Sveta loved two things deeply: good coffee and her husband, Roma.
In the mornings, that was the exact order. By evening, it was usually reversed.
Roma was the kind of man who felt like an expensive cashmere blanket—soft, agreeable, and just a little too trusting.
His only factory defect, unfortunately included in the basic package, was his mother.
Zhanna Romanovna moved through life with the grace of a cast-iron iron and the tact of a starving wolverine. Once a prominent union official, she had spent years viewing the world through the comforting lens of universal sinfulness and her own spotless virtue.
She always knew how people ought to live, whom they ought to sleep with, and even what should go into Olivier salad if one wished to preserve society’s moral backbone.
She disliked Sveta instantly. She hated her self-possession, her income—which was indecently higher than Roma’s—and most of all, the way Sveta smiled: the sort of smile that made other people instinctively check whether their fly was done up.
Sveta worked from home. Officially, in her husband’s family’s eyes, she merely “sat at the computer pressing buttons.”
Unofficially, she was a highly sought-after ghostwriter and screenwriter.
She wrote blog content, television scripts, and, most lucratively of all, scandalously popular romance novels under the pen name Isabella de Crow.
Roma knew all about the pseudonym and adored this hidden side of his wife. Especially after one particularly successful novel, The Jade Rod of Desire, had earned enough to wipe out half their mortgage in one blow.
The cold war turned hot in early spring.
Zhanna Romanovna had a spare key to their apartment, given to her solely for emergencies—say, a fire or a meteor striking the building.
One day, after casually learning from her trusting son that Sveta had rushed to the dentist with terrible pain, Zhanna decided it was the perfect time for a surprise inspection.
Sveta really had left the apartment in a daze and, in her hurry, forgot to lock her laptop screen.
When she came home later, one side of her face still numb from anesthesia, she noticed at once that the ficus on the windowsill had been watered so aggressively it looked ready for rice cultivation, and her work laptop had been nudged slightly out of place.
Sveta was not only intelligent but observant. She checked her recent documents history.
Zhanna Romanovna, unable to resist poking around, had apparently touched the mouse. And on the screen, still open, was the final edited layout of Sveta’s upcoming book—the one whose fresh print run was due from the press any day.
Sveta scanned the paragraph where the cursor had been left and let out a quiet laugh.
It was a scene in which the heroine negotiated terms with the owner of a luxury escort agency.
“My rate is one hundred thousand a night, Armando,” the text read. “No kissing on the lips, and full payment in advance. I’ll see you Friday.”
Any sane person would have recognized instantly that this was fiction. The formatting alone made that obvious. But Zhanna Romanovna did not process the world like sane people did.
She belonged to that old Soviet breed that preferred crime reports to comedy.
Sveta could almost hear the satisfying click in her mother-in-law’s mind as the pieces came together: remote work, expensive shoes, frequent absences explained as “meetings with clients”…
“Well then,” Sveta murmured, rubbing her thawing cheek, “people usually judge others according to the size of their own depravity. You want first-class cabaret, Mama? Fine. You’re getting front-row seats.”
From that day on, Sveta began dropping crumbs with exquisite precision.
She knew Zhanna Romanovna would now watch her three times more closely, like an intelligence operative tailing a defector.
So Sveta “accidentally” left her planner open on the hallway console.
Circled in red marker were the words:
FRIDAY, 7:00 PM. Loft on Baumanskaya. VIP session. Director.
(In reality, it was simply the date and location of a private presentation for distributors of her new novel.)
During phone calls—especially when her mother-in-law stopped by under the pretense of checking the utility meters—Sveta began speaking in a low, velvety voice:
“Yes, Viktor, I can meet you at the hotel, but that will cost double. You know how expensive my tastes are.”
Viktor, in fact, was her layout designer, and the two of them had been arguing over the price of urgent revisions.
“These modern girls have no shame left at all!” Zhanna Romanovna finally burst out one afternoon, glaring across a cup of tea.
“No morals, no decency—only selling themselves to the highest bidder!”
“You’re absolutely right, Mama,” Sveta replied meekly, adjusting her immaculate manicure.
“The competition is brutal these days. You have to keep improving your skills if you want to stay on top. Market rules are merciless.”
Zhanna Romanovna swallowed hard and stared at her daughter-in-law as though the sideboard had suddenly developed speech.
Not long after, she secretly assembled a family tribunal.
The panel consisted of her daughter Olya—who had spent the last three years as the mistress of a married deputy while still behaving like virtue incarnate—and, of course, poor Roma.
“Your wife is a woman of catastrophically low moral standards!” Zhanna Romanovna hissed dramatically in her kitchen, waving her handwritten “evidence.”
“She’s selling herself, Roma! I saw her price list! She calls herself ‘Mistress Isabella’! This Friday she has some sort of meeting in a loft on Baumanskaya with a director!”
Roma, who knew perfectly well where his wife would be and why, nearly choked trying to suppress a hysterical laugh.
He had wanted to explain everything immediately, but he remembered Sveta’s stern instructions from the night before:
“Roma, darling, your mother is preparing a crusade. Please, don’t ruin my performance. No defending me. Just nod, wear a tragic expression, and come along. Bring popcorn.”
“Mom, that sounds a bit far-fetched,” Roma protested weakly for appearances’ sake, carefully hiding his grin.
“Far-fetched? We are going there! I will expose that shameless woman! And Olya is coming too so she can document the full collapse of your wife’s character!”
At last, Friday arrived.
Sveta stood in the center of a beautifully designed event space, dressed in an expensive emerald pantsuit.
Waiters glided silently through the hall with trays. Freshly printed books, still smelling faintly of ink, were stacked neatly on the tables. Soft saxophone music floated through the room. Editors, marketers, and a couple of literary critics chatted pleasantly by the buffet.
At exactly 7:15, the massive дубовые doors burst open with the force of a police raid.
There stood Zhanna Romanovna, breathing heavily with righteous fury in her best formal burgundy coat.
Half-hidden behind her broad back was Olya, phone already raised, clearly prepared to capture compromising footage. Behind them stood Roma, biting the inside of his cheek so hard he wouldn’t howl with laughter.
“Don’t move!” Zhanna barked, storming into the room.
She had expected pole dancing, leather whips, and Sveta in leopard-print lingerie.
Instead, she found herself facing a room full of impeccably dressed professionals, all frozen mid-conversation, champagne glasses suspended in their hands.
Behind Sveta, on a large glossy banner, shimmered the gold inscription:
Isabella de Crow
Presentation of the New Bestseller
The Price of Passion
Zhanna Romanovna stopped dead, like an ancient statue someone had forgotten to finish. Her wide eyes moved slowly from the banner to Sveta, then to the stacks of books.
Sveta, taking an unhurried sip from her crystal flute, walked toward her relatives with a dazzling social smile.
“Oh, Zhanna Romanovna! Olya! Roma! I was afraid you might ignore my invitation. How wonderfully thoughtful of you to come support me at the private launch of my new novel.”
“A… novel?” her mother-in-law croaked. “What novel? And what about… the clients? The directors? The hotels?”
“Oh, you mean passionate Armando and his business associates?” Sveta laughed brightly, drawing the curious attention of several guests.
“Mama, surely you remember—you read that draft on my computer when you sneaked in to water my poor ficus to death. That was the opening of chapter seven.”
She paused with deliberate elegance, enjoying the effect.
“And by the way, that very ‘director’—my editor-in-chief—is the distinguished gentleman over there in glasses, Eduard Mikhailovich,” she added, gesturing lightly toward a flustered intellectual-looking man nearby.
Olya instantly shoved her phone deep into her handbag.
Zhanna Romanovna’s face was darkening by the second, taking on the color of overripe beetroot.
Her grand crusade of exposure had collapsed into public humiliation. In front of witnesses, she had effectively confessed to spying on her daughter-in-law, snooping through her computer, and making a complete fool of herself before her own son.
But Sveta had no habit of abandoning a match halfway through. She always played to checkmate.
“You know, Mama,” Sveta said, and suddenly the light social tone vanished from her voice, replaced by something soft and dangerously smooth, “I’ve always admired how expertly some people project their own filth onto others. I write stories. Just words on a screen. And you managed to turn that into a brothel.”
She took one slow step closer, looking directly into her mother-in-law’s darting eyes.
“Remember one very simple truth, Zhanna Romanovna. If a person sees dirt and vice in everything, it usually means that’s exactly what fills them to the brim. And do you know what makes this even funnier?”
Sveta stepped toward the nearest table, picked up one of the glossy books, and opened it gracefully.
“I have known for a very long time who my most loyal reader is. Access to the ‘spicy bonus chapters’ on my website is only available to email subscribers. I see the subscriber list myself.”
She tilted her head slightly.
“And I would recognize your personal email—zhanna.romanovna1958—anywhere. It’s the same one you send me Easter greetings from.”
Zhanna Romanovna went pale with such speed that her burgundy coat suddenly looked almost black against her skin.
“And tonight,” Sveta announced clearly, projecting her voice across the room with lethal precision, “I would like to personally present this very first copy to the user known as Zhanna_Hot_65.”
She held the heavy book out toward her mother-in-law.
“The same devoted fan who left this heartfelt comment beneath my last novel: ‘My God, the scene in the night pool—I stayed up reading until morning and completely forgot about my blood pressure.’”
The room fell instantly silent. Not quiet—silent. Absolute vacuum.
Roma turned toward the nearest column, his shoulders shaking with soundless hysteria. Olya stared at her mother with the kind of horror usually reserved for demonic possession.
“Thank you for your unwavering devotion to my modest work, Mama,” Sveta said elegantly, placing the book into her stunned relative’s hands.
“You were reading me long before I even became your son’s fiancée. Your secret attachment to my… suggestive imagination is truly touching.”
Zhanna Romanovna stood there like a carved wooden idol, clutching the bestseller to her chest. Her narrow lips trembled.
The moral pedestal she had spent years standing on—lecturing, judging, condemning—had shattered beneath her feet in full public view.
At last she understood: her daughter-in-law had not merely beaten her. Sveta had taken her armor of righteousness, wrapped Zhanna Romanovna inside it, and tied the knots herself.
Then, stiff-legged and mute, the former union leader turned and began to walk toward the exit without a single word. Olya stumbled after her in panicked little steps.
Sveta watched them go without the slightest flicker of emotion, exhaled in satisfaction, and turned smoothly back to her husband.
“Roma, darling, bring me another glass of sparkling wine. Tonight we’re celebrating not only the release of my new book, but a full-scale cleansing of our personal life.”
She took a small, graceful sip and smiled warmly as the absurd chaos others had tried to drag into her peaceful world dissolved forever into the ringing of crystal, the hush of expensive conversation, and the smooth sound of good jazz.
