Chapter 1: The Betrayal
The key to Max’s apartment always felt too light in Nastya’s hand, a cheap piece of metal that unlocked a world she’d mistaken for a sanctuary. She turned it now, the click echoing in the grim, silent hallway. The door swung inward, and the familiar smell hit her first—stale cigarettes, fried onions from yesterday’s dinner, and the faint, sweet-sharp trace of cheap beer. It was usually a smell she associated with him, with lazy Sunday mornings tangled in his sheets. Tonight, it just smelled dirty.
She called his name, her voice too bright, too hopeful against the low hum of the television static. “Max? My mom gave us the pirozhki. They are fresh.”
No answer. Just the thump of bass from the apartment below.
She kicked off her boots, the wet snow melting into the frayed welcome mat. The main room was a monument to his carelessness. A landslide of textbooks he never opened slumped against the wall. Empty bottles stood sentinel on the coffee table, next to a plate fossilized with ketchup. Something tightened in her chest, a premonition she refused to name. It was too quiet in a way that felt deliberate.
His bedroom door was ajar, a slash of deeper shadow.
“Max? Are you sleeping?”
She pushed the door open.
The light from the hallway fell across the bed in a guilty yellow wedge. For one merciful second, her brain refused to assemble the shapes. A tangle of limbs, pale skin against his dark sheets. A flash of blonde hair that wasn’t hers. The low, startled gasp that wasn’t his.
Then time snapped back with a vicious click.
Max’s head jerked up from the pillow. His eyes, wide and glassy, found hers. There was no instant regret there, no horror. Just shock, then a swift, crumbling annoyance, as if she’d interrupted an important meeting. His arm was slung possessively over a bare, feminine shoulder. The girl beneath him turned her head. Her mouth was swollen, her gaze lazy and triumphant before it shifted to curious.
Nastya’s hand flew to her own mouth, stifling a sound that was neither scream nor sob. The paper bag of pirozhki dropped from her numb fingers, hitting the floor with a soft, doughy thud.
“Nastya,” Max said. His voice was rough, but not with emotion. With use. And annoyance.
That one word, her name in that tone, was the catalyst. The frozen lock inside her shattered. A violent tremor ran through her, and she stumbled back, her shoulder crashing into the doorframe. The pain was bright and clarifying. She turned.
“Nastya, wait!” he called annoyingly, and she heard the rustle of sheets, the muffled curse.
She didn’t wait. She ran. Her socks slipped on the linoleum of the hallway. She slammed into the front door, fumbled with the lock, and then she was out, flying down the five flights of stairs. The cold, concrete air of the stairwell burned her lungs. Each step jarred her bones. The sound of her own ragged breaths echoed off the walls, mixing with the distant echo of his voice from above. “Nastya! For God’s sake, it’s not—!”
She didn’t hear the rest. She burst through the building’s heavy outer door and into the biting Moscow night.
The cold was a physical slap. She hadn’t grabbed her coat. Icy wind needled through her thin sweater, but she barely felt it. The heat of humiliation was too intense, a scorching flush that started at her collarbone and flooded her face. She staggered, leaning against the grimy brick of the building, her fingers scraping against the frost. She pressed her forehead to the cold stone, eyes squeezed shut, but the image was branded inside her lids: the curve of that stranger’s back, the familiar pattern of the tattoo on Max’s shoulder she’d traced with her own finger a hundred times.
Tears came then, hot and silent, cutting tracks through the chill on her cheeks. She choked on a gasp, swallowing the sob whole because to let it out would be to make it real, to give sound to the wreckage. Her body shook, a frail leaf in a brutal wind.
Across the street, idling in the shadow of a leafless birch tree, a sleek, black Mercedes G-Class sat with its engine purring. The rear window was down, just a crack.
Inside, Anna watched.
She had been grimly composing the cutting remarks she would deliver to her son upstairs. The city’s grime and winter decay were just a backdrop to her thoughts, unimportant. Then the girl had exploded from the doorway like a wounded bird taking frantic, doomed flight.
Anna’s cigarette paused halfway to her lips. Her eyes, a pale, unforgiving grey, narrowed.
She observed the collapse against the wall. The heaving shoulders. The hands that came up to cover a face, fingers clutching at hair as if to tear it out. It was a raw, unfiltered performance of anguish. No audience, no artifice. Just pure, shattered feeling.
Anna found herself leaning forward slightly, the rich leather of the seat creaking. Most people’s misery was ugly. Chaotic and weak. This… this was different. There was a poetry to it. A devastating honesty. The girl’s gentleness was visible even in her despair—the soft curve of her jaw now clenched in pain, the light brown hair whipping in the wind like something from a tragic folktale. This was not the damp, sniveling heartbreak of the girls Max usually entertained. This was a deep, personal cataclysm.
And Anna knew, with a cold, instantaneous certainty, that her worthless son was the cause.
A strange, unfamiliar sensation uncoiled in Anna’s chest. It wasn’t pity. Pity was for the feeble. It was fascination. Possession. The girl was a pristine canvas, freshly scraped raw and bleeding with vivid, emotional color. And Max had been the blunt, stupid instrument that prepared it.
“Aslan,” Anna said, her voice a low vibration in the quiet car.
The driver, a mountain of a man with a calm, impassive face, had just settled back into the driver’s seat. He followed her gaze. “Mistress?”
“That girl. Do you see her?”
“I see her.”
“I want to know who she is. Everything. Where she lives, who her family is, what she studies. How she knows my son.” Anna took a slow drag from her cigarette, the ember glowing in the dim light, her eyes never leaving the trembling figure across the street. “Talk to the neighbours, discreetly. If you learn her name — call Kesha, find out where she lives. She is of interest to me.”
The final words were a caress, a verdict. Aslan gave a single, slow nod. He understood the textures of Anna’s commands. This was not a threat assessment. This was an acquisition briefing.
“I’ll do it.”
Nastya pushed herself off the wall, wiping her face with the back of her hands in a childlike, brutal motion. She looked lost, looking left and right down the deserted, ice-slicked street, as if the correct path had been erased. Then she hunched her shoulders, wrapped her arms around herself, and began to walk with hurried, unstable steps into the darkness, disappearing around the corner.
Anna watched the empty space where the girl had been for a moment longer. The emotional charge of the scene still hung in the air. She could almost taste it—salt and sorrow. Exhaling a plume of smoke, she crushed the cigarette in the crystal ashtray.
“Just leave car here,” she told Aslan.
She exited the car without another word, the cold air a welcome tonic. She didn’t feel it, not really. She walked toward Max’s building, her knee-high boots of finest leather making precise, authoritative sounds on the pavement. Every step was a punctuation mark.
She took the stairs. The elevator was for the weak, and she wanted the climb to stoke her ire. By the time she reached his floor, her blood was moving, a quiet, lethal rhythm. She didn’t knock. She turned the handle, finding it unlocked—careless, like everything else about him—and stepped inside.
The scene was worse than she’d imagined. The squalor was palpable. And there he was, standing in the doorway of his bedroom, now wearing track pants, his chest still bare. He was running a hand through his disheveled dark hair, his face a mess of petulance and lingering arousal.
“—just a complete overreaction. She is crazy possessive!” he was saying to the blonde, who was wrapped in his sheet, lighting a cigarette on his bed. And that said to Anna everything she needed to know.
Max turned, hearing the door, expecting perhaps the returned, weeping Nastya. “Are you calm now—?”
His voice died in his throat when he saw his mother.
Anna closed the door softly behind her. She didn’t look at the girl in the bed. The girl was wallpaper, a symptom. Her entire focus was on her son. She took in the room, the bottles, the filth, the evidence of his cheap, lazy life. And she took in him, the entitled curve of his mouth, the defensive hunch of his shoulders.
“M-Mother,” Max stammered, instinctively crossing his arms over his chest. “This isn’t a good time.”
“No,” Anna agreed, her voice terribly quiet. “It is not. For you.” She took a few steps into the center of the room, her gaze a physical weight. “Send her away.”
“What? No, listen—”
“Now, Maxim.” The name was a whip-crack.
The blonde, sensing a danger far greater than a jealous girlfriend, was already scrambling, gathering her clothes with frantic hands. She didn’t make eye contact with anyone, darting from the bedroom, dressing in a jagged rush in the hallway, and letting herself out with a hushed, final click of the door.
Silence flooded in to take her place. A thick, choking silence.
Max found his bravado, that flimsy shield he always used. “You can’t just burst in here! This is my place!”
“This kennel?” Anna’s lip curled. “This is a sty I finance so you can pretend to be a man. And what do you do with it? You ruin beautiful things.”
He blinked, confused. The confrontation wasn’t following his script. “Is this about Nastya? It was nothing. She’s just a drama queen. She’ll get over it.”
“'Nothing,'” Anna repeated. She walked to the window, looking down at the spot where the girl had shattered. “You have the vision of a gnat. You saw a kind, trusting girl and your only thought was to see how much of that trust you could grind under your heel for amusement.”
“Oh, come on,” he scoffed, grabbing a t-shirt from the floor and pulling it on. “You’re acting like I murdered someone. I just hooked up with someone else. It happens. She’s not your concern.”
Anna turned from the window. The look in her eyes froze him where he stood. It was not anger. It was a profound, chilling disappointment, and something far colder beneath it. “Everything of value is my concern. You, however, are proving to be a liability. A leaky faucet dripping away my resources and my patience. Your university reports are a joke. The ‘internship’ at my friend’s firm? You were asked to leave last week. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
Max’s face paled. The petulance hardened into fear. “Who told you that? It was a misunderstanding—”
“Your life is a misunderstanding,” Anna cut him off, her voice like sleet on glass. “I have spent years trying to sculpt you into something with even a vague resemblance to competence. I provided every advantage. And what is my masterpiece? A boy who hides in filth, cheats on a jewel with gutter trash, and believes his own lies are as solid as stone.”
She took a step toward him. He took an involuntary step back, hitting the edge of the cluttered coffee table. A bottle wobbled and fell, rolling across the floor.
“That girl,” Anna said, gesturing vaguely toward the door, toward the vanished Nastya. “Her pain had more integrity, more raw power, than anything you have ever done or will ever do. You were given a piece of porcelain, and you used it as an ashtray.”
“You’re crazy!” he burst out, his fear morphing into a sneer. “She’s just a simple girl from a simple family. She’s nobody!”
The silence that followed was absolute. Anna stared at him, and in her stare, he saw his future reconfigure. The allowance, the apartment, the protection—all of it, hanging by a thread he had just gleefully sawed through.
“You are correct about one thing,” Anna said finally, her tone now conversational, which was infinitely more terrifying. “She was a simple girl. You have now complicated her. And you have complicated everything for yourself.”
She smoothed the front of her wool coat, a precise, elegant motion. “The funding for this… experiment… ends now. The card is canceled. The lease is in my name. You have one week to remove yourself and your trash.”
Max’s mouth opened and closed. “You can’t… Mother, please. Where will I go?”
Anna was already walking to the door. She paused, her hand on the knob, and looked back at him. He looked very young suddenly, and very small amidst the debris of his choices.
“That,” she said, “is no longer my concern. You have shown a remarkable talent for making a mess of things. I suggest you start by cleaning this one up. And Maxim?”
He looked up, a ghost of hope in his eyes.
“Stay away from Nastya. Do not call her. Do not text her. Do not so much as breathe in her direction. She is now entirely off-limits to you. I won’t allow you to use her as a ladder from the pit you dug.”
The finality in her voice left no room for argument. It was a transfer of ownership, stated in plain, cold terms. She opened the door and stepped out, leaving him standing alone in the center of the ruin he’d made, the cold from the open window downstairs finally seeping in to claim the space.
Down in the car, Aslan already waited. Anna slid into the back seat, the ambient warmth a comfort she noted but did not feel.
“Well?” she asked.
“The young woman is Nastya. She is eighteen. Apparently she lives with her parents and younger sister in the Tsaritsyno. She has been seeing your son for seven months. She is known to be very quiet, kind. But that’s about all neighbours know.”
Anna listened, watching the skeletal trees outside her window. A good student. Quiet. Kind. Shattered heart.
“Drive, Aslan,” Anna said softly.
The car pulled away from the curb, leaving the crumbling apartment block behind. Anna’s mind was no longer on her son, the fuck-up, rotting in his self-made cage. It was on the girl, on the exquisite, vulnerable pain she’d witnessed, and on the profound, silent possibilities that now lay ahead. The night had yielded something far more interesting than she had planned. A broken thing, waiting to be picked up. And Anna had always had a keen eye for value in the fractured places others overlooked.
And Anna had always had a keen eye for value in the fractured places others overlooked.
And Anna had always had a keen eye for value in the fractured places others overlooked.
The metro was a blur of sound and light that made Nastya’s head pound. She stood, clutching a chilled metal pole, not feeling the cold. Her reflection in the dark window was a stranger’s—eyes swollen, face blotchy and pale. She looked hollowed out. Every time the train swayed, she felt the memory of her own body stumbling back from Max’s bedroom door. The other passengers, buried in their phones and winter wear, were ghosts. She was the only real thing in the world, and being real was a raw, unbearable wound.
She walked the final ten minutes from the station to her family’s apartment block in a daze. The icy air scoured her lungs. She welcomed the pain. It was cleaner than the other feeling, the one that sat in her chest like a hot, wet stone. The familiar courtyard, with its rusted swing set and a single, skeletal birch tree, looked different. It looked poor. She had never thought of it that way before, but Max’s voice was in her head now. Simple girl from a simple family. Was that all she was? Was that why?
Her hands were shaking too badly to get the key in the lock. She dropped it with a sharp clatter on the concrete landing. Bending to pick it up, a sob finally broke loose, a harsh, ugly sound that echoed in the stairwell. The door swung open before she could try again.
“Nastya? Bozhe moi, what is wrong?”
Her mother, Larisa, stood there in her worn housecoat, her face softening from surprise to immediate concern. She was a small woman with kind eyes now etched with permanent worry. Behind her, Nastya’s younger sister, Ksenia, peered around the living room doorway, a textbook forgotten in her hand.
The sight of them, of home, was the final crack in the dam.
Nastya fell over the threshold and into her mother’s arms. The words were a garbled, wet mess against Larisa’s shoulder. “He… there was… another girl… in the bed, Mama… he was…”
She didn’t need to finish. Larisa’s arms tightened around her, a sharp intake of breath her only reaction. She guided Nastya inside, kicking the door shut. “Ksenia, put the kettle on. Now.”
Nastya let herself be led to the worn sofa, its floral pattern faded from years of use. The apartment was warm, smelled of yesterday’s cabbage soup and the faint, always-present scent of the pine-scented cleaner her mother used. It was a smell of safety. It made her cry harder.
Ksenia, sixteen and wide-eyed, hurried in with a cup of tea, placing it carefully on the low table before perching on the arm of the sofa. “Max did this?” she asked, her voice a mixture of outrage and fascination.
“Ksenia,” Larisa warned, but her eyes were on Nastya, brushing the tangled hair back from her daughter’s damp forehead. “Tell me. All of it.”
The story tumbled out in jagged pieces. The extra pirozhki from her grandmother. Letting herself in. The silence. The door. The shapes in the bed. The way he looked at her—not sorry, just inconvenienced. She left out the blonde’s smug expression, the specific, humiliating details of discarded clothing on his floor. Some things were too sharp to say aloud.
“And you just left?” Ksenia pressed. “You didn’t throw anything? Or scream? I would have screamed. I would have thrown his PlayStation out the window.”
“What good would that do?” Larisa sighed, a deep, weary sound that held the weight of decades of practicality. She rubbed Nastya’s back in slow circles. “A man who does this… it is in his character. It is a flaw. You cannot fix a flaw with screaming. You can only save yourself from it.”
“But he loved me,” Nastya whispered, the statement feeling pathetic even as she said it. “He said it. All the time.”
“He loved what you gave him,” Larisa corrected, her voice gentle but firm. “Your attention. Your kindness. Your peace. A man like that, he is an empty bucket. He takes and takes from a sweet girl until she is drained, and then he goes to find another well because he has nothing inside him to refill her. It is not love. It is consumption.”
The metaphor was so stark, so brutally accurate, that a fresh wave of tears spilled over. That’s exactly what it felt like. Drained.
“You are worth ten of him,” Ksenia said fiercely, slipping off the arm to squeeze Nastya’s hand. “He’s a loser with a rich mommy. You’re actually smart.”
“Ksenia, that’s enough,” Larisa said, but a faint, approving smile touched her lips. She looked back at Nastya. “Your sister is not entirely wrong. His money, his attitude… it was a costume. You saw the real boy tonight. Remember him. Not the one who bought you the fancy coffee.”
They sat in silence for a while. The old clock on the wall ticked steadily. Nastya’s sobs subsided into hiccuping shudders, then into an exhausted, numb stillness. The hot tea was tasteless, but the warmth seeped into her frozen fingers. The immediate, screaming pain was fading, leaving behind a deep, dull ache. The humiliation was settling in, a heavy blanket she knew she’d wear for weeks.
Her father, working the night shift, wasn’t home. In a way, she was glad. His quiet, stoic disappointment would have been harder than her mother’s pragmatic comfort.
“You will stay home tomorrow,” Larisa stated, not asking. “No classes. You rest.”
Nastya nodded, too tired to argue.
It was then that her phone, still buried in her coat pocket on the floor, began to vibrate. Not a text. A call. The specific, insistent buzzing seemed to pulse through the quiet room.
Everyone looked at the heap of fabric.
“Don’t answer it,” Ksenia said immediately.
“It might be… it might be him apologising?” The hope in her own voice sickened her. She hated it.
Larisa’s face tightened. “An apology tonight is only for his conscience, not for your heart. Let him sit with what he did.”
The phone stopped. A minute of thick, relief-filled silence passed.
Then it started again.
“He’s not going to stop,” Ksenia muttered.
A morbid curiosity, mixed with that pathetic, lingering thread of hope, uncoiled in Nastya’s gut. She slid off the sofa, retrieved the phone, and looked at the screen. MAX. The background photo was of the two of them, smiling in Gorky Park last autumn. His face looked like a lie now.
“Nastya, no,” Larisa said, standing.
“I need to hear it,” Nastya heard herself say. Her voice was flat. “I need to hear what excuse he has.” She needed to kill the hope, completely. Maybe this was how.
She accepted the call and brought the phone to her ear. She didn’t speak.
“Nastya? Nastya, hey. Are you there?” His voice was strained, scratchy. Not his smooth, confident baritone. He sounded panicked.
She walked into the narrow hallway, away from her family’s listening ears. “What do you want, Max?”
“You picked up. Okay. Okay, listen.” He took a shuddering breath. “I am so sorry. What you saw… it was a massive mistake. A huge, fucked-up mistake. She didn’t mean anything. It was just… it was nothing.”
The words were all wrong. They landed like stones. It was nothing. She didn’t mean anything. Not I’ve hurt you. Not I’ve destroyed us. An apology for the event, not for the betrayal. Her mother’s words echoed: for his conscience.
“You’re sorry I saw,” Nastya said, her voice surprisingly steady. “You’re not sorry you did it.”
“What? No! That’s not—I’m sorry for all of it! I’m sick about it, Nastya. You have to believe me.” He was talking fast, tripping over his words. “I love you. You know I do. This… it was a moment of stupidity. Weakness. I’m weak, okay? I admit it.”
She leaned her forehead against the cool wall. She wanted to hang up. But the novel, desperate pitch in his voice kept her listening. This wasn’t the Max she knew. That Max was always in control, a little bored, perpetually amused. This Max was unraveling.
“Is she still there?” Nastya asked dully.
“God, no. No! I sent her away the second you left. It’s just me. It’s just me here in this fucking hellhole.” His voice cracked on the last word. A genuine sob followed, raw and ugly through the speaker. “Nastya, I am in so much trouble. More than you know. I need… I need to see you. Can I come over? Can we just talk? Face to face. I can explain everything.”