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I couldn’t help thinking that Pyotr must have watched me sleep over the video surveillance system I knew covered every millimeter of Ivan’s palace. The moment my eyes fluttered open after an hour or two of fitful sleep—as it seemed to me anyway—I heard a knock at the door. Then before I could react at all, the door opened enough to reveal the butler looking straight back at me with such scorn in his eyes that I felt blood scorch my cheeks in an instant.
Nor did Pyotr even wait for me to show any further sign of awareness. He simply spoke in his most imperious tone, despite the slight concession with which it seemed he had no choice but to begin.
“Your master requested that I not wake you, whore, but now that you are rising, thepleasureof yourcompanyisinvitedin the kitchen, to assist with the servants’ breakfast.”
My heart beat wildly, my entire body seeming to go from zero to sixty—no, sixty million—in a microsecond. I did everything in my power to keep my face impassive, but I felt certain I failed miserably, because Pyotr smiled slightly, as if in pleasure at my confusion.
“Do you think you can join the kitchen staff, whore?” he inquired, his voice seeming to drip with saccharine syrup.
“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my breathing even and hearing myself succeed at least at making my tone of voice flat and unrevealing.
The opportunity to help in the kitchen would have seemed a godsend under other circumstances. Part of my brain—the logical, mission-following part—still looked forward to it with a little bit of hope despite the fear in which I had awoken. I would be able to overhear the servants talking, while they thought I understood nothing. Yesterday, it would have meant precious intelligence about how to go about turning Ivan, bringing him over—the terribly low percentage play my Pretorian Guard trainer had told me I should try, before simply killing him and escaping.
Today, it meant I might learn something much more immediate, about whether Ivan had suddenly begun to suspect me of being a mole.
“You will call mesir, whore,” Pyotr said with a sneer, “or you will be birched in front of the entire household. Do you understand?”
The heavily accented English words held such condescension that a thrill of shame traveled from my toes to my scalp. Much, much worse, I felt the unwelcome stirring between my legs that Pyotr—as Ivan’s butler, his most important servant—had the dismaying power to cause with his degrading treatment of his master’s bed girl.
“Yes,sir,” I replied, steeling myself as best I could for what would at least be an unpleasant battle of wills and, I supposed, might well become a good deal worse. I resolved not to back down: I had to at least test the limits of Pyotr’s power, because that would tell me a little more about Ivan’s state of mind. Besides, I might well need to provoke some kind of confrontation to complete my mission, however I decided to do it.
I narrowed my eyes at the odious man as he continued to peer at me through the half open door.
“May I please get dressed,sir?” I asked, finally.
To my dismay, a little smile lit up his face, at least to the extent that such a severe facecouldbe illuminated.
“Actually, no, whore,” he said. “You will serve nude in the kitchen. Get out of bed this instant and come with me.”
I felt my fists clench under the covers. So Pyotr felt emboldened enough to add to my shame this way, at least. The other servants had seen me naked, but only when serving Ivan, if I happened to be without clothing at the time. The thought of challenging this mortifying indignity, of telling Pyotr that Ivan would fire him as soon as he got back, or even of saying that the butler would ‘pay,’ or… doinganythingthat might deny him total victory over my modesty, came into my mind.
Fear of finding out that Ivan had decided simply to give me over to his butler from this point on stopped me. If the only result of a challenge would be a naked birching in front of all the servants, this definitely didn’t represent the right moment to issue that challenge.
I put as dispassionate a look on my face as I could muster, and I got out of bed, as naked as I had been when I returned from Devushkin’s palace. At least I didn’t have to take anythingoffin front of Pyotr.
I did have to endure his eyes moving up and down my body, as I lowered my own to his polished shoes.
“You really are a lovely little whore,” he said, his voice biting. “I do not blame the master for how long he took to tire of fucking you. I only wish he’d given me his little wand so that I’d have less trouble putting you in your place.”
The palace’s enormous kitchen already bustled at 5:30 a.m. Ivan led a veritable army of paramilitary thugs, all of them accustomed to a life of luxury at their warlord’s expense. Three assistant cooks in kitchen whites, young women in their twenties, served the head cook, Anya, a middle-aged woman in her fifties who presided over her domain with a long, heavy wooden spoon. Three more girls stood by, wearing aprons over their black maids’ uniforms: the servers who would bring out the food to the waiting minions.
None of them spoke a single word of English, but after a moment of stunned silence on my entry, they had plenty of Russian to share their thoughts on me with one another. The head cook began it herself, in a scornful voice.
“The master’s whore graces us with her presence,” Anya said, looking at me with a mixture of dismissive haughtiness and sheer animosity that sent a chill down my spine. I lowered my eyes to her feet before she could catch my gaze on her.
The other young women had started talking amongst themselves, and I strained to hear their words while trying to pay attention to Anya—and to look like I was only paying attention to her, waiting meekly for instructions.
“What is she doing here?” one of the servers asked another in a low voice that nevertheless carried far enough for me to hear it.
“The master…” the other started, but she did a better job of keeping her voice down, and I caught only, “… Pyotr wants…” before Anya’s malice demanded my attention again.
For the head cook had brought her spoon down on the counter, forcing my eyes up to hers, as she said at the same time in a voice that made clear that she thought me too stupid to understand even the most basic concepts.
“Look at me, you little cunt.”
I thanked God that at least my hot blushes at Anya’s demeaning words would fit perfectly well with a girl forced to serve naked in a kitchen full of hostile faces, whether she knew their language or not. As soon as the awful woman saw that she had my attention, she pointed an imperious finger toward one of the big sinks in the corner.
“Pots,” she said. “Do you think you can do that, cunt?”
