She punched in the shower code for her preferred temperature and flow and began washing in fine sandalwood soap. Her mother’s genetics – another astute purchase by her father – had blessed her with long legs, a waist Jaap could easily span with his hands, and full, pear-shaped breasts. Keeping that body looking fantastic was part of her job, and she ran thirty-five kilometres a week on top of doing free weights and Pilates. Sura Suyanto was twenty-eight, but she looked eighteen. Her symmetrical features and plump Cupid lips made her popular with her fifty-five-million-strong Indostar News audience, and something about her huge, widely spaced brown eyes created an impression of naivety, which inspired men to fancy they could realise their will in them.

How very wrong they were.

Jaap was sitting up in bed when she returned. The gigantic Afrikaner could have been carved from a block of white marble. A chiselled study in muscle, everything about him was oversized, except his intellect.

He asked how she was feeling while staring hungrily at her crotch.

‘I’m a little nervous.’ She slipped in to a demure grey kebaya, the kind her father approved of her wearing when she wasn’t on camera. ‘He can be unpredictable.’

‘Ah, once he sees what you’ve brought him, he’ll be putty in your hands.’

Jaap had never met her father, and if she had anything to do with it, he never would. Sura was dabbing perfume behind her ears when he grabbed her from behind. He was more than twice her weight, and his biceps were bigger than her thighs.

‘I want you,’ he said fiercely, his short beard tickling her neck. As her feet left the floor, she could feel him pressed against her back like an iron bar. ‘How about a quickie for good luck?’

‘Idiot, put me down!’ The hurt in his china-blue eyes reminded her of how immature he could be. ‘Wait for me here, and whatever you do, do not go outside. Do you hear me?’

‘Ja.’ He frowned. ‘I heard you the first time.’

Outside on the driveway, her father’s chief of security, Angka, waited impassive as a toad in a luxury Mercedes AMG. The driver was a soldier in civilian clothes. Behind them, another black Mercedes contained a heavily armed detachment of bodyguards. The drive took a few minutes. The general owned significant chunks of Kebayoran Baru and Menteng and preferred to keep his children close by. Tommy, his only son, lived in the biggest house next door, while Sura and her two older sisters, now both married, lived further along the road.

They drove beside an imposing white wall for a kilometre before arriving at a fortified gatehouse. Sura straightened her shoulders as the sentry approached the car. Dealings with her father were never easy.