I let the words sink in. She closes her eyes, her small fingers holding onto my arms.
“Do you understand, Sadie?”
Her desperate nod tells me she understands quite well. She licks her lips and nods again.
“You’ll get one warning, woman. If I squeeze your knee, you’ve had your warning. A second squeeze, you’ll face punishment.”
She says my name as if begging for mercy. “Kazimir.”
I kiss her forehead, a reminder of what’s in store for her if she behaves. “Yes.”
“I—don’t know what you expect me to do,” she says. “I’m in a foreign land and no one speaks my language. I’m in clothes I’ve never seen, much less worn. And even if I want to obey you,” she cringes when she says this, as if the idea of obeying is physically painful, “I’m not sure what you expect.”
“It’s simple,” I tell her. “You do exactly what I tell you.” Her spine straightens, her lips thin. But she doesn’t reply.
We walk into the room with her on my arm, her eyes so wide she looks as if I’m leading her to execution or hell. For her, maybe I am.
Dimitri stands when we enter. The table is laid with bread and butter, and glasses of wine and water. The food we eat is prepared in our massive kitchens, everything made from scratch with quality ingredients. Her stomach growls with hunger, and a small part of me yearns to feed her.
“We eat breakfast in my suite,” I tell her. “Eight o’clock promptly. Our midday meal is the largest of the day, which you’ll often have with me at one o’clock. We eat dinner at what you Americans call eight in the evening. Sometimes we will eat alone. Sometimes, we will join Dimitri. If I am away on business, you’ll eat alone.”
A short nod tells me she heard me, but she does not reply.
We reach Dimitri, who stands watching us in the quiet benevolence of a father, save for the way a muscle twitches in his jaw.
“Kazimir,” he says, taking my hand. He shakes so firmly, when I was a young man it made me wince. Now, I meet his firm grip with one of my own.
“Dimitri.”
“I see you’ve had Nikita attend to your woman?”
I’m not even sure he remembers her name, and for some reason that grates on me. Typically, I wouldn’t care. But Sadie is different.
“Yes,” I say. “Sadie has met Nikita.”
When he reaches for her she involuntarily takes a step back. This will not do. Placing my hand on her lower back, I move her toward him. “Greet Dimitri properly, Sadie.”
But when he leans in to kiss her cheek, something in me revolts and I hate the idea of him touching her. I brace for it, putting up a wall between my feelings and the respectful actions to the man who calls me son, but my hands involuntarily clench by my side. I pull her back to me quickly, and don’t meet his eyes.
“Sit,” I growl at her, pulling out a chair so quickly it scrapes along the floor like skates on ice. With the grace befitting a queen, she folds herself into the chair, wincing only slightly when her backside meets the wood.
I take my place beside her.
“You are hungry, my son,” Dimitri says in broken English, his eyes glinting in the candlelight.
“We both are,” I say in Russian. I don’t like her here with him. I’ve seen what he’s capable of, and if he treats her the way I’ve seen him treat our other captives… I pull the basket of bread to me, take out a piece, and butter it.
“Have you ever had rye bread?” I ask Sadie.
She shakes her head and reaches for a slice, but a firm shake of my head warns her. I watch as her hands slide into her lap and her jaw tightens.
“We take pride in our staff’s bread,” I tell her. “They bake it in small batches and knead it by hand. The locals order it from our kitchen for banquets for our leaders. It is renowned here.”
I’m not sure why I’m telling her this. Dimitri’s lips twitch, but he sits in silence while he eats a buttered slice of bread and follows it with a sip of wine.
Tearing off a corner of the bread, I hold it in front of her. She swallows, but her mouth remains closed.
“Open,” I instruct. Though she obeys, her eyes slice to mine, suddenly defiant. I slip the bread between her lips. To my surprise, she closes her mouth before I’ve removed my hand, her teeth just grazing the tips of my fingers.
With a scowl, I reach my other hand to her knee and squeeze. Inhaling, she straightens.
Warning number one.
Dimitri speaks to me of the business he’s conducted this week. We have associates laundering money in various countries in Asia, a large shipment of illicit jewels coming from overseas, and two political officials he’s had to pay off this week. Many are already on our payroll, so it’s a matter of pulling our resources together. We speak of these matters as if we’re discussing the stock exchange or investments. And in many ways, we are.