Chris, bring more beer—and hurry up. Can’t you see people’s throats are dry!”
Artyom’s voice—deliberately loud and coarse—cut through the drone of the TV and the drunken laughter of his buddies, Lyokha and Stas. They were sprawled on the couch, the entire floor around them littered with empty bottles and crumpled napkins. Everything about Artyom screamed that he was the leader of this pride. He sat in an armchair like on a throne, feet in dirty sneakers thrown up on the coffee table, right beside a plate with cooling pizza. The air in the living room was heavy and stale, soaked with the smell of cheap beer, overheated electronics, and male sweat. This was his territory, his evening, his rules.
Kristina came out of the kitchen. Without a word, she gathered the empty dark-green bottles from the table. Her fingers gripped the cold glass a little tighter than necessary, but her face remained impassive, as if carved from ivory. She didn’t look at her husband’s friends, who followed her with mocking, appraising stares. She looked straight at Artyom. Her gaze was level, weighty, and there was nothing of the “Kris” he’d just made a joke of. In her eyes a cold, dark water swayed, and when Artyom caught that look, he felt uneasy for a split second—then immediately brushed the feeling aside.
“And come up with some kind of snacks too—pizza’s running out,” he kept going, basking in his power and the approving snorts of his friends. “Slice some sandwiches or something. Just not with that cheap sausage of yours—use proper meat. Move it, hostess.”
Lyokha burst out laughing, choking on his beer.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about, Tyomyich—keeping your wife in line! Mine starts a scandal over nothing. Yours—solid as a rock!”
Kristina set the collected bottles on the floor near the doorway. She straightened slowly, as if giving herself a second to calm an inner tremor. Then she lifted her head and looked at her husband again. For a moment, the room grew quieter. Even the soccer commentator on TV seemed to pause, as if sensing a change in the game.
“Artyom. One second,” her voice was so soft it almost drowned in the noise, but there was a note in it that made Artyom drop his feet from the table. It wasn’t a request. It was a challenge.
“What now? Can’t you see I’m sitting with the guys?” he tried to save face, but it came out less confident than he wanted. There was something threatening in her calm—something his drunken pals couldn’t notice, but he, who’d known her for years, felt it on his skin.
“One second. In the bathroom,” she repeated, not looking away. And she nodded toward the hallway.
There was something in her posture, in that deathly calm face, that made him obey. He stood up, trying to look unfazed, and tossed over his shoulder to the guys, “Two sec. I’ll put the wife back in her place and I’ll be right back.” But as he passed Kristina in the narrow corridor, he felt a cold coming off her that had nothing to do with the apartment temperature. The bathroom door closed softly behind them, cutting them off from the world of male laughter.
The bathroom door clicked shut, and the drunken roar from the living room instantly turned muffled, as if it were coming from underwater. Here, in the small, brightly lit space smelling of mint and bleach, every sound was sharp. Artyom turned, still playing the role of the angry master. His face was flushed from beer and performative outrage.
“What the hell are you doing?” he hissed, stepping toward her. “Decided to put on a scene in front of the guys? You lost your fear completely?”
Kristina didn’t retreat a single step. She stood with her back against the cold tile and looked up at him. But there was no fear in her eyes, no submission. Only a cold, ringing emptiness. She waited until he finished his tirade, letting his words hang and dissolve in the air like steam from hot water. Then she spoke. Her voice was quiet, nearly soundless, but each word dug into him like a shard of ice.
“Try humiliating me and calling me names in front of your buddies one more time, my dear—and they’ll all find out what kind of bedroom hero you really are. Got it?!”
Artyom froze. This didn’t sound like the usual wife’s nagging. It was a calculated, precise punch to the gut. He tried to smirk, but his lips wouldn’t obey.
“What nonsense are you spewing, idiot?”
She tilted her head slightly, and a dangerous spark flickered in her eyes.
“One more word like that, Artyom. One more ‘order’ barked across the room. And I’ll walk out to your boys and—loudly, in detail—tell them why we haven’t had sex for six months. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated to hear about their alpha male’s problems. About how tired he gets from work. About how his head hurts. Want me to tell them how you turned your face to the wall last night? I think Lyokha and Stas will appreciate the spicy details.”
The air in the bathroom seemed to run out. Artyom stared at her, the color slowly draining from his face, leaving a pale, blotchy mask behind. He saw she wasn’t joking. This wasn’t hysteria. It was an ultimatum. Blackmail—the dirtiest, most humiliating kind imaginable. He opened his mouth to yell, to grab her wrist, but froze. He suddenly understood that any move he made now would only prove her right. He was trapped.
“You…” was all he managed.
“I’ve said what I needed to say,” she cut him off. “Now go back to your guests.”
She turned, pressed the handle, and opened the door. The living-room noise flooded their little world again—but now it sounded different. Fake. чужой. Kristina walked past him toward the kitchen, her back perfectly straight. Artyom stood there another second, staring at his reflection in the mirror. A stranger looked back at him—confused and pitiful.
When he returned to the living room, his friends met him with questioning looks.
“So, Tyomyich, put yours in her place?” Stas asked cheerfully.
Artyom collapsed into the armchair without a word. He picked up a beer bottle but didn’t drink, just turned it in his hands. The match on the screen no longer interested him.
“Tyom, why’d you go quiet?” Lyokha kept at him, noticing the change. “Swallowed your tongue? Wife put you in your place or what?”
The guys laughed. It was the usual “manly” teasing, one of hundreds they tossed around every day. But for Artyom, now, it sounded like a sentence. He stayed silent, feeling the authority he’d been building all evening crack and crumble with every second.
His silence turned thick and sticky. It filled the space around his chair, creating a zone of alienation. The friends, at first merely surprised, now began to feel awkward. Their drunken fun, deprived of its leader and main instigator, fizzled out. Lyokha set his bottle on the floor and stared with curiosity at his buddy, who sat motionless, glaring at the dark TV screen as if trying to find answers in it.
“You serious, Tyom?” he tried again. “She give you a lecture in there? Put you in the corner? Say the word—we’ll teach her ourselves, right, Stas?”
At that moment, Kristina came back into the room. She carried three bottles of beer, fogged with condensation. She moved with the noiseless efficiency of a surgeon, stepping around the mess on the floor. Without saying a word, she set a bottle in front of Lyokha and Stas, and the third—meant for Artyom—she placed on the coffee table beside his hand. She didn’t look at him. Her actions were completely neutral, stripped of emotion. But it was exactly that detached, matter-of-fact “care” that became the final straw.
For the friends, it was like a red rag to a bull. A visual confirmation: something had happened in the bathroom—and Artyom had lost.
“Ohhh, here comes the hostess,” Stas drawled, opening his bottle. He winked at Kristina. “Kris, what’d you do to him? Confess. Is he tame now?”
The laughter that followed was different now. Not friendly teasing—open mockery. They’d sensed weakness, and like a pack, they immediately started pecking at it.
Artyom sat gripping the armrests until his fingers hurt. His head buzzed. He felt naked in the middle of a square. His wife’s threat stood before his eyes—clear, unavoidable. He couldn’t answer. Couldn’t spring up, grab Stas by the chest, and roar in his face the way he would have ten minutes earlier. Any aggression now would be taken as a violation of the deal—and she’d carry out the sentence immediately. Every word from his friends was a nail she, Kristina, was hammering—by an invisible hand—into the lid of his coffin.
“He’s whipped!” Lyokha shouted, finally ripping off the last masks. “Totally whipped! Tyomyich, does she even let you see us? Or did you ask permission for tonight?”
Kristina, already about to go back to the kitchen, stopped in the doorway. She didn’t interfere, didn’t defend him. She simply watched. Her presence made Artyom’s humiliation twice as painful. She was a silent witness—and, he felt, the director of this show.
Artyom slowly raised his head. He looked at Lyokha, then at Stas, then at his wife. Their faces held different things: in the friends—drunken, gloating curiosity; in her—cold, detached expectation. He understood he’d lost on every front. He couldn’t defend his authority in front of his buddies, and he couldn’t put his wife “in her place.” He’d been cornered, stripped of voice, turned into a joke in his own home. Something inside him snapped. A molten surge of rage and helplessness burned through the ice of numbness.
He couldn’t take it. With one sharp motion, he stood. The chair creaked жалобно beneath him.
“That’s it. Evening’s over,” his voice was low, strangled, but steel rang in it. “Everyone out.”
His friends blinked, stunned. The laughter stuck in their throats.
“What’s wrong with you, Tyom? Offended or something? We were just—”
“Out,” Artyom repeated, staring right through them.
Realizing it wasn’t a joke, Lyokha and Stas exchanged looks and, muttering under their breath, reluctantly got up. They grabbed their jackets, and a minute later the front door slammed behind the last guest. The noise in the apartment vanished. Only the hum of the refrigerator remained—and Kristina standing in the doorway. And him, in the middle of the wrecked room, alone with his shame.
The click of the lock sounded in the silence like a gunshot. The fun evaporated, leaving only sticky mess and the heavy smell of a lost evening. Artyom stood in the living room, on the field of his own ruin. Empty bottles, crumpled napkins, a greasy pizza stain on the rug—everything was scenery for his personal humiliation. Slowly he turned to Kristina. She hadn’t moved, still standing in the kitchen doorway, like she was on the border between two worlds: her ordered one and his разрушенный.
“Happy?” his voice was hoarse, stripped of the fake bass he’d been showing off to his friends. Now it sounded real—and raw anger boiled in it.
Kristina looked at him in silence. Her face was calm, but it was the calm before a storm. She wasn’t going to оправдываться.
“And what did you want, Artyom?” she asked quietly. “For me to keep bringing beer and smiling while you wipe your feet on me in front of your buddies?”
He took a step toward her—not a quick threatening one, but slow and heavy, like he was dragging an unbearable weight.
“You didn’t just hit back,” he said. “You pulled out the dirtiest, nastiest trump card you could think of. You hit below the belt. You knew exactly where to strike.”
“I hit where it hurts,” she answered evenly, not looking away. “You showed me that spot yourself when you decided your ego mattered more than my dignity. You turned our apartment into a circus. I just swapped out the head clown.”
The words whipped across his face. He stopped a couple meters from her. His fists clenched until his knuckles went white. He saw she wasn’t afraid. And that made him even angrier. She hadn’t just blackmailed him—she’d taken away his main weapon: his male authority, his “right” to be in charge. She’d beaten him on his own field, but by her—female—rules he didn’t understand and despised.
“You made a laughingstock out of me,” he ground out through his teeth. “They’ll never forget this. Never. They saw you shut me up.”
“They saw what you allowed them to see,” her voice hardened. “You staged this show. You sold the tickets. Did you really think I’d play silent scenery forever?”
He looked at her and understood he’d lost for good. He couldn’t force her to apologize. Couldn’t turn time back. Couldn’t erase from his friends’ memory that pathetic, subdued version of him she’d turned him into. She was the witness of his shame. And as long as she was nearby, that shame would live—breathe—look at him with her cold, all-knowing eyes. He couldn’t be in the same space with her anymore. She’d poisoned the very air in his house.
He took the final step, coming right up to her. He smelled of beer and powerless fury.
“Pack your things,” he said softly, enunciating every word. “Or I will.”
Kristina flinched, but there was no pleading in her eyes. Only icy contempt.
“I won’t let you manipulate me,” he finished, and in that sentence was the whole essence of his decision. He was throwing her out not because she’d betrayed him, but because she’d turned out stronger. He couldn’t live with a woman who knew how to break him—and, worst of all, wasn’t afraid to do it. The only way he could reclaim power was to expel her from his territory.
She looked at him for one more second—a long, ringing second. No tears, no regret. Only exhaustion. As if she’d been waiting for these words, and they brought her not pain but a strange, bitter relief.
“Fine,” she said simply.
And that short, quiet “fine” disarmed him completely. He’d expected anything: screams, accusations, tears, begging. But not this calm, almost indifferent agreement. She turned and, without looking back, walked past him into the bedroom.
Artyom remained alone in the wrecked living room. He heard the bedroom closet open, the suitcase latches click. Those ordinary, domestic sounds were louder than any scream. He sank into his armchair—his empty throne. He let his gaze sweep the room: empty bottles, cooling pizza, Stas’s jacket tossed on the floor. He had won. He’d defended his right to be the хозяин. He’d kicked her out. But instead of triumph, only a cold, nauseating emptiness grew inside him. He was alone. A king on his own garbage heap. And from the bedroom came a steady, businesslike sound—the sound of a suitcase zipper being closed.
The sound of the end…
