Chapter 1: The Stench of Privilege
The office in Nouakchott was a sweltering, airless den. The scent of stale mint tea, unwashed skin, and something else—something animal and sharp—hung in the humid air like a curse. Katerina Volkov smoothed the cool silk of her skirt and fought the urge to pull at her blouse, which was already clinging to her spine. A single, fly-spotted bulb flickered overhead, casting long, dancing shadows over cheap wooden furniture sticky to the touch.
Behind a vast, cluttered desk sat Amadou Al Haq.
He wasn’t what she’d pictured from the vague agency brief. Not a boy. A man, in size, at least nineteen. But he slumped in his leather chair like a sated, grimy lion, his eyes tracking her from the doorway to the empty chair in front of him without a word of greeting. He wore a rumpled boubou that might have been white once, now the color of dusty sand. His hair was an uncombed cloud of tight curls. On the desk, a collage of neglect: half-empty soda cans sweating rings onto the wood, a congealed kebab on stained paper, and a single, greasy framed photo of an older, harder man smirking beside a rusted AK-47.
“You are Katerina,” he stated. His French was thickly accented but clear. His gaze was a physical thing, moving from her face, down her neck, over the curve of her breast held in check by her tailored blouse, then settling on her legs, exposed nearly to mid-thigh by the cut of her skirt.
“I am,” she said, sitting. She kept her back straight, her expression a pleasant, professional mask. She’d worn this mask through two marriages and three bankruptcies. It was her best garment.
“The agency said you are from… the cold place. Russia?”
“Further west,” she corrected gently. “But yes, a cold place.”
He grunted, still looking at her legs. “You are not old. You are… ripe.”
Katerina inhaled slowly, the hot air burning her lungs. She said nothing. Her financial statements, piled on a banker’s desk back in that cold place, flashed in her mind. The red numbers. The final notices.
“You will be my caretaker,” Amadou announced, as if she hadn’t applied for the exact job. “My father has many businesses. My work is to learn them. But I require… maintenance.”
“I understand. My duties would involve managing your schedule, ensuring your nutritional and hygienic needs are met, facilitating your—”
He waved a thick hand, cutting her off. “We speak now of salary. What do you require?”
This was the dance. She named a figure in euros that was, by any reasonable standard, exorbitant. It was a year’s rent on her crumbling apartment, five years of her mother’s medicine. It was survival.
Amadou’s lips curled into a loose smile. He picked up a can of warm Coke, took a sip, and set it back on the sticky wood. “That is nothing. I will pay double.”
The air left Katerina’s body.Double. The number echoed, a sweet, clean chime in the stinking room. She managed a nod. “That is… very generous.”
“It is not generosity. It is a price. For the duties.”
The flickering bulb buzzed. A fly landed on the kebab. Katerina felt a cold drop of sweat trace a path between her shoulder blades.
“The agency description was general,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “Perhaps you could detail your specific requirements.”
Amadou leaned forward, his elbows thudding on the desk. His smell—sleep and sweet soda and male musk—rolled over her. “You stay with me. All the time. When I wake, you are there. When I sleep, you are there. In this office, you are here. You feed me. You bathe with me. You kiss me, one hundred times each day.”
Katerina’s mask did not slip. Her face remained a calm lake. Inside, something brittle snapped.
“You understand me,” he pressed, his eyes gleaming in the poor light.
“I am listening,” she said.
“We have sex. A minimum. Three times each day. Morning, afternoon, night. You let me touch you.Everywhere. You…” He paused, searching for the word, then said something crude and specific in Hassaniya Arabic. He translated into rough French. “You let me taste you. As my dessert.”
The silence that followed was thick, layered with the hum of the bulb and the distant, tinny blare of a car horn from the dusty street below. The greasy photo of his father seemed to leer at her. The man with the gun.
Katerina saw the red numbers on the bank statements. She saw the gray linoleum of the clinic where her mother waited. She saw her own reflection in the smudged glass of the office’s sole window—a beautiful, thirty-eight-year-old woman with sharp eyes and nowhere left to fall.
She tilted her head, a small, calculated gesture. “A hundred kisses seems a lot to count.”
He blinked, then let out a short, surprised laugh. “You agree?”
“The salary you offered is fair. For comprehensive care.” The words were ash in her mouth.
A slow, triumphant smile spread across Amadou’s face. He leaned back, his gaze returning to her legs with a new, proprietary hunger. “Good. Your clothes. You see what I wear. It is comfortable. For you, you will wear skirts. Always. They must be… flowing. And they must end here.” He brought a hand to his own thigh, slapping the flesh just above his knee. “No longer. I like to see the skin. You understand this rule?”
“I understand,” Katerina said, her voice a dry whisper. She folded her hands in her lap, over the silk of her own skirt, which now felt like a uniform.
“Start now,” he said.
She looked up. “Pardon?”
“The kisses. The daily one hundred. We are behind schedule. Start now.”
He didn’t move from his chair. He expected her to rise, to walk around the desk to him, to lean into the smell and the stickiness and the triumph in his eyes.
Katerina Volkov stood. The silk whispered against her thighs. She smoothed it down, a gesture that felt both absurd and necessary. She took the three steps around the desk, the flickering light throwing her shadow over his sprawled form. The smell was stronger here, intimate and oppressive.
He looked up at her, his expression one of lazy expectation.
She bent at the waist, her hair falling forward to frame her face. She brought her lips to his cheek. The skin was oily. She kissed it. A dry, closed-mouth press.
“One,” she said softly, near his ear.
She straightened, took a half-step to the side, and bent again. Another kiss on the same spot.
“Two.”
He let out a satisfied sigh, his eyes closing. His hand came up and rested heavily on her hip, his fingers pressing into the bone.
Katerina continued.Three. Four.Five. The mechanics of it became a rhythm. Bend, press, count, straighten. The weight of his hand was a brand. The office around them dissolved into a haze of heat and buzzing sound and the greasy specter of the father in the photograph. She was a machine of soft lips and counted beats. Twenty. Twenty-one.
On the twenty-second kiss, his other hand came up and gripped the back of her thigh, his fingers pushing beneath the hem of her flowing skirt, finding bare skin.
Katerina did not flinch. She placed kiss twenty-three on his cheek, her eyes open, staring at the stained wall behind his head, seeing only the crisp, clean numbers of her new salary, arranged like a fortress wall between her and the abyss.