Where do you think you’re going? I said you’re staying home.”
Dima stepped out of the kitchen into the narrow hallway and, two steps ahead of Lera, planted his broad palm against the doorframe. His body completely blocked the exit. In the dim light of the single bulb, his figure looked massive and motionless, like a post driven into the ground. From the kitchen came the sharp smell of onions burning in the frying pan, and that ordinary, domestic smell made what was happening feel even more absurd and grotesque.
Lera slowly raised her eyes to him. Her gaze was calm, almost bored. She did not stop; she merely slowed down, coming almost right up to him. Her eyes slid from his face to his hand, arrogantly blocking her way, then returned to his eyes. She stayed silent, giving him the chance to realize for himself just how ridiculous he looked.
“I’m waiting for an answer,” he said sharply. “Tanya can sit in her café without you. You have a man. You’re supposed to be with him.”
“Dima, are you out of your mind?” Her voice was even, without the slightest hint of fear or outrage. It was the tone of someone speaking to an unreasonable child. “Have you forgotten whose apartment you’re standing in?”
He smirked, but the smirk came out crooked and uncertain. He had clearly expected a different reaction — tears, pleading, shouting. Not this cold, dissecting calm.
“That doesn’t matter. I’m your man, and I decide where you go and with whom. This is me taking care of you, if you don’t understand. I don’t want you wandering around at night God knows where.”
Lera took a tiny step back, creating distance. She looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. Not the quiet, slightly lost guy she had taken in six months ago, after he had been kicked out of his rented apartment, but someone completely alien, insolent, and unpleasant.
“You are not my man,” she said, each word like the crack of a whip. “You are a freeloader I let stay here out of pity while you look for a job. You live on my territory, eat my food, and sleep in my bed. And you will not tell me what to do. Do you understand me?”
His face turned crimson. Her words hit their target precisely, striking the most vulnerable place — his humiliating position, which he had been trying so hard to disguise with the role of a caring, dominant male. He clenched his fists.
“You’ll regret those words…”
“No, Dima, you’ll regret it if you don’t move your hand,” she interrupted in the same icy tone. “One more word like that, and I’ll call my father. He’ll explain very quickly and very clearly who makes the decisions here and whose apartment this is.”
The mention of her father worked. Dima knew her father — a man of few words, sturdy, with heavy hands and a direct gaze that tolerated no objections. The threat was more than real. His posture immediately sagged. The hand that a second ago had seemed like a steel barrier slid limply from the doorframe. He stepped aside, pressing himself against the hallway wall. There was no rage in his eyes now, only confused, spiteful resentment. The resentment of someone whose attempt to seize power had been cut short brutally and humiliatingly.
“You would’ve called him… I’d like to see that,” he muttered under his breath, looking away.
Lera did not dignify him with an answer. Silently, she took her small handbag from the cabinet, checked that her keys were inside, and walked out the door without looking back. She knew this was not the end. It was only a declaration of war. And now the enemy lived under the same roof with her, lying low until the next attack.
The week that followed that scandal was quiet. But it was not the quiet of peace; it was the stillness before a storm. The air in the apartment thickened, became dense and heavy, as if it could be scooped up with a spoon. They no longer spoke. They moved along separate orbits within sixty square meters, trying not to cross paths, like two celestial bodies whose collision would inevitably cause an explosion. Any word could become the detonator.
Dima changed tactics. Open aggression gave way to sticky, silent pressure. He no longer tried to forbid her from leaving. But whenever she came home, she would invariably find him sitting in the half-dark kitchen with a cup of cold tea. He did not look at her, but she physically felt his gaze drilling into her back while she took off her shoes in the hallway. He asked nothing, but his silence was louder than any question. It screamed: “Where were you? With whom? I see everything. I know everything.”
He began leaving traces of his displeasure all over the apartment. An uncapped tube of toothpaste, a dirty cup on her desk, crumbs on the kitchen floor that he demonstratively ignored. They were small jabs, designed to drive her mad, to make her snap, to force her to start the conversation first. But Lera did not snap. Silently, she cleaned up, fixed things, ignored him. She accepted the rules of this quiet war and played her part with cold, detached persistence. She knew he was waiting for her reaction, and she refused to give him that satisfaction.
The breaking point came on Thursday. Lera needed to pick up an order from an online store, and that morning she had deliberately withdrawn cash from her card — two large, crisp bills, which she placed in a separate pocket of her wallet. That evening, as she was getting ready to go out, she opened her bag. The wallet was where it belonged. She unzipped it and looked into that very pocket.
It was empty.
Lera froze. She did not frantically check all the compartments or dump the contents of her bag onto the bed. She simply stared at the empty fabric slit. There was no panic in her head, no surprise. Only a dull, icy emptiness and final understanding.
He had crossed the line. The last one.
This was no longer just foolish self-assertion. This was theft. Petty, humiliating theft, like spit in the face.
She slowly zipped the wallet closed, put it back into her bag, and left the bedroom. Dima was sitting on the living room sofa, watching some stupid TV show with exaggerated interest. He did not even turn his head when she entered, but his whole body was tense with anticipation. He knew she had discovered the missing money. He was waiting.
Lera silently sat down in the armchair opposite him. She looked at his profile, at the smug crease near his mouth, at the way he pretended to be absorbed in what was happening on the screen. And at that moment, all the pity she had once felt for him evaporated without a trace. Only pure, cold contempt remained. Before her she no longer saw a lost man, but a petty parasite who, after attaching himself to her, had decided he had the right not only to live at her expense but also to dispose of her belongings.
She took her phone from her pocket. Her fingers did not tremble. She unlocked the screen and found the number she needed in her contacts. She was not calling yet; she was simply looking at the name on the display. This was her last line of defense, her final argument, one she had not wanted to use. But he had left her no choice.
He broke first. The silence she had created with her wordless presence in the armchair pressed on him more heavily than any shouting. He demonstratively turned up the volume with the remote, but the fake laughter from the television only emphasized the unnaturalness of the moment. He shot her an irritated sideways glance.
“What, are you glued to your phone again? Can’t a person relax in peace?”
Lera slowly lifted her eyes from the phone screen and looked straight at him. Her face was completely unreadable, like that of a poker player holding a winning hand.
“There’s money missing from my wallet,” she said evenly, without any questioning intonation. It was not a question. It was a statement. “Two large bills that I put there this morning.”
His face twitched for a moment, but he immediately pulled himself together, arranging his expression into a mixture of surprise and mild contempt. He went on the offensive, choosing what he thought was the best tactic — attack.
“So what? You’re telling me this? You’re always stuffing things somewhere and then forgetting. Check the pockets of your jacket. Or look on the cabinet. What do I have to do with it?”
He spoke confidently, even brazenly, looking her straight in the eyes. He was trying to overpower her with his gaze, to make her doubt herself. But Lera did not look away. She continued watching him calmly, with a faint, almost imperceptible squint, as if studying some particularly unpleasant specimen under a microscope.
“They’re not in the jacket. And they’re not on the cabinet either,” her voice remained just as colorless. “They were in the wallet. And now they’re gone. Besides the two of us, no one has been in this apartment.”
“Oh, so that’s it!” He theatrically threw up his hands, raising his voice. “You want to say I took them? Have you completely lost your mind? You think I’m a thief? Maybe stop dragging yourself around cafés with that Tanya of yours. Then your money would stay safer, and you wouldn’t have anyone to suspect!”
That was his mistake. His final and fatal one. He was not merely denying the obvious; he was once again trying to tell her how to live and how to spend her own money. At that moment, something in her gaze went out completely. The last spark of doubt, the last trace of the past. Now she saw him with absolute clarity.
“And who suddenly gave you the right to act like you own the place, Dima? You asked to stay with me until things got better with your job and housing. If I need him to, my father will come and throw you out of here.”
Her words hung in the air. It was a direct, undisguised ultimatum. All his false confidence began to crack like thin ice. But he still could not believe she was serious. His mind refused to accept that his position was so unstable. And he did what all fools do at the edge of a precipice — he took one more step forward, smirking.
“What, calling your daddy?” he forced out, trying to save face.
Lera looked at the phone in her hand, then back at him. Her lips touched into a barely noticeable, cold smile.
“Yes,” she answered calmly and brought the phone to her ear.
She pressed call. Dima watched her, and his smirk slowly slid off his face, giving way to confusion. Ringing sounded on the line, then a man’s voice answered.
“Dad, hi. Can you come over?” She paused briefly, looking directly into Dima’s frozen eyes. “I need help taking out the trash. Very heavy trash.”
She ended the call and placed the phone on the armrest of the chair. The living room became quiet. Even the television seemed to fall silent. Dima stared at her, unable to say a word. He understood. He understood everything. But it was already too late.
The time it took her father to arrive stretched into a thick, unsteady eternity. No more than half an hour passed, but for Dima each minute lasted an hour. Several times he got up from the sofa, paced the room, then sat back down. His feigned self-assurance had evaporated, leaving behind a sticky, cold fear. He tried to speak to Lera, to start a dialogue that might fix everything, rewind the tape.
“Lera, listen…” he began, taking a step toward her. “I got carried away. Let’s talk like adults. There’s no need to involve…”
She did not even turn her head. Her gaze remained fixed on the dark phone screen lying on her knee. She simply sat and waited. Her calm was more frightening than any hysteria. It was absolute. It meant that the decision had been made, the sentence had been passed, and there was no appeal. To her, he was no longer a person, but an object that needed to be removed from her space.
“Lera, I’m begging you!” A pleading note appeared in his voice. “This is nonsense! Over some money… I’ll give it all back, do you hear me?”
She slowly raised her eyes to him. There was no anger in them, no hurt. Only cold, tired disgust.
“It’s not about the money, Dima. It’s about you.”
And she turned away again. He understood that the wall between them had become impenetrable. He sat back down on the sofa, clutching his head in his hands. He still could not believe this was really happening. It felt like a bad dream, an absurd farce.
The sharp, short doorbell rang like a gunshot. It made Dima flinch with his whole body. Lera, on the other hand, rose smoothly and calmly from the chair and went to open the door. She moved lightly, as if an unbearable weight had just been lifted from her shoulders.
Her father stood on the threshold. A large, silent man in a simple dark jacket. He did not say hello. His heavy gaze slid over his daughter, rested on her for a fraction of a second, then moved deeper into the room, unerringly finding its target. He asked no questions. The code phrase about “heavy trash” had been clear to him without any further explanation.
Without a word, he entered the apartment, stepping broadly over the threshold. His movements were economical and precise, like those of a man accustomed to physical work. Dima instinctively pressed himself into the back of the sofa, trying to become smaller, less noticeable. But it was useless. Lera’s father walked straight up to him.
“Pack your things,” he said, his voice low and even, without the slightest hint of emotion.
“I… I’ll do it now…” Dima babbled, trying to stand, but his legs would not obey him.
Her father did not wait. Without visible effort, he grabbed Dima by the collar of his hoodie and yanked him up from the sofa. Dima dangled in his grip like a rag doll. There was no swing, no blow, no struggle. Only simple, unavoidable physical superiority. Just as silently, her father dragged him toward the exit. Dima’s legs tangled beneath him; he barely managed to shuffle along the floor.
Lera stood by the wall, watching the scene with the same detached expression. She did not say a word.
Her father put him out onto the stairwell and released him. Dima staggered, barely keeping his balance. Then her father returned to the hallway, picked up Dima’s backpack standing by the wall, and, without looking, threw it after him. The backpack hit the opposite wall with a dull thud and fell to the floor.
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked.
Lera did not even turn around. She heard the sound of hurried, stumbling footsteps retreating down the stairs. Her father silently went into the kitchen, turned on the tap, and washed his hands. Then he returned to the hallway. He looked at his daughter. In their gazes there were no words of support, no pity, no questions. Only complete, absolute understanding.
“That’s it,” he said. It was not a question, but a statement of fact.
“Yes,” Lera answered quietly. “Thank you, Dad.”
He only gave a short nod and left.
The apartment belonged only to her again.