—and the hard pain of the clamps that dug into my eye sockets intensified as I tried desperately to buck and writhe and get a hand free from the cuffs. But I couldn’t move, not with Rachel straddling my body, not with the handcuffs that secured my wrists like a carpenter’s vice. And the drug she had given me had made me weak, my muscles heavy and pathetic. While my brain leapt and sparked and screeched, my body lay there like a newborn baby’s, stranded, helpless. At Rachel’s mercy.

With the calm precision of a surgeon, Rachel sliced through the conjunctiva of my left eye and into the sclera, then across, slashing through the cornea and pupil. She hummed something under her breath as she drew the blade across my eye.

I blacked out.

When I came to, she was still on top of me, dabbing at my cheek with a cloth.

The pain in my eye hit me like a tsunami and I almost went under again, craving oblivion. But she slapped my cheek, kept me awake.

‘Look at me,’ she said softly.

My left eye, the eye that the surgeons had worked so hard on to repair last year, was blind. My remaining good eye swivelled towards her, the clamp digging into the bone. It kept filling with tears which dripped down my face. I made a choking noise and she pulled the gag away from my mouth.

The first words I tried to speak came out as a rasp. She tipped some water down my throat, smiling kindly. I managed to speak. ‘I’m begging you, Rachel. I’ll live with you. I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t make me blind. Please.’

She carefully removed the clamp from the wounded eye and I squeezed it shut. The pain was like nothing I had ever known. Indescribable.

She leant forward and kissed the bloody eyelid.

‘Take a good look, Andrew,’ she said in that velvet-and-nails voice. ‘I want you to remember what I look like. I want you to be able to see me in your head when we make love.’

‘Please Rachel, please don’t blind me.’

She moved the blade towards my remaining good eye as I struggled and tried to throw her off. But I couldn’t get any leverage and my limbs were limp and useless.

I spat in her face.

She sat back, a look of stunned horror on her face. For a fleeting moment, I felt good. ‘I’d rather fuck a dog than fuck you,’ I said. But she smiled at me like I was a toddler who’d said something silly.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she said, yanking my jaw and slipping the gag back onto my mouth, pulling it tight. ‘You’ve got to be a good boy. When I’m looking after you, if you do naughty things, you will be punished. Like this.’