Kingmakers, Graduation

39. Sabrina

39

SAbrINA

I ’m laying by Krystiyan Kovalenko’s vast indoor pool, in the depths of his mansion in Rublyovka. The space is damp and cave-like, the domed roof covered in hand-painted tiles, white and blue, with images of thistles, cathedrals, stags, and birds. Images of the outside world in this deep hole in the ground.

The pool is filled with salt water so brackish that you can only see a few inches below the surface. Anything could be hiding in the dark water.

Ilsa swam laps for an hour. Now she’s laying on her back, a towel over her eyes, possibly asleep.

I don’t think she’s getting rest at night. She tries to stick by my side twenty-four seven, because she doesn’t trust Krystiyan or his men. She’s supposed to be my partner but she’s reverted to bodyguard, like she used to be for Neve. It’s her nature to try to protect the people she loves.

We’ve been living in this mansion for almost a month .

Our rooms are right next to each other. Once or twice I’ve even slept in Ilsa’s bed, when we’ve stayed up late talking, or I just needed to feel the warmth of her back against mine. We aren’t fucking, though Krystiyan thinks we are. He watches us on the security cameras. The nights I stay in Ilsa’s room, he’s pissy in the mornings.

I let him think what he wants because it helps keep him at arm’s length. He’s constantly filling my room with bath salts and pink roses, and piles of boxes and bags from Moscow’s boutiques. He asks me to dine with him almost every night. I stay late at the new lab to avoid him.

Adrik was right about one thing: Krystiyan makes my skin crawl.

He has not improved on further acquaintance.

In fact, when I hear his strutting walk echoing across the tiles, I consider rolling into the pool and holding my breath under the water until he’s gone.

Instead, I stay exactly where I am, head cushioned on a towel, eyes closed, pretending to sleep like Ilsa.

I’m hoping he’ll give up and go away.

His footsteps slow as he approaches. I feel his shadow overlaying my prone frame.

“Any more beauty sleep and I won’t be able to look at you.”

I open my eyes slowly, gazing up at Krystiyan Kovalenko.

He’s got his hands stuffed in the pockets of his trousers, face freshly shaven, dark hair combed into a careful pompadour above a high fade. Krystiyan is over-groomed for a gangster. His suits are tailored too tight, he wears pocket squares and cufflinks, diamond studs in both ears .

He’s handsome in a GQ kind of way—cleft chin, white teeth, strong Roman nose—but he’s too slick for my tastes. He definitely plucks his eyebrows.

Then there’s his personality—smarmy, manipulative, and envious. His insecurity revolts me.

When Krystiyan insists on engaging me in conversation, I’ve made it a habit to stare at him, waiting for him to get to the point.

“Your boyfriend’s back in business.” Krystiyan tosses me a small plastic baggie.

I hold it up to the light, examining the pill inside.

It’s small and ovoid, daffodil yellow, stamped with a lightning bolt. That’s all they could manage, since I took the custom press.

Heat spreads through my chest. Adrik is selling my product— my fucking invention.

I look at Krystiyan. He has to snap his eyes back to my face. He was trawling his gaze over my damp bikini bottoms, the little droplets of water gathered in my navel, and the points of my nipples poking against the triangle top. I want to pull on a robe, but I won’t give Krystiyan the satisfaction of seeing me squirm.

Nor will I correct him when he calls Adrik my boyfriend, or Ilsa my girlfriend. He wants to be contradicted.

I’m beginning to believe that Krystiyan’s fixation on me is nothing of the sort—it’s Adrik who obsesses him. He talks incessantly of how they were rivals at school. Every conflict, every interaction, is dug up and recited. Or at least, Krystiyan’s version of events. Unfortunately for Krystiyan, I spent a lot of time with Adrik. The Adrik Krystiyan portrays—overconfident, arrogant, easily bested by Krysti yan’s machinations and Krystiyan’s aspersions—bears little resemblance to the man I know.

Stealing me away from Adrik is Krystiyan’s greatest achievement.

The only thing that could top it is running Adrik’s business into the ground.

“How do we stop him?” Krystiyan demands.

I roll the baggie between my thumb and index finger, making the yellow pill twist back and forth.

“We sell our Molniya cheaper.”

“Cheaper?” Krystiyan frowns. “We’re barely making money as-is.”

“Neither is he. Adrik has to buy materials at top dollar from the Chechens and he has no cash reserves. We can undercut his price. Drive him out of business.”

Krystiyan pretends to consider the idea, like he’s the one in charge. I can tell from his smirk he’s already on board.

He has the money to do it, flush with cash after inheriting from his father. Davyah Kovalenko was a broker, facilitating the sale of construction contracts to oligarchs. He had a heart attack while fucking his favorite mistress on a yacht in Sochi. He might have survived it if the mistress had called for help instead of robbing his body of watch, rings, credit cards, and cash. Krystiyan told me that he slit the girl’s mouth on both sides when he tracked her down, as punishment for the theft.

He should have thanked her. Krystiyan loves playing boss, ordering around his motley mix of mercenaries. A few are Kachki, a few Ukrainian, a few Bratva, though from lesser, lower families. He pays them generously, but they don’t respect him. I hear their mutter ed jokes. I see the looks they give each other behind his back.

“How long do you think it will take to drive him out?” Krystiyan asks.

I shrug. “A month or two, maybe.”

It’ll cost Krystiyan a fuck-ton of money, not that he’ll notice. He reminds me of a trust-fund kid who purchases a night club or a clothing line, hemorrhaging money because they understand nothing about business.

I’ll stop the bleed when it suits me.

After I’ve cut Adrik’s legs out from under him.

Krystiyan drops into a squat next to me. Russians have the most remarkable ability to hold that position, even while wearing dress pants and loafers.

“What about the new drug?” he says, looking at me from under his thick, dark brows.

He has an unpleasant way of speaking, as if everything is an insinuation or a double entendre. Especially with me, he uses a soft, intimate tone that makes me want to smack him upside the head.

“It’s ready,” I say. “I tested it last night.”

Krystiyan sticks out his bottom lip in a pout.

“Why didn’t you invite me?”

“Maybe next time,” I say, with zero sincerity.

Krystiyan rests his palm on my thigh, looking in my eyes.

“You’d be surprised how helpful I can be … ”

“Krystiyan …”

“Yes?”

“Get your hand off my leg.”

He smiles at me like I’m joking, without moving his hand.

“Are you deaf?” Ilsa barks.

She hasn’t moved the towel off her eyes. Hasn’t sat up. But her voice cracks like a whip, echoing in the cavernous space.

Krystiyan jerks back his hand, then smooths his hair like that was the real reason he stopped groping me.

“This better work,” he says, his voice several degrees colder. “It’s an expensive proposition funding your operation …”

“You’re already selling five times what you ever sold before,” I toss my head. “Spare me the complaints.”

Putting the squeeze on Adrik is a slow process by which I continually drop the price of Molniya, while selling as much product as I can to flood the market. Adrik has to buy materials at the Chechens’ exorbitant prices, losing money on every sale he makes. He can’t keep it up forever.

Krystiyan complains weekly about the money we’re bleeding out twice as fast as Adrik, but I know our reserves can stand it. It’s a siege. I’m starving Adrik out of his castle, while I still have a storehouse full of food.

Adrik is under attack, yet I’m the prisoner at Krystiyan’s house. Not only because I don’t want to encounter any of the Wolfpack on the street s of Moscow, but because Krystiyan becomes more anxious and repressive by the day. I’ve strong-armed him into sinking his fortune into this standoff. Everything rests on my head. I’m his gamble—he has to make me pay off or he loses everything.

There’s a distinct sense that his men are watching me, following me, always close. Ilsa hates it. She hates all of this. She’s always worked with her own family, on whom she could completely rely. We’re constantly on edge, not trusting Krystiyan, not even able to trust that his men are loyal to him .

Not wanting to be at the house under Krystiyan’s eye, I spend as much time as possible in my new lab. It’s clean and modern with proper ventilation, but also cold and stark and much less cheerful without Hakim’s constant remarks on what I’m doing wrong. Ilsa doesn’t sit with me, she’s always prowling around making sure Krystiyan’s goons aren’t up to anything shady.

The lab’s other drawback is that it shares a wall with a restaurant owned by Yakim Dimka, another Bratva boss . I can hear the bang of the swinging doors as waiters go in and out of the kitchen, the sous chef bawling at his staff, and even the dishwasher humming to himself as he sprays down the utensils.

I’m sure Krystiyan rented this space to suck up to Dimka. I doubt it does him much good—the restaurant is too small and shabby for a Pakhan to eat there himself. We’ll never even cross paths.

The sound of people working close by is less dreary than total silence, if occasionally distracting.

I’ve been making my most brain-bending formula yet. I don’t have Hakim to help me with the time-release, so I design it to all hit at once, an obliterating blanket of sensation, smothering and intense. I added ketamine for total dissociation. You can float outside your own bo dy and watch yourself walk and talk and move around like an automaton. Like you’ve become both a robot and the god that operates it from afar.

I test it on myself with Ilsa keeping watch. I spend hours separating my brain from the pain in my chest that beats and beats all day and all night without any rest. That’s the only time I don’t feel it—when I’m high out of mind.

I take the drug more often than I need to for testing. I take it almost every day because it’s the only relief from the hurting.

When I’m on it, I don’t want to eat. Ilsa gets us food and I sit in front of mine, watching my hands touch and pick it up. When I put it in my mouth, it feels like a foreign object, like a penny. I move it around with my tongue, unable to chew or swallow.

My clothes are getting loose. My skin is sallow. I haven’t been outside barely at all. I’m yellow and drained.

Each day that goes by turns the screws on Adrik, but also punishes me. I hate working with Krystiyan. I hate how stressed Ilsa looks. This isn’t how she thought it would be—if it were just her alone, she’d never put up with Krystiyan’s bullshit. She stays because she’s worried about me.

All I can do is succeed, because that’s what I promised Ilsa, and what I promised myself.

I work harder and harder, while sinking further into misery. Wondering how anybody can feel this shitty and survive.

I call the new drug Mechtat, which means Dream. It’s a lie … I’m not dreaming anymore. Not even hoping.

In the sixth week of the stand-off, Krystiyan comes into my room while I’m getting ready for bed. He knows he’s not allowed in here. Without looking at his stiff gait and white knuckles, or smelling how much Stoli he’s been drinking, I already know he’s angry. The intrusion is the message.

I’m standing at the mirror in a silk slip, slowly wiping my face with a cleansing cloth. I took a double dose of Mechtat earlier, and I’m just at the point where everything looks distant and posed, like a movie set.

I see the pleasant chiaroscuro quality of the light, dark everywhere except the soft golden ring light illuminating my face. When I’m high I like to spend a solid hour washing, moisturizing, and massaging my face. Telling myself I’m still beautiful, no matter how ugly I feel.

Krystiyan looms up behind me, a pale face floating over my shoulder in the mirror. With his black hair slicked back, in his dark suit, he certainly looks like the devil’s bargain.

When he’s angry, the edges of his lips go white and the area around his mouth stiffens like the muzzle of a dog.

“You said if we sold the drug cheaper, Adrik wouldn’t be able to buy supplies anymore. You said he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his contracts to the clubs and the dealers, and we’d get them instead.”

“That’s right.” I watch my lips move in the mirror—dusky red, the color of a rose a gangster would lay on a coffin if this really were all part of a movie I was filming. “It’s simple math. He’ll run out of money first. That’s why America is the business giant of the world and not Russia—‘cause you don’t respect the fucking numbers. ”

“Well guess what, John Nash? He’s just partnered up with Yuri Koslov. And he is filling his orders, and we are still losing a metric fuck ton of money!”

By the end of his tirade, Krystiyan is yelling right next to my ear, loud enough to make the hair shift around my face.

I stay perfectly calm. That’s the beauty of the dissociative state. Krystiyan can’t possibly annoy or upset me. I can’t even feel the stress I was feeling before I took the drug. Good or bad, nothing touches me.

Happily, this reads to Krystiyan as confidence. As if I’m certain that what I promised will still come to pass.

“Even better,” I assure him. “Now Adrik has to split his profit two ways. And he has to work with someone outside the Wolfpack. He’s not in control of his environment anymore. That makes him vulnerable.”

It probably also makes him furious. Now we both have a partner we can’t stand.

You might miss collaborating with someone you could fuck, won’t you Adrik?

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Krystiyan snarls.

“Figure out the weak spot in his new supply chain. Yuri Koslov isn’t nearly as meticulous as Adrik—there’s bound to be one.”

Krystiyan considers this, his mouth working.

After a minute he leans in close and hisses, “You better be as smart as you think you are.”

It turns out I am .

Two days later, Krystiyan informs me that he’s discovered the time and location of Adrik’s next three shipments.

The bribe he paid for the information was more than half the value of the drugs themselves. Ilsa and I, plus four of Krystiyan’s men, successfully intercept the truck twenty miles from its drop-point. When I open it up, Yuri’s hidden compartments are much less ingenious than Zakharov’s. It only takes ten minutes to strip the vehicle of every last gram of illicit material.

Krystiyan is cackling at our theft. All his doubts forgotten, he’s right back to thinking he’s kingpin of the world, running train on Adrik like a real big boss.

I don’t feel good or bad about it.

I don’t feel anything at all at the moment.