Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

The air was scented with incense. Enormous Chinese lamps cast warm light in pools throughout the room, and in one corner hung an abstract reclining nude, fingers and eyes and toes pointing in all directions, a Picasso, Dominika guessed. That will be me in fifteen minutes, she thought wryly.

Ustinov dismissed his security detail with a wave, and the door clicked closed. On an ebony sideboard, among a forest of bottles, Dominika saw a squat bottle of cognac, presumably the three-hundred-year stuff. Ustinov poured into seventeenth-century Bohemian crystal and made her sip. From another tray, she sampled an earthy pâté with a sublime hint of lemon on a delicate toast point.

Ustinov took Dominika’s hand and led her down a broad hall hung with lighted paintings and up three wide steps to the darkened bedroom. He did not notice the hint of a limp from her mended foot, more a hitch in her stride than anything. He was too busy looking at her hair, her neck, the softness of her bosom.

Their motion into the room triggered recessed lighting and Dominika stared in amazement from the doorway. The bedroom was a cavernous space, the size of a throne room, decorated in white and black contrasts. An enormous circular bed on a platform in the middle of the room was covered with plush fur throws. The walls were lined with scores of full-length mirrors. Ustinov picked up a remote and pressed a button. Fabric shades on the ceiling mechanically drew back to reveal a star-filled black sky through a cantilevered glass roof. “I can follow the moon and stars as they move across the sky,” he said. “Will you watch the sunrise with me tomorrow?”

Dominika forced herself to smile. The svin’ya in his sty. But how could such a man amass such wealth while others still stood in lines for bread? The atmosphere in the bedroom was heavy, with a fragrance of sandalwood. The ivory carpet beneath her feet was soft and thick. A collection of silver dishes on a white ash sideboard winked in the revolving lights. A separate spot illuminated a framed Ebru panel with spidery calligraphy. Ustinov saw her look at it. “Sixteenth century,” he said, as if he were prepared to take it off the wall and give it to her.

Now that they were standing in his bedroom, the game was a little more serious, the sexuality she had thrown around during dinner suddenly not so clever. The physical act was easy enough, she was not a prude. But she wondered what she would lose if she seduced this man. Nothing, she told herself. Ustinov couldn’t take anything away from her, neither could the leering briefers from the Service, nor lavender-scented Uncle Vanya with his mouthed condolences. “Serious work for the Service,” Vanya had said. Nonsense, Dominika thought. It was a political game to unseat a rival, but anyway this blyad, this gilded bastard, deserved to lose what he had, to go to prison. She would gut him, and Uncle Vanya would wonder what sort of person he had recruited for this task.

Dominika turned to Ustinov and let her wrap fall from her shoulders. She kissed him once lightly on the mouth and ran her hand across his cheek. He pulled her close and kissed her back roughly. Their two figures were reflected in a hundred mirror images.

Ustinov pulled away and looked at Dominika through tunnel-visioned eyes. His body was an exposed nerve; his brain was detaching itself from the anchor points inside his skull. He shrugged his dinner jacket to the floor and pawed at his silk bow tie. The oligarch who had made a fortune by outplaying other dangerous men, by cheating and hammering and, even, by eliminating his competition, saw only the blue eyes, the tendril of brown hair falling to the slender white throat, the lips still wet from their kiss. Dominika put her hands on his chest and whispered, “ Dushka, wait for me on the bed. I will be two minutes.”

In the gilt-bedecked bathroom, Dominika looked at herself in the mirror. You said yes, she thought, first to Vanya and now to this medved, this drooling bear, so important to prove yourself, now get on with it. She reached behind her, unzipped, and stepped out of her dress. You use this, she thought, looking at her body in the mirror, and you get the thing done, captivate him, find out what they want to know. They had told her Ustinov was dangerous, he was a brute who had killed men. Fine. Tomorrow morning she would be spooning iced consommé into his upturned mouth like a baby bird, and he would be chirping his secrets to her, and then the brute would be looking at the world through bars. Then she remembered something from the briefing and quickly reached into her clutch and popped a Benzedrine tablet they had given her, for the physical lift, they had told her.

Ustinov was lying on the bed on his back, propped up on his elbows, naked except for a pair of black silk shorts. Dominika walked slowly up to the foot of the bed, wondering how to start. She remembered how good it felt when trainers had rubbed their inflamed feet at the ballet academy, so she knelt and rubbed her thumbs hard across the arch of his foot. Ustinov looked at her blankly. Idiotka, she thought, some courtesan you are, and with desperate intuition put her mouth over the big toe of Ustinov’s right foot and swirled her tongue around the length of it. He groaned and fell back on the bed. Better. His trembling hand reached into a recess on the frame of the bed and instantly the room was bathed in deep red light, coloring the bed, their faces, their skin. It was augmented by smaller dots of pink, swirling around the room, off the mirrors and over Dominika’s crimson body. With a low hum, the bed began revolving. God preserve us from gangsters, thought Dominika.

Ustinov grunted something at her and reached out his hand. The revolving pink lights against the all-red background of the room turned into double pink dots, then triple dots, revolving around one another in their respective paths across the room. Dominika was overloading on the lights and the colors, and Ustinov continued beckoning for her. His guttural obscenities came out as slashes of dark orange, elemental, brutal; they somehow slid beneath, not over, the pink dots.

Dominika looked at him from under half-closed lids and wondered whether she should lick her lips for effect. As he revolved like a Bundt cake in a microwave, Ustinov’s eyes never left her. Dominika knew she had to simultaneously obliterate his body as well as his head, he had to want her to stay with him. A week, two weeks, two months. Any amount of time would satisfy the requirements, the longer the better, they said. They had told her the sidewalk outside Ustinov’s apartment was stained with the tears of his one-night stands.

Ustinov was slowly revolving toward her. When he came even with where Dominika was kneeling, he put his arms around her waist, threw her on her back—she registered the tug of tearing panties—hunched over her like a gargoyle and began making passionate, if feral, love to her.

In the red light, Ustinov’s clenched teeth—normally white and even—appeared blue and black-rimmed. Dominika threw her head back and closed her eyes. She felt Ustinov’s hot breath on her breasts. The pink sparks of light flowed over her quivering legs, their bodies, and the mirrors. She lifted her buttocks and rocked her pelvis to meet each of his lupine thrusts, clapped her hands around his arms and concentrated on making him lose his sanity. Ustinov pulled his head back in a paroxysm of impending meltdown. Dominika involuntarily huffed as he began moving harder and faster. Apart from the red light, and his blue teeth, and his grunting, Dominika was surprised to feel her own body—her secret self—responding; the bitter-tongue lift from the Benzedrine had arrived. She looked past his chin at the glass ceiling but she could not see any celestial bodies. Where were the stars?