12. Artem
Artem
I don't sleep.
This isn't unusual. In my line of work, sleep is a luxury that sometimes one cannot afford if they want to live.
Tonight is different, though. I'm not sleeping for a reason. And that reason is in my arms, naked, and content.
I lie in the dark for an hour, trying to disassociate, and yet I can't. I'm hyperaware of every breath Katya takes, of the way she shifts closer toward my warmth, of how soft her skin feels, and how hard her little pink nipples are.
When it's all too much, I get up from bed, softly, so as not to wake her.
I go to my office—the room furthest from where she's sleeping—and pour myself two fingers of vodka. I don't drink it. Instead, I sit in the dark behind my desk, staring at nothing, wondering what the fuck I was thinking.
This was the plan. It has always been the plan. Getting Katya to trust me enough to give me her virginity has always been the most important part of my revenge. And yet, I feel ill.
In the moment, I wasn't thinking about Irina or Viktor or anything from the past. I was in it with her. I wanted her. Craved her. So much so that I forgot myself. For a short period of time, I allowed myself to be absorbed into the fantasy, to forget the end goal.
I pull out Irina's photograph. The wedding photo, creased from handling. I set it on the desk in front of me and press my thumb to the bracelet on my wrist.
The sight of her reminds me of why I am doing this.
Irina. My sister. The person who started all of this.
The sight of the photograph isn't just a reminder—it's a catalyst. Irina spent two years being tortured by a psychopath, one our father and Viktor Popov sold her off to for their own personal profit. She became such a shell of herself that she chose to end her life rather than survive it.
I could recite the sequence of events the way I recite everything that matters—cleanly, without flinching. My father's debt. Viktor's arrangement. Alexei's cruelty. The call. The flight back. The funeral where I stood beside a man I intended to kill and shook his hand.
The plan. Four years of the plan.
Everything I've done has been in service of that plan, and it has been correct. It has been just. I have never once doubted it.
I press my thumb harder against the bracelet, feeling the edge of the clasp, and stand.
I walk softly back to the bedroom doorway and stand there, watching Katya.
Her hair is fanned out on my pillow, and the moonlight plays across her skin. She looks like some sort of painting come to life, and as much as I want to crawl across the bed and place my mouth on her, I can't.
I did what was necessary. That's what I tell myself.
Yes, I like her. I may even care for her in some ways. It's difficult not to. She is the type of woman I might have dreamed about as a young man—one more innocent.
I might have manufactured this scenario, but I did not create her.
I did not manufacture her wit or her stubbornness or the specific way she argues about Balanchine with the kind of certainty that invites challenge.
I did not invent the eleven minutes in front of the Repin, or the way she puts her whole body into laughing, or the fact that she said the one place she feels certain of herself is on stage and I understood that—not tactically, not as intelligence, but understood it the way you understand something that is also true of yourself.
The life she has been building in her small apartment with the scuffed floors and the mismatched furniture is a life built entirely by herself, and I respect it with a completeness that has nothing to do with the operation.
I would have chosen her.
The thought arrives without warning, and I set it down immediately, the way you set down something hot. I don't look at it. I don't turn it over. I have no use for that line of thinking, and I know exactly where it leads and I am not going there.
I was raised to be a certain kind of man.
My mother was very clear about what that meant—how to treat a woman, how to conduct yourself, how to honor your name and your word and the people who trusted you.
I have violated every one of those principles in the last three months, and I would violate them again, because Irina's name is also on that list. My mother's list. The things that matter.
Irina matters more.
She trusts me completely. She said so with her body tonight, with her willingness to be that vulnerable in a space she'd never been before, with the way she reached for my hand in the dark and the soft thing she said just before she slept.
She trusts me.
I am going to use that.
I am going to use her trust and her love and her name and everything she has given me willingly, and I am going to give it all to the altar of this plan, and when it's over she will understand what I am.
She'll have been right about me from the beginning.
You're the bad man in my story.
I walk back to the bedroom.
She's shifted toward the empty space where I was, one hand open on the mattress, her face soft in the dark. I stand in the doorway for a moment—one moment, only—and then I get back into bed.
She makes a small sound and moves toward me without waking, settling against my side with the ease of someone who has been doing this for years.
I stare at the ceiling.
This is what justice requires, I tell myself.
But Irina's eyes look at me from the photograph on my desk, and she would have liked Katya, and that is the one fact in this entire operation I cannot file anywhere useful.
I don't sleep.