“Hello, son? So, how’s my new daughter-in-law? Has she started nagging you yet?”
“Mom, everything’s perfect. Olya’s thrilled. She’s walking around the apartment like the Queen of Sheba. She’s already hung all her clothes in the walk-in closet. I shoved Raisa’s stuff into the storage room for now, in black trash bags.”
“Oh, good. That’s exactly what you should’ve done. The previous one was far too clever for her own good. A ‘fundraiser,’ honestly. A professional beggar, that’s what she was. But Olenka is a fine girl, and her family has money. Don’t mess this up, Vityusha. Since you quietly got married while that fool was away, now hold on to that apartment. It’s gorgeous—I saw it on video call. Don’t even think about moving out.”
“I’m not moving out, Mom. Do I look stupid? I’ve already come up with the story. I’ll tell Raisa the landlord raised the rent and that I signed a new lease in my name because I’m more financially reliable. She won’t be able to do anything. She’ll cry a little and run off to her sister.”
Victor adjusted his tie in front of the hallway mirror. The mirror was enormous, framed in heavy designer trim, just like everything else in the apartment. He worked as a curriculum specialist for a major educational holding company, designing training programs for top managers. His job required precision and the ability to build logical chains. Those very skills, he believed, had helped him carry out the perfect operation under the code name “Change of Scenery.”
He had lived with Raisa for two years. She was odd. She worked as a fundraiser for a charitable foundation, constantly searching for money for high-tech prosthetics, medicine, and rehabilitation centers. Huge sums passed through her hands, yet she herself seemed indifferent to luxury. She dressed simply and rode the metro, even though she could easily have afforded business-class taxis.
The apartment they lived in was the only thing that clashed with her almost ascetic lifestyle. A spacious three-room apartment in a new residential complex, gated grounds, a concierge, marble in the entrance hall. Raisa had said she was renting it from acquaintances who had moved permanently to New Zealand. The rent she named was ridiculous—fifty thousand rubles. For a place like that, it was practically free. Naturally, Victor had taken on the “manly duty” of paying for the housing. Every month he transferred fifty thousand to Raisa’s card, feeling like a provider and the one in control.
“Vitya, I need to leave,” she had told him two months earlier while packing a small suitcase. “My sister is having problems in Syzran. My nephew needs surgery. I have to arrange things with the doctors and help with rehabilitation.”
Victor had put on an expression of cosmic sorrow, though inside he was celebrating. Raisa, with her righteousness and endless conversations about humanity, had begun to wear him out. He wanted celebration, sparkle, and… Olya.
Olya had appeared on the horizon six months earlier. She was a beauty salon administrator: bright, loud, demanding. She didn’t talk about saving whales. She wanted a new iPhone, a trip to Dubai, and for everything to be “like normal people have it.” Olya became the catalyst.
“Are you a man or what?” she would ask, pouting her overfilled lips. “You’re living with that nun, and I’m supposed to sit around waiting?”
And Victor made up his mind. As soon as Raisa left, he moved Olya in. A month later, giving in to pressure from Olya and her “influential” mother, he married her at the registry office. The celebration was modest, but pretentious. Now he was a married man. Raisa belonged to the past, like a draft of a training manual that never made it to print. He planned to tell her about the breakup over the phone when she returned to the city, but he had no intention of letting her back into the apartment.
Victor was certain he was untouchable.
After all, he was the one paying.
And whoever paid called the tune.
Raisa was sitting in her sister’s cramped kitchen, reviewing reports on her laptop. Her nephew’s surgery had gone well. The foundation had covered most of the cost, and Raisa had paid the rest from her own savings. She was tired. Wildly, inhumanly tired. All she wanted was to go home, to silence, to her beloved bathtub with hydromassage.
Her phone vibrated. The screen showed the name: “Inga Work.” Inga was not just a colleague—she was Raisa’s eyes and ears in the city’s social circles.
“Rai, hi. Are you sitting down?” Inga’s voice sounded cautious.
“Hi. I’m sitting. Did someone sabotage the grant?”
“Worse. We got the grant. This is something else. Yesterday I stopped by your downstairs neighbor, Lena—you remember her—to drop off some documents about the cats. We went out onto the balcony for a smoke. And I saw someone in your window… let’s just say, not you.”
“What do you mean?” Raisa frowned. “Was Vitya home?”
“Vitya was home. But there was also some peroxide-blonde girl there. And Rai, she was wearing your silk robe. The one with the dragons that you brought from China. She was standing on the balcony, drinking wine and hanging all over your Victor. And he was… well, let’s say he was very actively holding her by the waist.”
Raisa felt cold spreading through her body. Not tears. Not hurt. A clean, crystalline, icy rage.
“Thank you, Inga.”
“Wait, that’s not all. Lena said she saw them leaving the building in wedding clothes a week ago. I checked through my contacts at the registry office. Victor Sokolov registered a marriage with Olga Vetrova.”
The world did not collapse.
It simply froze.
Raisa slowly closed her laptop.
“Bastard,” she said clearly into the empty room.
She dialed Victor’s number. The ringing went on for a long time.
“Yes, Rayush! Hi, how are you?” Victor sounded cheerful. Too cheerful. Music played in the background.
“Hi. How’s life? How’s the ‘rent’?”
“Everything’s great. I’m working on a methodology, exhausted like a dog. When are you planning to come back?”
“I’m already leaving. I’ll be there tomorrow. And Vitya… I know about Olya.”
“What Olya?” he choked.
“Your wife.”
The pause stretched. Victor was obviously calculating his options.
“Well then…” His tone changed abruptly, turning crude and arrogant. “Since you know, that makes things easier. You’ve saved me a difficult conversation. Yes, I fell in love with someone else. We got married. These things happen. I packed your belongings. Don’t come over. I’ll send them to you by courier.”
“Are you out of your mind? I’m coming home.”
“You don’t have a home, Raya. I’m renting the apartment. I’m the one paying for it. I already spoke with the landlord and told him we broke up, and now the contract will be under my name. He has no problem with it. So… the honeymoon is over, darling. Get out of my life.”
He ended the call.
Raisa looked at the phone, and her lips twisted into a dangerous smile. She didn’t call back. She simply went to pack her things.
The rage inside her transformed into fuel.
Victor felt like a winner.
He had repelled the attack.
“Who was that?” Olya asked lazily, flipping through a magazine on the sofa.
“My ex. She found out about us. Tried to assert her rights.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I cut her off. Told her the apartment is my territory now.”
“What did she say?”
“What can she do? She’s basically nobody. Just a girlfriend who rented a place. From now on, I’ll pay directly. To hell with middlemen.”
The evening passed in pleasant bustle. They discussed how they would turn Raisa’s study into a nursery for the future—or into a dressing room for Olya.
“I don’t like this wall color,” Olya said capriciously. “It’s too gloomy. We need to repaint it peach.”
“We’ll do everything, kitten. Anything for you.”
Victor was already calculating where to find money for renovations. The wedding and the ring, bought on credit, had hit his budget hard. On top of that, he had taken out a loan for a brand-new crossover, so he could match the status of being the husband of a beautiful woman. The debts were piling up, but he believed in his genius as a curriculum specialist and in a future bonus.
The next day, toward evening, a key scraped in the lock.
Victor and Olya were sitting at the table, finishing ordered sushi.
“You didn’t change the locks?” Olya’s eyes widened. “You said you handled everything!”
“I didn’t have time…” Victor muttered, jumping to his feet.
The door swung open.
Raisa stood on the threshold.
She did not look the way she usually did. No stretched-out sweaters. She wore a strict pantsuit, her eyes narrowed like a predator’s, and an aura surrounded her that made one want to hide under the floorboards.
“Well, hello, newlyweds,” she said quietly.
And somehow, that made it even more frightening.
“What are you doing here?” Victor tried to switch on his “alpha male” act, but his voice betrayed him and trembled. “I told you in plain Russian: don’t come here!”
“Get out of my apartment!” Olya shrieked, leaping up from the chair.
She was wearing the very robe with the dragons.
Raisa slowly walked into the living room without taking off her shoes. Dirt from her boots marked the expensive parquet flooring, but she didn’t care. She approached the table, looked at the half-eaten roll, then at Olya.
“Take off the robe. Right now.”
“What? Go to hell! Vitya, throw her out!”
Victor stepped toward Raisa, intending to grab her by the arm.
“Raya, I’m asking nicely. Leave. Don’t make a scene. I love Olya. We’re a family. You’re the extra person here. This is a rental apartment. I transferred the lease—”
“SHUT UP!” Raisa roared so loudly the glasses in the cabinet rattled.
This was not the hysteria of an abandoned woman.
This was the fury of an owner who had found parasites in her bed.
“What an idiot you are, Vitya. What a phenomenal, fairy-tale-level moron. ‘The honeymoon is over’? You’re right. It’s over for you.”
She grabbed a plate of soy sauce from the table and hurled it at the wall with all her strength, just above Victor’s head. A dark stain spread across the designer wallpaper.
“Hey! Are you insane? We’ll lose the deposit!” Victor shouted.
Raisa burst into laughter.
That laugh was more terrifying than a scream.
“The deposit? Who did you pay a deposit to, you pathetic fool? Me?”
“I paid you rent! Fifty thousand! You were sending it to the landlord!”
“I AM THE LANDLORD!” Raisa screamed, her voice breaking, her face twisted with rage. “Me! THIS IS MY APARTMENT! I bought it three years ago with the bonus I received for closing a federal project!”
Victor froze.
Olya blinked her fake eyelashes, trying to process what she had just heard.
“You’re lying,” Victor rasped. “But you… you rode the metro. You raised money for sick children. You said you were renting from friends…”
“Because I didn’t want an opportunist like you to feel inferior! I protected your fragile male ego! Fifty thousand? Did you seriously think a one-hundred-and-twenty-square-meter apartment in the city center with an Italian-designed renovation costs fifty thousand? That barely covered the utilities and security! You were living here on sufferance, at my expense, eating my food, and you still dared bring this little… this girl into my home?”
Raisa stepped toward Olya and, without holding back, yanked hard at the belt of the robe.
“TAKE IT OFF! IT’S MINE!”
Olya squealed in fear, shrank back, and hurriedly pulled off the robe, left standing in her underwear.
“Vitya, do something!” she whined.
But Victor was paralyzed. The entire structure of his world was collapsing inside his head.
The training manual had failed.
“Raya, wait… Let’s talk… If it’s your apartment, then we can come to an arrangement… I’ll pay more…”
“NO!” Raisa grabbed a vase from the console and smashed it onto the floor. Shards flew in every direction. “GET OUT! BOTH OF YOU! RIGHT NOW! YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES!”
She was not crying.
She was destroying.
She knocked Victor’s jacket off the hanger and kicked his shoes toward the door.
“You betrayed me. You lied to me. You dragged this cheap woman into my home. I tolerated your passivity, your laziness, your greed. But I will not tolerate your arrogance.”
“But we have nowhere to go!” Victor was no longer arrogant. He was pitiful. “We have tons of things… It’s night…”
“I DON’T CARE! Go into the street! Under a bridge! To your precious mommy! GET OUT!”
Raisa grabbed Olya’s bag and threw it out through the open apartment door into the stairwell.
“And if you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the complex security. They’ll carry you out like trash. There’s a panic button here, Vitya. Did you not know that? Right on the key fob.”
She pulled out her keys and deliberately pressed the large red button on the alarm fob.
Somewhere deep inside the building, a siren began to wail.
Victor and Olya stood on the sidewalk.
Bags of hastily thrown-together belongings lay scattered beside them. Wet snow was falling, but that was the least of Victor’s problems.
He stood there wearing only one shoe—the other one had never made it onto his foot when he was fleeing the enraged fury—while clutching his laptop to his chest. Olya sobbed, smearing her mascara.
“You said you had handled everything! You said the apartment would be ours! You promised my mother!”
“Shut up, Olya…” Victor groaned.
He was beginning to understand the scale of the disaster.
He had no place to live.
Renting anything decent now was impossible. There was almost no money left on his card after the wedding expenses.
He had a half-million-ruble loan for the wedding.
He had a car loan for a vehicle that now had nowhere to park, since the underground parking space belonged to Raisa too.
He had a hysterical wife accustomed to comfort.
And worst of all, Olya had a mother.
A mother-in-law.
Tamara Igorevna.
A woman with a heavy gaze and connections in the city administration, who had agreed to this marriage only because Victor had blinded everyone with the illusion of his “wealth” and his “elite apartment in the center.”
Victor pulled out his phone.
A message from the bank appeared: “Your next loan payment is due in 2 days.”
He looked up at the windows of the third floor. The lights were on. Raisa had probably already ordered a cleaning service to erase the traces of their stay.
He remembered how condescendingly he had sent her that “fifty thousand” every month, thinking he was her benefactor.
And she…
She had simply allowed him to play the man.
For pocket change.
Greed.
He had wanted to save money.
He had thought he was the cleverest one in the room.
And now he was homeless, drowning in debt, with an angry wife at his side.
Olya suddenly stopped crying and looked at him with cold contempt. In that look, Victor recognized the same expression Raisa had given him half an hour earlier.
“You’re broke, Vitya,” Olya said. “Mom is going to kill me. And before that, she’s going to kill you.”
“Olya, we’ll figure something out… We’ll rent a one-room apartment in Biryulyovo…”
“I am not going to Biryulyovo! I’m calling Mom!”
Olya dialed the number.
“Mom? Mommy… He lied to us. He’s homeless, Mom. He has nothing. The apartment isn’t his. We got thrown out… Yes… Yes, he lied. Please send the driver.”
Victor sank down onto a suitcase.
He understood that this was the end.
Not just the end of his marriage.
It was the end of his career, his reputation—Tamara Igorevna did not forgive such things—and his quiet life.
Up above, in the brightly lit window, a silhouette moved.
Raisa stood there with a glass of wine.
She was not looking down.
She no longer cared.
She had already crossed them out of her expense report.
For Victor, that was the most terrifying realization of all: he had never been the hero of a novel.
He had been nothing more than a line item labeled “unexpected expenses.”
And at last, that cost had been optimized.
