Page 137 of Cruel Demands

I sit beside him in the dark while he plays, and think that maybe for the first time since meeting Mikhail, he is letting me see a part of himself he hasn’t sharpened into a weapon or hidden behind a wall.

35

TAYLOR

Three weeks later, the first thing I notice is the coffee. It smells wrong and has been smelling wrong for weeks now. Not bad, exactly. Burnt. Bitter.

I stop halfway into the kitchen. Nikita sits at the far end reading the newspaper. She looks up over the top of it. “Yes?” she asks.

I take another step into the room. The smell hits me again. My stomach twists. “The coffee. You can drink it?”

What is left of her overplucked eyebrows knit together. She looks from the coffee to me. “Yes?”

I unplug the coffeepot and sit across from Nikita. A plate appears in front of me. Eggs. The sight of them makes my stomach turn harder. I push the plate away.

Nikita folds the newspaper and places it beside her plate. “You are not hungry?”

“I had something late last night.”

“What?”

I try to remember. “A cracker.”

“One cracker?”

“It was a large cracker.”

“There is no such thing.”

Nikita’s coffee is too close to my nose. My stomach rolls, and I push it away from me. She watches all of this in silence, which irritates me.

“Are you going to keep staring at me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You are interesting this morning.”

“I’m exhausted and nauseous. That’s not interesting.”

Her eyes sharpen. “Nauseous?”

I shrug. “Probably something I ate.”

“But you only ate one…large cracker?”

“Maybe it was a bad cracker.”

Nikita leans back in her chair. Her gaze moves over my face. “Tell me, are you willing to be tied to Mikhail forever?”

The question is so strange that it breaks through everything else. “What?”

“Answer me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You understand the words.”