, Yugao had taken extreme action.
What she’d done had infuriated him rather than pleased him. He’d dropped her and vanished like smoke. Yugao was devastated. Then more calamity struck. Her father was demoted to hinin. The family had moved to the settlement. She’d often gone looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found.
The war had turned her luck.
A month after the battle had ended, Yugao awakened in the middle of the night to hear a voice outside the window, hissing her name. It was the voice she’d longed to hear. She jumped out of bed and ran outside. She found him lying on the ground, bleeding from serious wounds, half dead. Yugao never knew what had happened to him or how he’d found her; he never said. What mattered was that he’d returned to her. She took him in and put him to bed in the lean-to where her sister Umeko entertained men. Umeko wasn’t pleased.