Page 29 of Corruption

I stop and look back at her. “What about me?”

“What’s your favorite cookie? Or dessert. I’m pretty good at whatever…”

I eye her body up and down before looking directly in her eye and saying with a smirk, “Cunt. But you won’t let me taste.”

The way her entire face and neck turn red is going to keep me amused for the rest of the day.

“Alik…”

“Korolevskiycake,” I finally reply to her original question.

“Kor—” She clears her throat, shifting from foot to foot before shaking her head. “Korolevskiycake,” she repeats. Or tries to. She butchers the pronunciation. “What’s that?”

“It’s also called a Russian Royal cake.”

Her eyes light up. “Oh. A dessert from your home country?” She frowns and mutters, “That’s going to take some research…”

“If it’s too challenging for you…”

“No! I like a challenge. It gives me something to do.”

The next days of footage show that Kiya continues to use my office, even though she continues to leave before she knows Nadia and I will be back. However, the next time she uses the kitchen to bake a batch of snickerdoodles and aKorolevskiycake from scratch, she’s not as meticulous about leaving the kitchen exactly as she found it, though she does make sure to wipe and clean every surface. It takes her two days of being in the kitchen most of her days and evenings after dinner to figure out the cake.

“Do you like it?” she asks as she watches me taste the cake after she’s presented it to me one evening after dinner.

It reminds me of my mother. My mother who died just after I turned eighteen. Who countered my father’s sternness and toughness with homemade sweets just like this one, a soft tone, and gentle hands that cupped my cheeks when she kissed me, even long after I would try to push her away in irritation for treating me like a child.

But just because she was kind and gentle didn’t mean she wasn’t vicious. Like when she cocked a gun at our father when she found out he’d beaten me with a fucking steel wire rope. Because she would tolerate him not being able to keep his dick in is pants. She would even tolerate him hitting her. But she drew the line at hurting her children. She actually did shoot him. In the foot. While I watched. Then she took me, thirteen, to the kitchen and served meKorolevskiycake for a late evening snack while Vaughn was in bed and my dad got medical attention. My dad never touched me again.

Until after she died, that is.

To Kiya, I simply reply, “It’s exceptional. You have a real talent, Kitten.”

Her entire face lights up, and she doesn’t remember to be annoyed that I called her Kitten.

“It’s rude to stare, my love,” Nadia says, snapping me out my stupor.

I glare at her, but she just smiles as she bites into her cookie.

12

Kiya

“F

uck,” Nadia mutters as she reads a message on her phone as we’re leaving the house with Alik.

Today is the day we get to see the New Millennial Art Gallery. I’ve been wanting to go for three years since it opened when I was fifteen. My goal was to save enough money to get tickets to see the pieces of up-and-coming artists, but I didn’t expect to be able to until a few years from now. Not before I finished school, at least. Despite the circumstance of being sold to a mafia boss for marriage being the thing that’s allowed me to see it a lot sooner, I’m grateful for the chance.

I’m so excited I can barely contain myself. So the anxiety I feel at Nadia’s exclamation makes me brace myself for the disappointment that something has gone wrong.

“Fuck is right,” Alik says, looking at his phone.

Nadia sighs.

“Is everything alright?” I ask.

“Fine. Or it will be. Just one of the donors for our organization wants to pull out. Said something about talking with Vaughn,” Nadia says. “Looks like I won’t be joining you today. I have to talk them back into our good graces after whatever the fuck your brother said.”

---