Yelena turns my head and kisses me.
Her lips are soft, perfect, but the taste is sour—like a trace of cheap wine mixed with mint, a combination that shouldn't exist and yet stubbornly lingers on the tongue. She grabs my collar with both hands and moans into my mouth.
I respond for a split second, out of reflex—some kind of bodily automatism that knows how to pretend when the mind refuses—but immediately something inside me tightens, like a drawn bow. Uninvited, the image of Alla flashes through my head: tied to a chair, her shirt soaked in blood, her eyes wet. And suddenly Yelena's kiss isn't just sour anymore.
It's wrong. It's dirty.
Yelena presses herself against me, almost purring, her knee sliding between my legs. She bites my lip lightly—just enough to irritate me, not enough to hurt.
"You don't give in easily," she murmurs, her voice warm, slippery, false. "Did you know I've had erotic dreams about you since the first moment I saw you? Last night I was with a man and I imagined it was you—the one thrusting into me, fierce, hungry."
I don't answer.
I stare past her shoulder, at the table where the bottle sits, at the shards of the glass Ivar smashed, at the small stain of vodka slowly spreading across the glossy wood. I like the way that stain looks. Simple. Honest. It isn't trying to be anything else.
Yelena trails her fingers along my neck, then presses lightly on my pulse, as if counting something.
"Stop thinking about that girl. Just feel," she says, without raising her voice, but in exactly the right way to make sure I hear her. "Feel me," she whispers, sliding her hand down to my fly.
I lift my gaze to her only then, and her smile widens, satisfied, because she's struck home. She looks like a cat that's just knocked something off the table and is staring at you as if it were your fault for putting it there in the first place.
"Forget her," she continues, stroking my fly more and more insistently. "She's just a girl. An accident. A pawn."
A pawn.
The word slides into my stomach like a nail.
Alla's voice rises in my mind again: It was Ivar! That scream that sounded like nothing I'd ever heard from her before, her desperation for me to believe her.
And I left.
I closed the door.
I let someone else carry through to the end what I had started.
I sigh and let my head fall back against the armchair. Yelena, the hyena she is, takes advantage immediately and licks along the column of my neck.
I'm struck by how quiet the Volkov house is, how thick the walls are, how well they keep the sounds out—as if here any scream becomes just a minor detail, a small vibration, unimportant. Real power always has silence around it.
I peel Yelena's hand off my neck, slowly, without brutality, but without room for negotiation. I feel a slight tension in her, a brief flicker of surprise, then she resumes her smile—because she doesn't lose control even when she loses it.
"Did I upset you?" she asks. "Or do you just like pretending to be moral? Pretending you don't want me? Does that turn you on? Seeing how much I want you? Making me kneel at your feet?"
I feel like laughing. A dry laugh.
Moral.
If I were moral, Gaston would still be alive. If I were moral, I would never have had a hotel full of rooms, of people, of weapons, of plans, of Russians greeting each other with false names and wearing their truth at their belts. If I were moral, I wouldn't have had a Hugo.
I run my tongue over my bitten lip. I can still taste her—sour, stubborn.
"It's not about morality," I say quietly. "It's about control."
Yelena arches an eyebrow, intrigued.
"Oh?" she says. "And did you lose it?"
I look at her directly, and she doesn't blink, because she knows how to play with a gaze, how to turn it into a weapon.
"I let go of it for one second," I say. "And in that second, someone who shouldn't have died, died."
And Yelena understands, because this is the world she grew up in too.
"Ivar got under your skin," she says, as if it were a trivial conversation. "You talked too loudly to him. You drank too much. You forgot where you were."
I lift the glass from the table and study it for a moment. The vodka is clear, clean—like a well-told lie. I set it back down without drinking.
"I know exactly where I am," I say. "That's precisely the problem."
The words fall heavily between us, like a door slamming shut.
Yelena watches me, shifts her posture, becomes more serious, sharper—closer to who she is when she's not playing the girl who laughs in hallways and perches on the arms of armchairs like on little thrones.
"Be careful, Duca," she says, and now it's no longer a caress. It's a warning. "This house doesn't forgive confusion. If you start seeing ghosts where there are none, you'll end up a ghost yourself."
Ghosts.
I think of my father. I think of my house burning. I think of Gaston pulling me out of the flames. I think of Alla, with her wide eyes, too alive, too honest for this world—and I feel the urge to tell Yelena that ghosts are the only honest things left in my life.
But I don't.
Because in the Volkov house, sincerity is a form of suicide.
I turn my head and look at her.
"Leave me," I say simply.
She smiles again, but it's a different smile now. A thin one. One that understands she hasn't won.
"You want to go to her," she says, and it isn't a question.
I don't answer, because silence is the best answer when you don't want to leave traces.
"Why would you want someone so inferior when you have me?" she says, almost tenderly, but with a thin cruelty tucked beneath every syllable. "Let me show you how well I can take care of you."
I don't answer. I let my silence settle between us, heavy and stubborn, because it's the only thing still keeping me lucid in this madness.
Yelena smiles, as if my silence were just a more elaborate invitation, and slowly slides off the armchair—her movement calculated, fluid, unhurried. She sinks to her knees at my feet and lifts her gaze to me, self-assured.
She's beautiful. I can see that objectively.
Small in stature, almost delicate at first glance, Yelena wears fragility like a well-rehearsed theatrical role. Her hair, white to the point of strangeness, falls softly over her shoulders and catches the light in a way that makes you want to touch it, and her skin—too smooth—always seems half a shade warmer than the air around it. Her eyes—that old, doll-blue of something expensive—burn as she looks at me.
Her body is an invitation to sin: the slim waist that arches naturally when she moves, the firm thighs hidden beneath slow, deliberate gestures, the way she knows exactly how much to reveal and how much to suggest. Everything about her is designed to awaken appetite, not haste—a seduction that doesn't pounce but offers itself piece by piece, until you realize you're already hungry. I can see all of this clearly and still feel nothing.
Her fingers move lower, confident now, familiar with my shape, and the fabric of my trousers gives way slowly under her measured touch. My body reacts immediately, treacherously, with a warm tension climbing my spine, while my mind refuses to follow its rhythm. I don't protest. I let her play it out to the end. She frees my already hardened cock and looks at it with reverence.
Yelena shifts closer, so close I feel her breath on my skin—warm, insistent—and her delicate tongue running along my entire length. I groan despite myself.
She grins like the big cat she is and takes me fully into the heat of her mouth. She's good at this; I can grant her that.
My body betrays me without shame. It responds to the closeness, to her rhythm, to the confidence with which she knows exactly what to do and when to stop. My mind, meanwhile, resists stubbornly, clinging to other images—cinnamon-colored hair flickering behind my closed eyelids—and I groan in frustration and open my eyes.
Yelena misreads my groan and is pleased. She keeps sucking with skill and dedication, her pressure, friction, and rhythm flawless.
She changes pace—slow, then more insistent—just enough to wrench a sigh from me that I can't stop, but not enough to let me forget myself. It's a game of control, not pleasure; a demonstration.
I run a hand through my hair, a reflexive gesture, and feel the tension gathering, tightening, refusing to dissipate. I don't want this. I don't want to come here, in her mouth. And yet my body says otherwise, and the contradiction irritates me, enrages me, makes me hold my breath.
"See?" she murmurs, almost gently, as if stating a fact. "I knew you'd like it."
My breathing breaks into short, uneven pieces, and my body slips into a rhythm I didn't choose—an inevitable climb that drags me along without asking permission. I try to cling to logic, to the rooms in my head where I keep order and hierarchies, but everything melts into a dull, dense noise, like a wave rising from inside and erasing my edges.
In the second the tension demands its due, my mind betrays me. I no longer see Yelena. I no longer feel the house, the armchair, the thick walls that swallow sound. Instead, the image shifts brutally, clear and impossible to stop: Alla at my feet, her gaze lifted, sensual, perfect—
Her name strikes my thoughts like a reflex, voiceless, formless, but enough to split me open from the inside. Everything that had built up disperses in a short, silent explosion, and after it there's only a cold void, a strange quiet in which I realize, with a biting clarity, that I have never been farther from control than I am now.
I open my eyes.
I'm here again. Yelena is in front of me with my semen on her tongue, the Volkov house breathes the same heavy silence, and I'm left with the dirty sensation that, in the moment my body chose for me, my mind spoke the exact truth I don't want to hear.
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