Page 69 of Cruel Demands

Destroying the phone doesn’t erase her number from the world. It doesn’t change the fact that she gave it to him. It only gives the violent part of me something it understands.

A broken thing. A closed door. For a moment, I feel calm. Violence has always had the mercy of simplicity. A man offends. A man is corrected. The body understands rules the mind tries to negotiate.

This is not me protecting her. Nikolai did not disrespect her. Not really. He touched her with the careless confidence of a young man in a bar, but she allowed it. She gave him her number. She made her choice.

I knew this before I hit him. I know it now, standing over him while he bleeds into the dirty snow. This is simple jealousy. The word rolls through me, humiliating and precise. Boyish.

Taylor does not belong to me. I made that clear to her. I am the one who wouldn’t take her virginity. I am the one who called her Miss Hayes and pushed her toward men her own age.

Then I punished the first man foolish enough to believe the lie I forced her to tell.

I look down at Nikolai. I step back. “Get up.”

He does not move. “VSTAN!” GET UP!

He struggles onto one elbow, then back to his knees. He tries to stand and fails. His ribs will bruise. His nose may be broken.

He will live. He will remember. That’s what I wanted. I tell myself that’s what I wanted. I message Pavel. The car turns into the side street less than a minute later.

I look down at Nikolai—a young man, I see it now, not much more than a kid compared with me—and say, “You were robbed. You do not know who did this to you. That’s what you’ll tell your friends, the hospital, and anyone else who asks.”

He nods. He’s trying not to cry now. It makes him younger.

“Tell anyone you do know, and I will come back to finish it.”

He nods again. For the first time tonight, disgust with myself rises in me.

I get into the car and close the door. Pavel pulls away from the curb without speaking. When we are three streets over, I take the burner phone from the compartment beneath the seat and dial 103.

“I need an ambulance. I found a man badly injured beside the closed pharmacy on Arbat Street. By the bar.”

She asks for my name. I hang up and turn off the phone.

I have left blood on the screen.

15

TAYLOR

By noon the next day, I have decided three things.

One, I cannot keep up with my Russian coworkers when they drink. Two, Mikhail has no intention of staying away from me. And three, Viktoriya knows it.

I have not yet decided that Nikolai won’t be calling me, but it does feel like a possibility. It’s only the next day, but I didn’t think he was the type to play games.

I stare at my phone as Viktoriya and I sit in our small break room. She waves a pirozhok under my nose, and I groan. “If I eat anything, I swear I’ll throw up.”

She shakes her red hair and coaxes in English, “No, no. It is good for a hangover. Bite.”

I sigh and take a bite. She nods for me to take the pastry from her, so I do reluctantly.

Mikhail pulls up a chair but doesn’t sit. I stop chewing and look up at him, his broad frame towering over me. He smiles, a sly smile that tells me he is all too aware of the effect he has on me. “How did the rest of your evening go?”

“Fine,” I say nonchalantly, picking at the pirozhok in my hand. Viktoriya nudges me under the table with her knee, and I knock hers back with mine.

“Did your prince call?”

I stop chewing. He waits. I swallow slowly. “Who?”