16. Nina
NINA
Sofiya arrives on a Saturday morning with one bag, which means she packed the way our mother taught us—light, efficient, nothing that can’t be replaced if you have to move fast. Old habit from a childhood spent following our father between cities every time his business required it.
She walks through the front door, stops, looks up at the ceiling, then looks left and right.
“Nina.”
“I know.”
“This is?—”
“I know.”
She drops the bag and hugs me. Long. The kind she only does when she has been worrying and has decided not to say so.
I let her. When she pulls back, she looks at my face the way she’s been looking at my face since we were twelve and I came home from school with a split lip and told her I’d walked into a door.
“You look good,” she says, suspicious about it.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“Sofiya.”
She laughs and links her arm through mine, and we go through to the sitting room.
Anton catches my eye on his way past, the same nod he gives me every morning when he pulls the car around.
Nothing different about it. That’s the thing about Alexei—he moves through spaces without making them about him.
Sofiya tucks her feet under her on the sofa and looks around the room.
“How are Papa and Mama?” I ask.
Sofiya’s expression does a small thing. “Papa is busy. You know how he is when he’s trying not to think about something.”
“And Mama?”
“She calls me every three days to ask if I’ve spoken to you.”
“She has my number.”
“Nina.”
“She does.”
“She doesn’t know what to say to you.” Sofiya looks at me directly. “Neither does he, for what it’s worth.”
“Good.”
Sofiya doesn’t push it. She knows where that door leads. We’ve been having a version of this conversation about our parents since we were teenagers and by now we both know which parts of it are worth unpacking and which parts are just weather.
We sit with that for a moment. Outside, a car passes. The house is quiet, the way it always is on Saturday mornings.
“Do you remember,” Sofiya says, “when Papa took us to that dacha outside Petersburg, and we weren’t allowed to touch anything, and you broke the blue lamp in the front room within twenty minutes of arriving?”
“I didn’t break it. It fell.”
“You were standing on the table.”
“I was looking out the window.”
“From the table.”
“The window was high.”
She laughs, properly this time. “Mama made you hold all the other breakable things for the rest of the weekend. Just hold them. Standing in the middle of rooms with porcelain in your hands so you couldn’t break anything else.”
“I was nine.”
“You were furious.” She grins. “You had that face you get. The one that means you’re plotting something.”
“I was nine, Sofiya, I wasn’t plotting anything.”
“You absolutely were.”
I was. I figured out by day two that if I held the things loosely enough, Mama got nervous and took them back herself.
“Tell me everything,” Sofiya says. “And I mean everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Nina.”
“Sofiya.”
She gives me the look. The one that has worked on me since she was five years old and will apparently work on me until I’m dead. I sit down across from her, and I tell her things, selected things, the way of the life here without the content of it, and she listens intently.
I tell her about the gala. About the business dinner before that. About the writing, the pieces I’ve filed, the fact that my editor has stopped emailing me passive-aggressive notes about deadlines, which means I’m back on schedule, which is the clearest indicator I have that things are functional.
“And Nikolai,” she says.
“What about him?”
“What is he like. Actually.”
“He’s complicated,” I say, which is the truest thing I can offer her right now.
She nods slowly. She doesn’t look surprised.
We have lunch in the garden because the afternoon is warm enough. Marta brings out the food, and Nikolia joins us at the table. It is, absurdly, pleasant.
Sofiya talks about her work, a gallery show she’s curating, and two artists she’s fighting with. Nikolai asks two questions about the gallery that are specific enough to make Sofiya blink, surprised, and then answer with too much enthusiasm.
I watch Sofiya open up because of them, and I think about the Warsaw breakfast, the question about the third paragraph, and I pick up my wine and look at the garden.
After lunch, Sofiya and I walk through the lower garden while Nikolai works. She takes my arm, and we walk slowly. “You seem settled,” she says.
“I’m not settled.”
“I didn’t say happy. I said settled.”
“Those aren’t different enough.”
She looks at me sideways. “He looks at you like he’s keeping track of where you are in the room at all times.”
“That’s called surveillance, Sofiya.”
She laughs. “It’s really not.”
I don’t answer that.
We walk a little further and I look at the house and think about the fact that I know which floorboard creaks outside the kitchen, which light Marta leaves on at night, how Nikolai takes his coffee.
Six weeks and I know this place the way I know my own apartment.
That’s the part I don’t want to sit with.
We come back around toward the terrace, and Nikolai is standing at the edge of it, jacket off, and he looks at me when we come around the corner, just for a second, and then he looks at Sofiya and says he’s glad she came.
Sofiya says she is too, and she means it.
He turns to me. “I’m going out for an hour. Do you need anything?”
I smile at him. It’s not a warm smile. “Your head on a gold platter would be a great start.”
Sofiya goes very still beside me.
Nikolai looks at me. The look is not angry. It’s the look of a man making a note, quiet, complete, the kind of note that doesn’t get forgotten. He holds it for exactly one second, and then he nods once, almost pleasantly, and goes inside.
Sofiya waits until the door closes.
“Nina,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“That was?—”
“I know what it was.”
She looks at me for a moment. Then she looks at the door he went through and back at me. “Why would you say that to him?”
“Sofiya, don’t.”
I’m aware.
I just don’t want to talk about it.
The afternoon winds down, and dinner is quiet, and Sofiya retires to her bedroom to take a call.
I go upstairs.
His knock comes at ten.
Two knocks. Then the door opens.
He comes in, and he closes the door behind him, and he looks at me sitting on the edge of the bed. “You had something to say earlier,” he says.
“I say a lot of things,” I answer.
He closes the door behind him with a quiet click. “You do. But you don’t get to say them like that in front of your sister.”
I lift my chin. “It was a joke.”
“It was disrespectful.” His voice is calm, almost quiet. That makes it worse. “Stand up.”
I stay seated for a second, just to make the point. Then I stand slowly, arms crossed. “Happy?”
He walks over until he’s right in front of me. He looks down at me for a long moment, like he’s deciding exactly how much of this lesson I need. “Take your clothes off.”
I laugh once, sharp and short. “You’re not serious.”
“I am.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “Now.”
I stare at him. Part of me wants to tell him to go fuck himself. The other part, the one that is already getting warm between my legs, knows he’s not going to let this go. I pull my shirt over my head and drop it on the floor. Then my pants. I leave my underwear on, just to push him a little more.
He notices. Of course he does.
“All of it,” he says.
I hook my thumbs in my panties and slide them down. I step out of them and stand there naked while he’s still fully dressed. The power difference feels heavy in the room.
“Good,” he says quietly. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
I hesitate. He waits. I turn around slowly and bring my wrists together behind me. I feel the leather of his belt slide against my skin as he wraps it around my wrists and buckles it tight. Not painful, but firm enough that I can’t pull free.
He turns me back to face him. One hand comes up and wraps around my throat, not squeezing yet, just holding me there. His thumb presses lightly under my jaw so I have to look at him.
“You embarrassed me in front of your sister today,” he says, voice low and even. “You will not do that again.”
“I was?—”
He tightens his grip on my throat just enough to cut me off. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to remind me who is in control right now. “You will learn to watch your mouth. Do you understand?”
I glare at him. My pulse is racing under his fingers. “Yes.”
He squeezes a little harder. “Try again.”
I swallow against his hand. The word feels thick in my throat. “Yes… sir.”
The corner of his mouth moves, almost a smile. “Better.”
He walks me backward until my legs hit the bed, then bends me over it so my chest is pressed against the mattress and my ass is up. My wrists are still bound behind me. I can’t brace myself. I feel completely exposed.
His hand comes down hard on my ass.
The smack is loud. The sting is immediate and sharp. I gasp.
He spanks me again, harder, on the other cheek. Then again. And again. Each one lands with a loud crack. My skin burns hotter with every slap. I try to stay quiet, but on the fifth or sixth one, a moan slips out.
“You like this,” he says, almost conversational, as he keeps spanking me. “You like being put in your place.”
“Fuck you,” I breathe, even as I push my ass back toward his hand.
He chuckles low and brings his hand down even harder. The sting turns into a deep heat that spreads between my legs. I’m wet. I can feel it. I hate how obvious it is.
He slides two fingers between my thighs and feels how soaked I am. “Already dripping. All that attitude and your pussy is begging for me.”
I bite my lip and say nothing.
He spanks me one more time, hard enough that I cry out, then rubs his palm over the burning skin. “We’re just getting started.”