She was the glimmer in the eye of every partner he'd ever had, that hard little twinkle that always seemed to say Better be careful, you sick twisted piece of shit. One slip and you're finished. She was six-year-old Penny, broken and bleeding and promising not to tell. She was his father, standing in a darkened hallway, staring through him with unreadable eyes that said I know something about you, son, and you'll never know exactly what it is

"Rory," Desjardins said carefully, "have you ever talked to anyone about this?"

"All the time." She was still smiling, but a sudden wariness tinged her voice.

"No, I mean someone—you know—"

"Professional." The smile was gone. "Some piece of corpsy wetware that sucks down my account while telling me that I don't know my own mind, it's all just low self-esteem and my father raped me when I was preverbal." She reached for her clothes. "No, Achilles, I haven't. I'd rather spend my time with people who accept me for who I am than with misguided assholes who try to change me into what I'm not." She pulled up her panties. "I guess you just don't run into those types at official functions any more."

He tried: "You don't have to go."

He tried: "It was just so unexpected, you know?"

He tried: "It's just, you know, it seems to disrespectful—"

Aurora sighed. "Kiddo, if you really respected me you'd at least give me credit for knowing what I like."

"But I like you," he blundered, free-falling in smoke and flame. "How am I supposed to enjoy hurting you when—"

"Hey, you think I enjoyed everything I did to get you off?"

She left him in the cubby with a flaccid penis, fifty minutes left on the clock and the stunning, humiliating realization that he was forever trapped within his own disguise. I'll never let it out, he realised. No matter how much I want to, no matter who asks me, no matter how safe it seems. I'll never be sure there isn't an open circuit somewhere. I'll never be sure it isn't a trap. I'm gonna be undercover for the rest of my life, I'm too fucking terrified to come out.

His Dad would have been proud. He was a good Catholic boy after all.

But Achilles Desjardins was nothing if not practised at the art of adaptation. By the time he emerged, chastened and alone, he was already beginning to rebuild his defenses. Maybe it was better this way. The biology was irrefutable, after all: sex was violence, literally, right down to the neurons. The same synapses lit up whether you fucked or fought, the same drive to violate and subjugate. It didn't matter how gentle you were on the outside, it didn't matter how much you pretended: even the most consensual intercourse was nothing more than the rape of a victim who'd given up.