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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?”
I did my absolute best impression of confusion, a task made much easier by my apprehension that no, I probably couldn’t wash pots to the standard required in a kitchen like this one.
Anya moved toward me, covering the tiled floor in the huge strides of a commanding officer in absolute control of her war camp. I didn’t have to feign my shrinking back against the swinging door or the nervous energy in my legs, begging the rest of my body to run away.
Someone yanked the door open the rest of the way and grabbed my shoulders—someone tall. Pyotr growled in my ear, “Stay right where you are, whore.” Then he said, in Russian to Anya, “Don’t let her get away with anything.”
Anya’s eyes went from the butler to me and back, the scorn seeming to radiate in chilly waves from her hazel eyes.
“Don’t worry, old man,” she replied. “This little cunt won’t be able to sit down by the end of breakfast.”
Again she helped me conceal that I knew exactly what she had just said: my little whimper of fear at her words could very easily also have represented my response to her sheer physical presence looming over me and the way she reached out to take me by the elbow and start to haul me toward the sink she had pointed to.
She turned me, and brought me past her, my bare feet breaking into a humiliating semi-run as I tried to satisfy her enough that she might loosen her painful grip on my arm. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek as the surge of sensation there made its way through my body, and the terrible shame of the moment, the fear of what would happen next, the feeling of complete abjection, took their unwelcome effect between my thighs.
The distance to the sink, where I could see three pans already awaiting my clumsy services, seemed to extend itself forever, when I looked at the other girls and saw them regarding me with a mixture of horror, contempt, and—worst of all—embarrassment of their own. The blushing blonde woman, probably even younger than me, eighteen maybe, stirred the most complicated sensations and emotions: I thought I could see in her green eyes that she, too, had fought hard against the dark desires that the Pretorian Guard had exploited in me. The thought of how aroused she must have gotten, watching my ordeal, made my own involuntary, mortifying neediness down there even worse.
When I looked down at the floor, though, the distance seemed nothing at all. I knew after all, to my dismay, precisely what would happen there at the sink, before I even had the chance to show my inadequate dishwashing skill. The tiles went by, and Anya squeezed my elbow harder—so tightly that I cried out in pain—and then she had me in front of the deep sink, its dull metal showing murky reflections, white from Anya’s cook’s uniform and creamy pink from my bare skin.
