Бесплатный фрагмент - Inside the Russian Dolls

The Discipline of Bodies, The Poise of Desire

The Countess and Her Second

Petersburg, Winter 1910

The Salle d’Armes stood discreetly on the second floor of a former merchant’s townhouse on Sergievskaya Street, its windows shuttered against the long February dusk. Outside, the snow had begun to fall with the dogged insistence of a Petersburg evening, muffling hooves, dimming gaslamps, settling like velvet ash upon the collars of those who passed. Inside, beneath the vaulted ceiling and tarnished gilt cornices, the air bore a very different tension — dry, close, electric with the friction of movement.

She entered as she always did: silent, composed, and late by exactly five minutes. Not enough to disrespect the hour, but just enough to reassert the habits of a woman unaccustomed to waiting.

Countess Vera Svyatogorskaya.

The name was murmured in elite circles with the same mixture of amusement and unease that one might reserve for a woman who had kept her French accent after returning from Paris — but applied it, with surgical precision, to the handling of a blade.

She wore a tailored fencing jacket, starched to cruelty, and beneath it, breeches cut to the shape of her thigh with indecent fidelity. Her black leather gloves, still warm from the carriage, held her épée lightly, almost indifferently — as if it were not an instrument of combat but an extension of thought.

He was already there.

Captain Yegor Mirkovich, her second.

He had not removed his greatcoat, nor spoken a word. The lines of his face had the implacable calm of a sabre wound long since healed, and his hands — gloveless, coarsened — rested on the hilt of the foil he himself had once wielded in duels where the stakes were not cups or medals, but apologies, honour, blood. He had left the cavalry with a limp and a silence that neither women nor wine could soften.

Vera stepped onto the strip without announcement. He followed. She saluted. He inclined his head.

Then began the ritual.

A narrow advance. A parry, light as breath. A riposte — swift, but measured.

Her eyes did not leave his. His remained fixed on her shoulder, the muscle that gave away her intentions half a second before the strike. The sound of blades kissing filled the hall, thin and metallic, like frost on a window being scored by a ringed finger.

She pressed harder than usual that day.

He noticed.

A disengage, feint, lunge — her épée slid past his guard and tapped the padded breast of his coat.

«Point,» she said, low.

He nodded, but did not step back. His nearness, sudden and deliberate, seemed to cast a different kind of shadow between them. Not of threat, but of something suspended — like dust in lamplight before a storm.

«You are leaning forward,» he murmured, voice dry, eyes unblinking. «That betrays eagerness.»

She allowed herself a breath — short, not quite a laugh.

«And you,» she replied, «are flinching. That betrays fear.»

The second bout began without signal. This time he pressed first, a sharp, fluid aggression not typical of their usual rehearsed elegance. She retreated — once, twice — then turned. Parried.

Now their blades sang.

Not clashed — sang. Long, urgent strokes, like cello strings under duress.

Sweat began to rise at her nape, caught under the collar. His jaw, usually granite-still, was clenched, almost imperceptibly.

Then — an opening.

She saw it, took it. Her blade struck again, this time lower, close to his abdomen.

But he stepped in, closing the distance, hand still on hilt.

Their chests nearly touched.

The épée, still between them, trembled in her grip — not from effort, but from the realization that she had crossed a threshold she could not name.

His voice, low enough to be breath:

«That was reckless, Countess.»

She did not step away.

«Discipline,» she whispered, «is not the absence of desire.»

Then — without a sound, without a smile — he raised his hand. Not to disarm, not to strike, but to adjust her collar, slowly, with military precision.

The gesture was chaste.

But her pulse was not.

The snowfall had thickened by the time she descended the steps alone, the épée now cradled beneath one arm like a parasol of some violent etiquette. Her driver, Pavlik, dozed on the high bench of the carriage, his cap pulled low, the horses steaming like wrestlers before a bout. She did not wake him.

She stood beneath the gas lamp, one glove removed, feeling the sting of cold air on her fingers. The fencing jacket, damp at the back, clung to her spine. Every movement pulled the wool against her, reminding her of each advance, each retreat, each point of contact where blade had met blade — or body had met shadow.

Then, the sound of boots on the steps behind her.

She did not turn.

«I assume,» she said, voice measured, «that you do not approve of my final touch.»

His voice, just behind her, replied without heat:

«You overextend. You always have.»

He was close. Not in the way of etiquette, but in the way of men who have forgotten it.

Still, she did not turn.

«Do you speak as my instructor,» she murmured, «or my second?»

He stepped to her side. In the low light, his profile looked carved — stone and quiet disappointment. Snow caught in his hair, unmelted.

«I speak,» he said, «as a man who has held steel against his ribs. I know what it means to lean in before one is ready.»

«Ready for what?»

He looked at her then. Not at her gloves, or the bare fingers, or the scarlet flush creeping just beneath her collar. But at her mouth — without disguise.

«To be struck,» he said.

Now she turned.

Their eyes locked — not like duellists, but like dancers, locked in poise before the first step.

She did not speak. Neither did he.

And yet something between them shifted: not spoken, not agreed, but accepted. The rules of the salle no longer applied. The lines had blurred — between strike and touch, between correction and caress.

She stepped forward — barely.

Not enough to be scandalous.

Enough to test the air.

His glove met hers — not in a gentleman’s clasp, but palm to palm, hand to hand. The heat of it startled her more than any parry that afternoon. Slowly, deliberately, he removed her other glove. The motion was careful, almost priestly, but his eyes remained fixed on hers, unblinking.

The wind rose. Her hair came loose.

Still, she did not step away.

Then — his hand at her waist.

Not possessive. Not gentle.

But certain.

She caught her breath — held it — and released it into the narrow space between their mouths.

«I do not permit my students such liberties,» he said.

«I do not permit my instructors such silences,» she replied.

And she leaned in.

Their mouths met — not with hunger, but with force held back, pressed down like the tip of a blade against cloth. His lips were cold, but parted quickly; hers tasted faintly of steel and the clove lozenge she always carried.

He broke the kiss first, but did not step away.

Her fencing jacket was wet at the back and her body burning beneath it. Without words, he pulled her toward the open door of the carriage.

Inside, the velvet was still warm from her earlier ride.

He followed.

The door closed behind them with a weighty finality, muting the world to a hush of hooves and snow. Inside, the air was close, perfumed faintly with tobacco from her glove-box, horse sweat from the upholstery, and something else — ozone and wool, like a salle after a long bout.

Vera leaned back against the velvet, exhaling as if her body were uncoiling from a day held too tightly in its own skin. The overhead lamp swayed with the carriage’s idle shift, throwing soft gold over the carriage’s mahogany panels, over her cheeks flushed from exertion, and over the sheen at her collar where discipline had already begun to melt.

Captain Mirkovich remained still, sitting opposite — hat removed, gloves on his knees, as if awaiting orders on a battlefield that was no longer drawn. His eyes had lost none of their steadiness. But something in the line of his jaw had softened — as though his restraint now cost him effort.

She unfastened the top clasp of her fencing jacket — not hurriedly, not coquettishly, but as one does with a burden: as though she had earned the right to remove it. The linen beneath was damp, clinging to her back, outlining the curve of her spine in damp shadow. Her breathing was still shallow, not from nervousness, but from the way heat moves when it no longer pretends to be anything else.

He did not stop her.

Nor did he look away.

With deliberate slowness, she slipped one arm from the jacket, then the other, folding it neatly beside her. She remained in her fencing shirt: high-collared, slightly sheer, and translucent in the wrong light — and this was very much the wrong light.

«You watch,» she said, finally, voice low, «like a man remembering what he used to be.»

He blinked once. No more.

«And you,» he said, «move like a woman who wants to be undone — but properly.»

The word undone hung in the space between them, not vulgar, but mechanical, as if she were armor to be disassembled.

He stood, slowly, and crossed the narrow space. In one gesture — not rushed, not unsure — he reached out and touched the cloth at her throat. Not her skin. Just the fabric.

His fingers trembled, almost imperceptibly.

«Permission?» he asked.

She tilted her head back against the seat, exposing her neck in the lamplight.

Not a word. But the gesture was a command.

He undid the next button, then the next. The linen opened like a curtain drawn with reverence, revealing not just skin, but the tension beneath it — the muscle at her collarbone, the shallow beat of her pulse. No jewelry. No powder. Just naked warmth, and the memory of movement.

She reached for his wrist, guiding his hand, not to her breast, but to her ribs — the side, where the fabric was still cool and soaked with her sweat. She pressed his palm there.

«There,» she whispered. «Where I feel the blade pass before it strikes.»

He drew in his breath through his teeth — sharp, involuntary.

Then he knelt.

Not out of servitude, but proximity. To be closer to the source of heat. To read the language her body had been writing silently all afternoon.

His hands went to her boots. He undid them — the laces stiff from salt — and drew them off one by one. Then the gaiters. Then his hands slid up her calves, fingers grazing the fine stockings already damp at the knees.

No vulgarity.

Just friction.

Just flesh under form.

She leaned forward, hands in his hair now, face unreadable. Her voice dropped to a hush:

«You correct my stance, Captain. But do you know how to correct… surrender?»

He looked up.

And answered her not with words, but by rising, pressing his mouth to the line where her fencing shirt met her breast — not claiming, but tasting. As if learning. As if every inch of her were a lesson written in sweat, in silence, in poise about to collapse.

She breathed him in — the salt of his skin, the dry heat of his neck where the uniform collar had pressed all day. A scent not of cologne but of discipline endured, of sweat dried into wool, of long silences broken only by blades. Her mouth lingered near his throat, open but not biting, her breath a silent question.

He didn’t answer. He waited — like he always did.

That, she decided, was his flaw.

She moved.

In a single, smooth shift of weight, she mounted him — not awkwardly, not impulsively, but with the grace of a practiced lunge, settling herself across his lap with precision. Her skirt, already loosened, bunched at her hips; the fencing shirt fell open wider, its buttons gaping like lips parting under pressure. Her thighs pressed against his uniform trousers — damp, muscular, warm.

He inhaled, sharply.

«You don’t get to stand still now, Captain,» she said, low and amused. «We’re past drills.»

His hands had risen — instinctively, absurdly — as if to protect himself. She caught them at the wrists and pinned them lightly against the seat behind his shoulders. His eyes darkened, but he did not resist. The very absence of it thrilled her more than any physical struggle.

She leaned in, and kissed him again — not on the mouth this time, but lower, at the corner of his jaw, along the line of his neck, down to the edge of his shirt. Her tongue traced the hollow there, her teeth grazed him — not enough to mark, but enough to assert. She could feel his heartbeat, quickened, just beneath the skin. There it was. Contact.

Her hand slid between them, between the folds of her own open shirt and the crisp wool of his tunic. She unfastened his belt with the same deliberateness with which she tied off her épée: one movement, two fingers, no hesitation. He stiffened — not from fear, not from surprise, but from the acute awareness of power transferred.

«Do you remember,» she whispered, «what I told you in Paris?»

He blinked. Once.

«That a woman,» she continued, unfastening the last button with a slow flourish, «can lunge with more than her blade.»

And then she pressed herself against him fully — no longer teasing. Skin to skin. Heat to heat. Her hips shifted forward, guided by rhythm rather than hunger — a rhythm drilled into her in long hours of training, but now applied to breath, not blade.

He made a sound — low, from the chest — and surged upward. Not to resist, but to meet her. But she pressed him back down, one hand still at his chest, the other guiding him into her, slow as a draw, deep as a thrust.

Her exhale was sharp — and silent. A victor’s breath.

The carriage swayed.

Outside, snow whispered on the windows. Inside, nothing spoke but motion — her body dictating tempo, his answering with silent awe.

She rode him like she fenced: spine straight, balance perfect, each movement a controlled surrender to tension. His hands finally rose — one to her waist, the other to the damp silk at her nape, not pulling, only anchoring.

She closed her eyes, leaned in, and whispered against his ear:

«You should have parried.»

He exhaled — a sound like surrender.

Or perhaps — like praise.

The motion slowed — not from fatigue, but from something more dangerous. Proximity to truth. She hovered above him, the heat between their bodies no longer sharp but liquid, simmering. His tunic was damp at the shoulders from her palms; her shirt clung in translucent threads to the curve beneath her breasts, darkened at the spine, where his hands had just begun to tremble.

She looked down at him — his chest rising beneath the grey-blue cloth, the sharp crease of his collar now undone, his hair disheveled from her fingers. Something in her gaze shifted — not softened, but deepened, as though she had discovered a note in him she hadn’t known existed.

Her hand went to his throat, not to restrain, but to trace — skin to skin now, bare at last, warm and human. She bent down and kissed the hollow beneath his jaw, then bit, lightly. He flinched — not from pain, but from recognition. She was no longer fencing with him.

She was disarming.

«Take it off,» she murmured, voice ragged now, but still with that hint of command. «All of it. I want no history between us.»

He obeyed.

Wordlessly, he sat up — and in the narrow, lurching dark of the carriage, began to remove the layers of his discipline. The tunic first, then the undershirt, drawn over his head with a grunt. The shift of muscle in his shoulders, the damp line along his abdomen where her thighs had pressed — all of it emerged as if unwrapped, like steel freed of scabbard. His body was scarred, but not brutally; a long, pale line curved near his hip, another across his ribs — relics, not warnings.

She touched one, and her fingers lingered. «Saber?» she asked.

«Bayonet.»

She smiled, just faintly. «Then you know what it means to be opened.»

He caught her wrist. Not to stop her — only to steady her.

Now she stood, only half-rising in the swaying carriage, and reached behind her. Her fencing shirt fell to the floor with the sound of linen parting from sweat. Then the skirt — loosened with a practiced tug — dropped to her ankles, and she stepped free of it. Stockings next, rolled down with surprising grace, one foot on the seat, the other between his knees. No shame. Only precision.

She stood before him now bare but upright, like a statue warmed to life, skin flushed, thighs marked faintly by the edge of her garters. Her breasts rose with her breath, their peaks taut from cold and hunger both. A single strand of hair had come loose and clung to her collarbone.

He looked up at her. This time, truly looked — no longer her second, but her opponent, her equal, her match.

«Now,» she said, voice low, «there is nothing between us but skin.»

He rose — slower, steadier — and stepped into her space. His hands went to her waist, sliding along the small of her back, his mouth to her throat, then collarbone, then breast. Not devouring — learning. And she let him.

She let him, and then she guided him down onto the floor of the carriage, wrapping herself around him like a ribbon given weight.

There, in the dark, no longer captain and countess, no longer duellists — they became heat, breath, flesh, and the long, relentless rhythm of two people learning each other without rules.

* * *

Morning arrived reluctantly, like a guest who sensed something indecent had taken place during the night. The light in the boudoir of Countess Vera Svyatogorskaya was pale, like milk poured into porcelain, and the air held that August stillness peculiar to Petersburg — heavy, damp, faintly perfumed with overripe roses and coal smoke from a nearby chimney.

She stood before the tall mirror, half-dressed, fastening the final hooks of her corset. Her hair, freshly brushed, shimmered like tarnished brass, still bearing a trace of sweat and gun oil beneath the lavender water. Along the inside of her thigh, just above the garter’s edge, bloomed a small bruise — violet, finger-shaped, unmistakably human. She touched it with an absentminded hush of her thumb.

From the adjoining room came a voice, muffled by linen and sleep:

«Vera… it’s barely eight. Must you go already?»

She did not answer at first. Her fencing jacket lay on the chair — folded with precise care, navy wool, collar sharp as a blade’s edge. Her gloves beside it, and, leaning against the wardrobe, her épée — gleaming faintly, as if aware it would soon be used again.

She spoke at last, still facing the mirror:

«I must.»

There was a rustle from the bedchamber — silk sheets, a sigh, the wooden groan of a bedframe that had grown too used to solitude.

«You’ve been so diligent lately. Training every morning, even on Sundays,» came his voice again, a little drier now, tinged with the soft irritation of the comfortably married. «Should I be jealous of this… fencing master of yours?»

She paused, hands at her cuffs.

Then she turned.

He lay in the bed in his dressing gown, propped lazily against pillows, moustache impeccably groomed, complexion paler than his role as husband ought to allow. A man of finance, not warfare. He looked at her with a half-playful squint, as if hoping to coax her back through charm alone.

She tilted her head.

«If you like,» she said, «you may be jealous of the bruises.»

«Bruises?» he echoed, blinking.

She reached for the jacket and shrugged into it with the slow finality of armor. The fabric was cool against her skin, her blouse rustling beneath like something being pressed into silence.

«We train seriously,» she said simply.

He gave a light laugh, the sound of someone fencing with conversation rather than steel. «Still — do be careful, Vera. You bruise so easily.»

She didn’t respond.

Instead, she took her gloves, tucking them into her belt, and retrieved the épée, its weight familiar in her hand. She looked into the mirror once more. But this time, she didn’t see her reflection — only the bearing of a body that had been changed. Chin lifted. Shoulders set. Neck exposed, not in submission, but in discipline. There was something brighter in her stillness now — a held note from the night’s unfinished cadence.

She moved toward the door. Paused.

«I’ll be home by luncheon,» she said, without turning.

And then she left.

* * *

The salle d’armes of the women’s fencing club on Kamennoostrovsky stood quiet in the late morning haze, the sun filtering through high leaded windows in long, devotional slats of light. Dust hung in the beams like incense. The scent of resin, oil, and chalk lingered in the air, mingling with something sharper — like the memory of breath too recently caught between lips.

Countess Vera Svyatogorskaya stood at one end of the piste, already gloved, masked, épée in hand. Her fencing jacket was buttoned high and taut against her figure; her posture, as always, was immaculate. But her eyes — those grey-green eyes behind the mesh — burned with something that belied discipline. She tapped the blade once against her heel, a metallic whisper of anticipation.

Across from her stood he — her second, her former officer, her silent partner in the unsanctioned and the unspoken. He wore no uniform this time — just a white linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, dark trousers, boots. Relaxed, almost careless, save for the way his eyes followed her every breath like a hunter watching a doe that had once grown antlers.

«Shall we make it… interesting?» she said.

Her voice, slightly muffled by the mask, still cut through the stillness like a silver thread.

He didn’t move.

«What do you propose?»

She took a step forward, blade low, her weight shifting onto the ball of her foot.

«A wager. Touché — and the other removes one article. No exceptions.»

He let the silence settle — like snow, like dust — before answering:

«You risk yourself too easily.»

«No,» she said, sliding into first position. «Only carefully.»

He saluted with the slightest flick of his wrist. The game was on.

The first exchange was brief, elegant. She lunged — he parried, countered — she recovered, retreated. A flick of his wrist nearly caught her shoulder, but she twisted just out of reach, replying with a sharp thrust that scraped his guard.

Then, a sudden disengage. Her point found his hip.

«Touché,» she breathed, satisfied.

He exhaled. And with no hesitation, he reached to the throat of his shirt, undid the first button. Then another. Slowly. Deliberately. The fabric parted to reveal the edge of his collarbone, the dark hair at his chest. Not much — but more than protocol allowed.

They reset.

The second bout was longer, less polite. She tested his balance with feints, drove him to retreat, only to find herself caught in a tight riposte that grazed her side — too close. A mistake. He struck.

«Touché.»

She stepped back, stillness radiating from her like heat from iron. Then — silent — she reached behind her neck and unfastened the top button of her jacket. One by one, they fell open, until the garment could be shrugged off her shoulders. Beneath it: the fencing blouse, translucent with sweat at the spine, clinging faintly to her figure. The outline of her corset beneath it gave her waist an aristocratic geometry.

She met his eyes through the masks.

He nodded. Respectfully. No more.

Third pass.

This time, she fought harder.

There was rhythm now — not just blade against blade, but breath against breath. She came close to disarming him with a tight inward parry, but he twisted, redirected her energy, and caught her exposed flank.

«Touché.»

A pause. Her lips tightened behind the mesh.

With steady fingers, she unpinned her hair. The dark coils tumbled down past her shoulders, damp at the ends, catching in the light like the lines of a painting. She was still mostly dressed — but now something intimate had been released, and it colored the air.

Next round.

Her turn.

She feinted left, then pivoted, using a trick from French school — a drop of the point, then upward flick to his bicep.

«Touché.»

He gave a breath of laughter — short, rueful — and then bent to unlace his boots.

She watched him. The way he leaned, the quiet efficiency of his hands. Once both boots were off, he stood barefoot, his shirt open halfway now, the ridges of his abdomen catching the sun.

Now, even the air between them felt changed.

And so it went.

Another pass — he caught her wrist, twisted slightly. Her balance faltered. He struck.

«Touché.»

This time, she undid her gloves.

Her bare hands looked almost vulnerable. Long fingers, pale at the knuckles, a few calluses — elegant, yes, but touched by real use. She flexed them once, then took her épée again.

Their footwork grew looser, hungrier. They circled faster. No judges. No audience. No rules but one: give, or take.

He won again.

Now her blouse.

She drew it out from the corset, then pulled it over her head — arms raised, hair lifting slightly as it came free. Beneath it, only the corset and chemise remained, ivory with faint embroidery at the décolletage. The skin of her shoulders glowed — flushed, not with shame, but exhilaration. The bruise at her thigh peeked from the slit of her skirt, like a fingerprint in wine.

But she was not losing.

Not yet.

She lunged, sharp and decisive, and struck his thigh.

«Touché.»

He nodded. Without ceremony, he removed his shirt entirely.

The air caught in her throat — but only for a second. His torso was sculpted like something cast, not grown: taut, lean, lightly scarred. She knew this flesh now — but not like this. Not when it was hers to conquer in open daylight.

Reset.

Two more passes. Each lost one more piece.

She lost her skirt. He, his belt and trousers. He now wore only underclothes — white, snug, military-issue. She stood in corset, chemise, stockings, boots. More hidden, but somehow more incendiary.

They paused.

Breathless.

She tilted her head.

«One more point.»

He didn’t reply. Only raised his épée.

They met in the center of the piste. For once, no feints. No hesitations.

They lunged at once.

Her blade struck his shoulder.

His struck her chest.

They held.

Both touched.

Silence.

Then she stepped back — just half a pace.

«You first,» he said softly, his voice unrecognizable now — rough silk, half-broken restraint.

She reached down and began to unlace her boots.

She bent low, one knee grazing the wood, as her fingers found the brass clasps of her boot. They clicked open one by one, slow, almost ceremonial. The leather yielded with a sigh, then slipped free, revealing a narrow stockinged foot in pearl-white silk, the arch too high to be modest, the heel delicately curved, like the cup of a hand held out for a kiss.

The other boot followed, falling with a gentle thud. She rose again barefoot, taller somehow, as if her bones had shed something heavier than leather. Her chemise, unpinned by movement, hung looser now. The lace at the edge of her thigh trembled when she stepped forward — not from fear, but from awareness: of the air, of his gaze, of the weightlessness of standing so near undressed while holding a sword.

She looked at him. There was no triumph in her eyes — only invitation.

His blade tilted down.

«My turn,» he said quietly.

And without removing his mask, he reached to his hips, hooked his thumbs beneath the waistband of his undergarments, and drew them down in one fluid, unbroken gesture.

The linen fell.

He stepped out of it.

Beneath the hem of his shirt, nothing remained — no modest concealment, no ceremonial delay. He was bare from the waist down, unadorned and unshielded, the skin pale where the sun had never touched, the line of his abdomen breaking into the raw truth of a man who no longer hid behind uniform or restraint.

For a breathless instant, Vera did not move. Her gaze, veiled by her own mask, slid downward — not abruptly, not hungrily, but with the measured gravity of someone reading the next line in a sacred text.

His body was bared like a sculpture half-finished — all tension and exposed intention, yet never crude. He stood still, not shielding himself, but also not flaunting — as if nudity, here, in this consecrated space of duels and desire, was merely the next logical surrender.

She drew breath. The point of her épée traced a slow downward arc and came to rest against the floor.

«We are even,» he said.

«Are we?» she answered.

A step brought her closer. The chemise brushed her thighs as she moved, transparent now in places, clinging to her spine where the corset had begun to loosen. Her corset — a dove-grey relic of aristocratic elegance — remained bound, but barely. Beneath it, her breathing was visible, steady but deep, each inhale pressing the silk tighter across her ribs.

«Then one more bout,» she murmured.

«Without blades?» he asked.

Her hand slipped up to her mask.

«Without masks.»

She lifted hers away.

Her hair, still damp with exertion, clung to her temples. Her skin gleamed — not like porcelain, but like something lived in, warmed, softened. Her lips were parted, flushed. Her eyes — those aristocratic, falcon-sharp eyes — had lost their edge. Or rather, turned it inward, as if cutting open something long guarded.

He mirrored her, removing his own.

His face, at last bare, revealed the soldier stripped of discipline. Not broken — but undone. Tension lived in his jaw, his brow, the set of his mouth — but it was not fear. It was restraint. The kind born from years of drills, commands, ice-cold baths. And now, tested again — by a woman in stockings and a sword belt, standing just beyond reach.

She approached.

The blade in her hand slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. Her hand rose — slowly, like one might approach a wild animal — and touched his shoulder.

«Then we change the game,» she said, barely above breath.

He looked down at her. Her touch slid across his collarbone, downward, then paused at his chest, where the skin still bore the trace of her earlier strike — the mark of her blade, and now her fingers.

He did not move.

But when her other hand reached behind her back and found the knot of her corset, he did.

«No,» he said softly.

And it wasn’t a refusal.

It was a permission.

He stepped behind her.

His fingers, once trained for rifle bolts and field repairs, found the silk laces. One tug — and the pressure of the corset softened. Another — and it began to slip. With each breath she took, the garment released her, inch by inch, until it could be drawn down and laid aside, like the final sheath of armor.

The chemise was now her only barrier — and even it barely counted.

He touched her shoulders.

Bare. Pale. Rising gently as she exhaled.

She turned to face him.

And now, without corset, without jacket, without fencing stance, she stood not as a countess, not as a fencer, but as a woman. The chemise fell open slightly at the neck. One sleeve had slipped halfway down her arm. The lace at her thighs trembled when she stepped close enough to feel the warmth of his skin against hers.

Their bodies did not rush together — not yet.

Instead, they regarded one another in the silence of the salle, with its long windows and high ceiling and the faint echo of swords once drawn.

This was the final duel.

One of flesh.

One without footwork.

She raised her hand again and touched his cheek.

And this time, he leaned forward.

The next round began without announcement, without reset — only a glance, a tilt of blade, the whisper of bare feet repositioning on the parquet. Sunlight streamed through the tall windows like molten silk, catching motes of dust and the slow gleam of sweat along her clavicles.

Countess Vera Svyatogorskaya tried to reassemble her focus.

Tried.

But her opponent — no longer her second, no longer merely the austere former officer whose hands once corrected her grip — now stood with his shirt open and nothing beneath the hem. He moved with the same precise, military grace, but where once his footwork had drawn her admiration, now it drew her attention to something else entirely.

With every lunge, every sidestep, the soft sway of his member caught her eye like a metronome to which her breath began to sync involuntarily. Not even the sword’s glint held such power now — not the edge, not the feint. Only the quiet, living pendulum between his thighs, heavy and indifferent to modesty, answering to the rhythm of their bodies, not of rules.

She parried late.

Steel hissed.

«Touch,» he said softly.

She narrowed her eyes. «On purpose,» she lied.

Another layer gone — the chemise slid from her shoulders like a breath escaping a dream. Beneath it, her skin was cool and taut, goosefleshed from anticipation rather than cold. Her breasts, exposed now to the golden light, did not flinch. She caught his glance — it was brief, respectful, and devastating.

They resumed.

And yet something had changed. She no longer sought victory. Or rather — she did, but not in points. Her movements grew more feline, less academic. The edge of the blade became a line of tension, but not the only one between them.

She moved forward, swift as water. He countered, his stance opening — and again, there it was: the inevitable motion, the exposed weight of him. The dark thatch above, the silken shaft below, shifting with each breath, a rawness she had not imagined, and could no longer not imagine.

Her blade dipped.

Steel kissed her shoulder — touch.

She gave a slow exhale, her chest rising. «Not fair,» she murmured.

«Distraction,» he answered.

She reached for the ribbons at her hip. The silk drawers came away, puddling at her feet. She stepped from them with a dancer’s poise, now clad only in stockings and a single garter. Her body — long, lean, trained — stood proudly bare, unhidden. The small triangle of dark curls between her thighs seemed almost ceremonial in its shadow.

He did not smirk. He did not leer.

But his shaft moved — just barely — a subtle twitch that betrayed more excitement than he allowed to show.

Another round. She lunged high, aiming for his shoulder. He parried. Blades sang.

She feinted low — and this time, as he twisted to block her, his length shifted with such bold, blatant swing that she almost missed her mark. Her mind filled not with tactics, but with feel — the imagined weight of him in her hand, against her, inside—

Steel flicked her breast.

«Touch,» he said.

She smiled, flushed. «You cheat.»

«I’m only as naked as your rules permit.»

She laughed — throatily, breath breaking. «Then by all means… let’s see how far they’ll bend.»

She raised her blade again — no longer for defense.

But for invitation.

They circled again — slower now, their breathing shallow but not from exertion. Blades traced half-arcs in the air, the gleam of steel barely more provocative than the curve of her bare hips or the veiled pulse at his throat.

Vera’s balance wavered. Not outwardly — no, her footwork remained poised, her form elegant — but inwardly, the storm was growing. She had never stood so exposed, not in the salons of Paris, not in the private gardens of her girlhood. The chill kiss of air on her thighs was nothing compared to the heat that rose between them now, silent and pulsing.

He watched her — not lewdly, not even hungrily. But with a soldier’s attention. As if her body were terrain to be mapped, studied, understood before conquered.

She tried to strike. He parried.

His riposte was casual, almost lazy — and yet his tip caught her wrist with a soft tap of leather against skin. She lowered her blade a fraction.

«Touch,» he said, voice low.

She said nothing. Only reached down — slowly — and unfastened the garter at her left thigh. The elastic snapped free with a whisper, and the silk stocking, held no longer in place, began its gentle descent. She did not pull it — she let gravity do its work. As it slid past her calf and pooled at her ankle, she stepped out of it like shedding an old life.

Now her legs were bare — entirely. And she stood, save for the other stocking, fully nude. One foot in silk, the other in nothing. One thigh banded with lace, the other pure skin. The asymmetry made her somehow more naked than nudity itself.

His gaze flicked downward — and this time, lingered.

Not on her breasts, not on the soft triangle between her thighs — but on the stocking that remained, like a final standard yet to fall.

«You hesitate,» she said, lips barely parting.

He stepped forward.

«Not from fear,» he murmured. «From discipline.»

Then — a sudden thrust. She blocked it, barely. Her hand was trembling.

Their swords caught, pressed, slid against each other in a slow duel of friction and angle. And again — the motion between his legs pulled her eye. That pendulum, that dark, heavy promise — no longer swinging aimlessly, but stirred by tension. Half-risen now, not from physical movement but from the ache building behind his restraint.

She lunged — and missed.

«Touch,» he whispered, catching her shoulder.

She held her breath.

And then, softly — he dropped his blade. It clattered on the floor like a final verdict. With both hands, he unfastened the last buttons at his collar, drew the shirt from his shoulders — and let it fall.

It slid to the floor like a flag of surrender.

He stood before her now, entirely revealed. Broad-shouldered, pale in the morning light, his chest rising slowly with each breath. His sex, freed fully, now swelled in open defiance of any feigned neutrality. It did not hide. It rose.

Vera felt it — not as sight, but as heat. A presence in the room.

She stepped back — not in retreat, but invitation. Her blade still in hand, she raised it gently.

«One more round,» she said.

He nodded. Then, with a flicker of something darker in his gaze, he bent — not to return her stocking, but to claim it. The silk curled in his fingers like a ribbon of surrender. And with a calm, almost ceremonial motion, he wound it once, twice — and tied it lightly around the base of his cock, a velvet noose that did not conceal but crowned his arousal.

«Then let it be for everything.»

They began again.

She blinked once — slowly — as the silk tightened at his base.

Not lewd. No — deliberate. A gesture of tension and control, like a duelist winding a ribbon round his hilt. The stocking hung like a dark token between his thighs, soft against the weight of him, a velvet tether that somehow exposed him more than nakedness ever could.

He did not smile. His face held the same stern composure he bore on the parade ground. But in the flare of his nostrils, in the minute tremor of his fingers, she read the shift: he was no longer defending his decency. He was offering it.

Their blades lifted again.

She came at him — fast, precise, forcing him to retreat. Her bare foot glided across the parquet, the single stocking whispering as it slid against her calf. The tension in her thighs, the roll of her hips — all meant to distract.

And distract it did.

For the first time, his guard faltered. Her feint drew him wide — and her riposte kissed his ribs.

«Touch,» she whispered.

He stepped back, breath sharp.

Her eyes gleamed.

«Then what shall you remove now?»

He glanced down. Nothing left. Not on his body — but the ribbon. Still tied. Still marking him.

She nodded toward it.

«Unbind it,» she said.

A pause.

Then, without a word, he reached down — fingers grazing the silk, pulling the knot free. The stocking slid down, brushed his length, and fell to the floor with a sigh.

He made no effort to conceal himself. Not now. The tension of the cloth had left him full, taut, pointed toward her like a second weapon — a challenge, but also a plea.

And she —

— she trembled.

It wasn’t fear.

It was power.

She had stripped him, not only of garments, but of poise. Of distance. Of his impassive stare and the quiet command in his stance.

Now, she was the one still half-dressed. A single stocking hugging her leg like a trailing veil. Her chest bare, yes, but her presence clothed in the victory of the moment.

She advanced.

Her blade kissed his chest — the point resting lightly above his heart.

«I should take your place,» she murmured. «The teacher. The one who commands.»

His voice was hoarse. «Then command me.»

She stepped in — the blade never leaving his skin — and with her free hand, unfastened the last clasp of her stocking. It peeled from her leg like an afterthought. She let it fall between them.

Now she, too, was entirely bare.

The air felt electric. Their breath mingled in the narrow space between two naked bodies, their swords still held, as if any wrong word would trigger another duel — or an embrace.

His hand rose — to her wrist, not to disarm her, but to hold the line of steel that still connected them.

«You’ve won,» he said, voice low.

She smiled — a slow, knowing smile that unfurled like silk across her face.

«No,» she said. «I’ve only changed the terms of surrender.»

She lowered her blade — not with haste, but with ceremony, as if returning a scepter to its sheath. The metal touched the floor with a muted clang, and then she stood fully, nakedly, before him.

No veil now. No silk. Only skin — pale where her corset once bound, faintly flushed along her collarbones, the swell of her breasts rising and falling with a new rhythm.

Her gaze moved downward. Slowly.

Not shyly.

From the hollow of his throat — where a faint pulse flickered — to the broad plain of his chest, firm and sun-dusted, down across the tight slope of his abdomen. There, the light caught on fine hairs and the sculpted ridge of his hip bones, narrowing to where his sex stood, firm and unhidden.

She tilted her head, studying him like sculpture. Her fingers did not rise — not yet — but her eyes traced the line of his shaft, the texture of it, the tension beneath the skin. The memory of her stocking still lingered faintly in the flushed ring where it had pressed.

«You were bound a moment ago,» she murmured.

He exhaled — a breath, deep and patient.

«And now?»

She stepped closer. Her breasts brushed his chest. She felt the heat of him, the nearness, the potential. But she did not touch. Not yet.

«Now you’re… armed,» she said, glancing down again.

The corner of his mouth twitched, but he did not smile.

And then his gaze began its own descent.

He didn’t rush.

He looked at her the way a man studies a poem written in ink he knows will fade — trying to read every line before it vanishes.

From her eyes, he lingered on her parted lips, where her breath came in slow puffs. Then down — the curve of her neck, the gentle slope of her shoulder. Her collarbones, still marked by faint impressions of earlier tension. Her breasts — not large, but perfectly proportioned, tipped with rose-dark nipples that tightened as he looked, as if responding to his eyes alone.

She felt it — the weight of his attention. It moved over her like sunlight.

His eyes paused at her navel, then lowered further, to the slight hollow of her hips, and the soft, delicate folds between her thighs, now slightly slick with arousal. He said nothing. But she saw his throat move as he swallowed.

And finally — he looked at her legs. One smooth and bare, the other bearing the faint trace where the garter had once held. The skin there slightly blushed. A memory. A phantom restraint.

«You are…» he began, then stopped.

«Say it.»

«Like something I was never meant to touch,» he said softly, «but have been training all my life to protect.»

That stirred her. Not just her body — though it clenched and warmed — but something deeper. Some ache that had no name.

She raised a hand now. Slowly. Fingertips first. She touched his chest, then let her nails trail down — light as ash — across his stomach, toward his groin. He flinched, not from fear but from sheer, unbearable anticipation.

And when she stopped — just before she reached him — she whispered:

«Then protect me now. But not from danger…»

She looked up.

«…from distance.»

Their bodies closed the final inch. No sword between them now. Only skin. Breath. Want. And the slow, inexorable draw of one body answering the question of the other.

He did not reply.

Instead, his hands slid to her waist — firm, deliberate, as if he had long since memorized the shape of her. His touch was warm, steady, reverent. And in that grasp there was no haste, no urgency — only permission. A quiet acknowledgment: now it may begin.

He leaned in and pressed his lips to her shoulder. Once. Then lower — the slope of her collarbone, the curve beneath. She didn’t move. Only her breath quickened, her nipples drawn tight with the tremor of anticipation. She stood motionless, as though awaiting a blow — or a kiss she could no longer resist.

Then he knelt.

Not as a supplicant, but with a smooth, deliberate grace, like a panther coiling for the final motion. His lips moved along the flat of her abdomen, lower, and when she could no longer bear it — when her fingers found their way into his hair — he wrapped his arms around her thighs and pressed his mouth against her heat.

Vera gasped.

She hadn’t meant to — but it escaped her, sharp and broken. He was skilled — too skilled — his tongue precise, insistent, circling and flicking with the same rhythm he used to parry her blade. She clutched his shoulders, her legs trembling as he devoured her, not crudely, but with focused, ruthless intent.

Her knees began to buckle.

He felt it, and rose, lifting her by the hips with practiced strength, and laid her back upon the floor where the swords had fallen.

Now he loomed above her.

His cock brushed her thigh — no longer only erect, but aching. She reached for him then, wrapped her fingers around him, and watched his jaw tighten.

«I told you,» she murmured, «I wanted command.»

He met her eyes. «Then lead.»

She guided him to her entrance — slick, open, throbbing — and as he pressed in, her breath caught.

He entered her slowly.

Not out of caution, but reverence. She clenched around him, back arching, her hands gripping his shoulders as inch by inch he filled her, until their hips met and there was no space left between them.

Neither spoke.

There was no need.

Only the slow, rolling rhythm of their bodies, the sweat forming at his brow, the soft slap of skin on skin as he moved within her — deep, deliberate, again and again.

She watched him.

Not with surrender — but with satisfaction.

This man who had stood silent beside her with blade and duty and formality — now panting above her, groaning as her hips rose to meet his, eyes dark and lost.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, drawing him deeper, harder.

«Don’t hold back,» she whispered. «You’re not on parade.»

He growled — and obeyed.

His thrusts had deepened, grown more insistent — but not ragged. Not yet. There was still discipline in him, a soldier’s restraint, a fencer’s timing. But she could feel the tremor beginning to rise through his body — the tension gathering in his thighs, the twitch in his abdomen each time her inner muscles clenched around him.

He was close. Too close.

She sensed it.

And then — in a breathless, wordless instant — he withdrew.

She gasped, empty and throbbing.

But before she could protest, his hands slid beneath her hips and turned her. A smooth, powerful motion, as though lifting a blade from its sheath. She found herself on her belly, arms braced, the polished floor cool beneath her breasts.

Then came his palm — firm on her lower back, guiding her upward — and she rose to her knees, presenting herself to him, her spine arched, her hair cascading over one shoulder in loose, sweat-damp waves.

«Like this,» he murmured — more to himself than to her.

She felt his cock brush between her cheeks, slick and heavy, not seeking her entrance now, but higher — parting the softness between her buttocks, pressing against that tighter, forbidden place.

Her breath caught.

She looked back at him, over her shoulder.

«You’ll need to go slow,» she whispered.

«I know.»

He held himself there a moment — not moving — letting the pressure build, letting her nerves ignite. Then, with one slow thrust, he began to press inside. Not brutal, but inexorable. Her body resisted, then relented, the ache giving way to a fullness that made her eyes flutter shut and her lips part in a soundless moan.

He filled her — deeper, it seemed, than before — and once seated fully within her, he paused, one hand gripping her hip, the other sliding up her back, possessive, grounding her as though she might drift away.

Her breath was ragged.

But she didn’t ask him to stop.

Quite the opposite — she pushed back against him, testing his control, offering him not her surrender, but her triumph.

And when he began to move — slow, grinding thrusts — she felt no shame. Only power. Shared. Twinned.

They had ceased to fence.

Now they fused.

He moved within her slowly — so slowly it was almost cruel. Each roll of his hips sent a wave through her body, but she could feel the tension building in him now, not her. His grip was tighter, breath sharper, that once-rigid discipline flickering at its edges. She knew this rhythm. She had driven men there before. But never like this — never while offering herself so utterly, never while wanting the end to delay, even as it stalked them both.

And then — she slipped forward.

He gasped, involuntarily, as she slid off him — not violently, but decisively, a silken, practiced motion. She turned onto her back with feline grace, her legs folding, her chest rising with breath.

His cock stood slick and glistening above her, still trembling with the memory of her tightness. It twitched, straining toward her lips, as if it, too, had made its choice.

He looked down at her, confused at first — then stricken with want.

She did not speak. Words would have been wasteful.

She reached for him — not to guide, but to welcome — and as he stepped forward, she lifted her hips, slid beneath him, her back arching so her lips could meet him from below.

When she took him into her mouth, it was not a gentle act.

It was a claim.

He moaned — properly now, not a gasp, but a sound, deep and involuntary. She circled him with her lips, drew him slowly in — inch by inch — letting her tongue trace the line where slickness met skin, where silk met heat. He braced his hands on the wall behind her, as if afraid his knees might give out.

And still she moved, her hands resting lightly on his thighs, feeling them tense and shift as he fought to hold back. Her eyes watched him — unblinking, dark with hunger — as she slid him deeper, swallowed him, drew back again with a wet, deliberate sound.

He looked down at her.

A man in fragments now. Muscles taut, breath ragged, eyes wide — caught between restraint and collapse.

She smiled around him.

She wanted him undone. But not yet.

Her mouth released him slowly, letting the wet heat linger like a kiss too long held. A glistening thread clung between her lips and his tip, trembling before breaking. He staggered half a step back, disoriented, aching. But her hands caught him at the hips.

«Don’t go far,» she murmured.

And then she slid further down the carpet, onto her elbows, onto her back, until her head rested just beneath his thighs. Her hair fanned across the floor like spilled ink, and she looked up at him — inverted now, like some vision from a fevered dream, her lips parted in breathless provocation.

He hovered above her, suspended, shaking slightly. Every inch of him still throbbing with need, his jaw tight as if biting back a cry.

She lifted her hands again, placed them gently on his buttocks — not pushing, not guiding, only holding. Then, with a whisper of breath, she tilted her chin and took him again. This time deeper.

His thighs quivered. A guttural noise broke in his throat.

She hollowed her cheeks around him, her tongue drawing lazy, languid circles as he filled her. The angle was harder, stranger, more intense — and she embraced it, reveled in it, feeling him pulse with each shallow thrust he dared allow himself.

He reached for the wall again but missed it. His hands landed on her breasts instead — and there they stayed. Not kneading, not grasping, just holding them as if for anchor. She was slick beneath him, warm and strong and yielding, and when her fingers curled into his flesh, he understood: she wasn’t simply receiving him.

She was consuming him.

He gasped her name.

Her only reply was the wet glide of her mouth, the velvet constriction of her throat, the unbearable patience of her rhythm.

He was close. Dangerously. But still she did not relent. She watched him from beneath — hungry, proud — until his eyes fluttered shut and his body betrayed him with a desperate buck.

Only then did she release him — again — her lips parting with a gasp that left him glistening and shaking above her, undone yet unfinished.

«Not yet,» she whispered again. But this time, it was a promise.

He stood above her, quivering — his breath shallow, his chest marked with the ghost of her fingernails, his hips slick with her touch and his own restraint. For a moment, he only looked at her — the way her body stretched out on the floor, one arm crooked beneath her head, the other sliding down to trace her own thigh with idle cruelty. Her breasts rose and fell in time with her breath, the nipples taut and flushed; her belly shimmered with perspiration, and lower — lower — he could see the glisten of her need, unapologetic, glistening.

«Come down,» she said.

A command, not a plea. He obeyed.

He knelt, then crawled to her, slowly, like a man walking into flame. She took his face between her palms when he was near enough, kissed him — deeply, hungrily — tasting herself still on his mouth. And then she whispered:

«Inside me.»

He shifted, and her thighs parted for him with silent urgency. He guided himself to her entrance, and for a moment simply held there, pressing, teasing, letting her feel the breadth of him, the blunt promise. She hooked one leg around his hip — impatient — and that broke his hesitation.

He pushed in, slowly, watching every change in her face.

Her mouth parted. Her eyes fluttered, then locked on his. Her hands clutched his back, urging, pulling. And still he went slow — so achingly slow that the breath caught in her throat and she whispered something harsh in French, then in Russian — something he didn’t quite understand, but knew was meant to hurry him.

He buried himself in her, to the hilt.

The groan that left them both was almost shared.

She was impossibly hot. Tight. Alive around him in ways words could never convey. Her body adjusted with every inch, clinging, trembling, and when he was fully inside, she arched up to meet him, her fingers digging into his shoulders as if to say: Now.

And so he moved. Not with the sharp thrusts of conquest, but with the long, rhythmic strokes of someone savoring every second. Her hands slid down to his waist, anchoring him to her. Their foreheads touched. Their mouths met and missed and met again. Between them, sweat and breath and scent mingled — something wild and intimate and wordless.

She wrapped her other leg around him now, locking him there. Her ankles crossed at the small of his back, and every shift of her hips pulled him deeper, made him groan. She whispered his name into his neck. He buried his face in her shoulder, biting back a sound he couldn’t contain.

And still they moved.

Together.

Not racing toward the end, but circling it, delaying it, learning one another in thrusts and shivers and broken whispers. His hands slid beneath her — one cupping the base of her spine, the other tangled in her hair. Hers mapped the ridges of his back, the slick lines of his ribs, the tremble in his thighs.

When her climax came, it was silent. Her body tensed, every muscle clamping down around him, her lips parting but no sound escaping — only a long, shuddering exhale. He felt her tighten, pulse, ripple around him — and it was nearly his undoing.

Nearly.

But not yet.

He held.

By some buried instinct or cruelty, he held — even as her body begged, as her breath shook against his cheek, as her legs flexed around his hips in aftershocks that echoed through her bones. She had come with a grace he had never witnessed — not in brothel nor dream — and yet he, in defiance of every trembling muscle, every pleading throb of his own need, refused to spill.

She felt it — the trembling stillness in him, the strain in his jaw, the restraint like iron under his skin. Her hands rose to his face, fingers brushing the soaked curls at his temples, and she whispered, amused and breathless:

«You’re trying to shame me with patience.»

He shook his head against her. «No. Worship.»

A flicker of laughter curved her lips, softened by affection. She let her hand trail downward again — over his slick shoulder, down his chest, between them, until her palm lay flat on his belly. She pressed lightly, as if to coax him further, and then — slowly — she unhooked her legs.

«Lie back,» she said.

He obeyed without protest, his body now burning with suspended hunger. She rose onto her knees above him, her skin aglow with exertion, her hair wild, cheeks flushed, inner thighs glistening. She was the very shape of conquest — not a prize, but a sovereign.

And she took him again.

Not with haste, but with purpose — lowering herself over him, inch by inch, her spine arching as she enveloped him once more. His groan was helpless now, dragged from the pit of his chest. Her hands settled on his ribs, then slid up to his chest, pinning him gently as she began to ride him — slow, grinding circles that made the air thick with want.

He watched her, entranced: the way her breasts moved with each shift of her hips, the small line between her brows when the angle struck just right, the wild heat in her eyes when she realized how much control she had.

She leaned down suddenly, her mouth hovering near his. «You’ll come when I say.»

He gritted his teeth. «Yes.»

«Not before?»

«Never.»

And with that, she rose again, and moved in earnest.

The rhythm became more urgent — not frantic, but intentional. Each downward stroke of her hips hit with precision. Her hands braced on his chest. His fingers dug into her thighs, trying to hold on, but it was she who owned the pace now, she who orchestrated the fall.

And then — somewhere between a breath and a cry — she broke again.

This time louder, with a moan that bent up from her gut, her head thrown back, her whole body bowing as wave after wave took her. Her inner walls clenched tight, pulsing around him in relentless rhythm, and at last, at last, she looked down at him and said:

«Now.»

He came undone.

It was not a climax — it was a collapse. A surrender. His body arched, jaw slack, eyes blind with sensation as he emptied into her, his hands clutching whatever flesh they could reach. She held herself atop him, riding the spasms out, her own breath ragged, her smile feral and satisfied.

They lay there for long minutes, fused, glistening, silent but for the storm of breath between them.

And then she leaned forward, kissed his damp brow, and whispered, «Next time… I fight left-handed.»

END.

The Tradition

It was not the kind of place a lady should frequent — not even one who wrote for La Gazette de la Société, where a single barbed phrase could unravel reputations as deftly as fingers unlace a corset. But Madame Adélaïde Fournier, widow by name, Parisian by temperament, and venomous by style, had never been deterred by the suggestion of impropriety. If anything, she fed on it.

The hall smelled of men. Not in the polite, diluted way of a perfumer’s showroom or a gentleman’s club where scent was masked by cigars and discourse. No — this was a full-bodied assault of sweat, resin, chalk dust, and the faint, stubborn tang of liniment. Ropes creaked overhead. Bare feet padded across worn canvas. Bodies collided with the soft, punishing thud of practice falls.

She stood at the edge of the mat like a creature from another species, her silhouette stark in its elegance — corset drawn firm beneath a moss-green jacket, gloves still buttoned, parasol closed but clutched like a sword. Her hat, a dark confection of felt and netting, tilted slightly over one brow as if mocking everything she surveyed.

And she was surveying.

Noting with mild amusement the way one of the younger wrestlers winced as his shoulder was pressed too far back. How another — thicker, slower — grunted as he failed to lift his partner. They were impressive specimens, yes, in the way oxen are: strong, dull-eyed, built for labor rather than beauty.

Except one.

He moved differently.

Not faster, not more graceful — but with a kind of defiant containment, as if the strength in his limbs was not to be wasted on exertion, but stored for some private act of violence. His back was to her now, bronzed and broad, damp curls clinging to his nape. When he turned, she caught her breath — not audibly, of course, not enough to betray herself — but inwardly, like a door closing against a draft.

He was younger than she expected. Perhaps no more than twenty-three. A peasant’s face: bold features, sun-touched skin, a brow too low and wide to be fashionable. Yet his eyes — dark, direct, and devoid of any deference — met hers with such bluntness that for a fleeting second, she forgot herself.

Then she smiled.

Coldly. Like a blade being drawn.

The editor had begged her to cover the wrestling tournaments as a summer amusement for the readership — «Give them flesh, Madame Fournier. Give them masculinity, but softened by irony.» She had done so with glee. Her last column referred to the competitors as «a parade of ambulatory thighs, trundling across the mat with all the elegance of agricultural machinery.» That line alone had earned her three fan letters, one marriage proposal, and a stern note from the federation.

But this one — this unnamed, silent brute with the insolent gaze — he would need a different angle.

She turned to leave, clicking her parasol shut with deliberate finality. Behind her, the boy had gone back to lifting sandbags.

What she did not see — and would not admit, even if she had — was how his eyes followed her retreat. Not with awe. Not with confusion. But with a dark, deliberate interest.

As if he, too, had chosen a target.

He had seen her before.

Not here, in the hall where the air was thick with dust and breath and the groaning of old wood. Not among the benches or the tiled baths. No, he had seen her on the printed page — her, though never named — in the slant of the words, the cruelty of the phrasing, the smirk between the lines. He did not read often, but when the lads passed the paper around, they always found her column. They chuckled, slapped backs, mocked the phrases.

He did not laugh.

«She calls us cattle,» he once said. «Cattle don’t fight back.»

Today she was real. Smaller than he imagined. Finer. Her bones looked delicate, but her eyes were not. They moved like needles, pricking holes into the room, into the men, into him. She watched with that strange smile, the kind that meant nothing — or everything. She smiled like someone watching a play and waiting for the villain to enter.

He let her watch.

No — he made her watch. The weight of her eyes was lighter than a sparring partner’s grip, but it burned longer. He could feel it at the nape of his neck, where the hair curled damp with sweat. He resisted the urge to shake his head, to clear the warmth.

When she turned to leave, something strange tugged behind his ribs — not anger, not pride. A question. An itch. Something he had no word for, but which lived in his chest now like a buried ember.

That night, long after the hall had emptied, he remained.

The silence was a relief — no shouting, no slaps of body on mat, no whistles or trainers calling out numbers. Only the scrape of his heel, the breath through his nose, the dull creak of the ropes swinging ever so slightly as if the room remembered every motion that had filled it.

He dropped to his knees.

The mat was warm still, holding the memory of the day like skin holds the sun. He placed his palms down and pressed — not for training, not this time. This was something else. His head hung forward, hair brushing the floor.

He remembered the smell of her — faint but sharp, like paper just touched by perfume. He had caught it when she passed behind him. Something foreign, almost bitter, but not unpleasant. It reminded him of high places. The kind of rooms where he was not meant to stand. The kind of woman he was not meant to touch.

Yet his hands curled now as if they held her wrists. Not hard, not rough — but certain.

He had lifted heavier weights than her. He had pinned stronger men. But none had made him feel what her gaze had done. Not fear — no. He feared no one in that ring. But the idea that she understood his body better than he did… that was a different kind of danger.

She had seen the way he stood, the shape of his thighs, the set of his shoulders — and she had reduced it to clever words. And yet, she had returned.

What for?

A chill passed through him, though his body steamed from the late exertion. He sat back on his heels, one hand drifting to the bare skin below his navel. He pressed his palm there, firm — grounding himself.

No woman had ever looked at him like that.

Not with hunger — he knew what hunger looked like in the village girls, in the eyes of lonely widows behind half-shut doors. But this — this was dissection. She wanted to undo him, take him apart like a clock, see what ticked beneath the brute strength. Perhaps mock it. Perhaps more.

He stood.

Tomorrow, she would write about them again. She would twist their sweat and labor into metaphors for society’s amusement. But tonight, he saw her glove. And under it — he was sure — her fingers had trembled once.

Just once.

* * *

The morning began with birds and bells.

They chimed from the spire of a distant church — Orthodox, no doubt, with those onion-shaped domes she found so provincial — and were followed by the cawing of crows, the clatter of a milk cart on cobblestone, the rhythmic creak of a water pump worked by unseen hands. Adélaïde did not open her eyes immediately. She had long ago learned that the world insisted itself upon women far too early, and a few moments of resistance, of being pure thought, made the day more bearable.

When she did rise, she did so like a cat: slowly, one shoulder first, back arching with languor that was not for any viewer but herself. The room was a temporary lodging, somewhere between a pension and a respectable hotel — wood floors, plain walls, linen curtains, a washstand with a cracked enamel basin. The wallpaper had faded roses; they did not please her.

She went to the window naked.

The glass was open already, propped with a matchbox, letting in the humid breath of a Russian summer. From below came the smell of rye bread, horses, coal dust, and that peculiar trace of wildness that lingered even in cities — as if the forests beyond the edge of things still breathed through the bricks. She stretched both arms above her head, unconcerned by the idea of being seen. The angle was such that only the sky could spy on her, and it did so without judgment.

She stepped into the enamel basin — its curve shallow but sufficient — and grasped the metal jug with both hands. The water inside was cold, delightfully so, drawn the night before and left to sit near the window. With a swift, practiced breath — not a gasp, but a silent tightening of the ribs — she raised the jug high above her shoulder and tilted it.

The stream poured over her like a sudden storm, striking the nape of her neck, cascading down her spine, over her breasts, her hips, pooling briefly at her feet before slipping between her toes and into the waiting bowl. She inhaled again, sharper this time — from shock, from pleasure — and her skin prickled into wakefulness, as if every nerve had surfaced to greet the water.

The droplets ran down her naked body in silver rivulets, tracing the line of her collarbone, sliding between her breasts, gathering briefly at her navel before tumbling over the soft inward curve of her stomach. Her body, though no longer young in the brutal, fruit-bursting sense of twenty, held the sharpness of discipline: thighs firm from fencing, arms taut from hours of travel with heavy trunks, the line of her back still drawn with the precision of good posture and better vanity.

She stood there, wet and cool and alive, her nipples tightening in the morning breeze, her skin prickling into alertness. Not with arousal — not quite. But with readiness. As though something in her, long dormant, now stirred against its leash.

She dried herself with a rough towel, unhurriedly, paying attention to her ankles, the backs of her knees, the soft hollow at the base of her spine. These were places women often forgot, but men noticed. Not that she meant to be noticed. Not deliberately.

She dressed in a thin, pale chemise and her morning robe — an indigo silk brought from Constantinople, embroidered with cranes. Her hair she pinned with the same efficiency as always, but left two curls loose. Not for him. For herself.

At the desk, she uncapped her fountain pen and spread before her a blank sheet of ivory paper embossed with her Parisian letterhead.

She began, in French — of course — for her editor, for her public, for her carefully cultivated tone of mockery tempered with insight:

«Les lutteurs russes ne ressemblent pas à des athlètes, mais à des mythes mal taillés dans le bois.»

(«Russian wrestlers do not resemble athletes, but myths crudely carved from wood.»)

She paused.

Took a sip of tepid tea from the samovar. Ink glistened on the page.

«Ils se tiennent comme des statues rurales, fiers mais sans réflexion — faits de muscles, de sueur et de silence.»

(«They stand like rural statues, proud but thoughtless — made of muscle, sweat, and silence.»)

Her pen continued almost on its own, elegant loops curling like smoke:

«Leur beauté, s’il y en a une, ne vient pas de la forme, mais de la fonction. Ils sont construits pour l’action brute, pas pour l’admiration.»

(«Their beauty, if such a thing exists, does not come from form, but from function. They are built for brute action, not for admiration.»)

She smiled. The phrases pleased her. They had just enough disdain to elevate her voice above the provincial scene, but not so much as to alienate her audience, who secretly delighted in barbarity.

And yet…

Her pen hesitated. Hovered.

A tiny drop formed at the nib and fell, marring the perfection of the last line.

She leaned back in her chair, exhaling through her nose. Something was wrong. Or not wrong — missing. The sentences shimmered with wit, yes, but they lacked heat. They were observations, not impressions. And impressions, she knew, required the senses.

She remembered the boy from yesterday — or not a boy, not really. A man young enough to make her feel suddenly seasoned. Not polished — no, never that — but used, in the sense of a well-read book. He had looked at her as if he saw the page — and meant to write over it.

The pen slipped from her fingers.

She stood.

Crossed the room to the mirror and regarded herself not as a woman, but as a journalist in need of material.

She needed sweat. Breath. The sound of flesh against rope. The angle of a shoulder strained under tension. The coarseness of their voices, the calluses on their palms.

She needed to be among them — not as a voyeur behind glass, but inside the scene.

She would go back.

But not with her notebook in hand, no. That would give the game away.

She would go as someone curious, yes. But not inquisitive.

Let them imagine her as they pleased.

Let him, that one with the insolent eyes, see her again — in full daylight, without her mask of disdain.

This time, she would be close enough to smell them.

And if she were lucky, close enough to be smelled in return.

The street was already alive.

Horse hooves rang dully on the packed earth, tramcars clattered on iron rails, and women with baskets on their hips called out to one another in brisk, nasal Russian — so harsh in its vowels, yet so oddly familiar. She pulled her gloves tighter, stepped into the waiting cab without a word, and tapped twice against the sideboard with the tip of her parasol. The coachman nodded and flicked the reins.

As the wheels began to turn, Adélaïde leaned back against the worn upholstery and allowed herself the indulgence of recollection.

She had been born in Paris, yes — rue des Martyrs, fourth floor, red curtains, the faint smell of varnished wood and cabbage. But the apartment had been entirely, almost stubbornly, Russian. Her mother, Vera Nikolaevna, had insisted on speaking only the tongue of Pushkin and Glinka at home. Her father, more lenient, allowed French at breakfast — but by luncheon, the samovar would hiss, and the house would revert to St. Petersburg vowels and Moscow silences.

Vera had been a singer once, before love and childbirth stole her breath. She hummed in the mornings, washed her daughter’s hair with rainwater and vinegar, and spoke of men as one might speak of storms — fascinating, but best observed from indoors.

Her father had been a chess player, officially a notary, but truly a creature of evenings: he smoked Turkish tobacco, quoted Tyutchev, and taught his daughter that syntax was power. «Власть — в структуре предложения,» he would say. «Сначала ты строишь фразу. Потом — целый мир.» («Power lies in sentence structure. First you build a phrase. Then — an entire world.»).

She had listened, absorbed, turned it into her trade.

Marrying Maurice Fournier had been the expected, respectable outcome of her upbringing. He was twelve years older, well-connected, delicately cruel in bed, and incurably diplomatic in society. He died — politely — of a heart murmur in the third year of their union, leaving her with a townhouse she never visited and a wardrobe she refused to update.

Widowhood, as it turned out, suited her.

It gave her the one thing Paris rarely offers a woman: a room of her own, and silence within it. From there she wrote. First essays, then travel pieces, then the satirical columns that made her feared and adored in equal measure. Her French became sharp as steel; her Russian, a velvet sheath she wore only in memory — or when angered.

She still spoke it well. Fluently, even. But with a Parisian lilt, a hesitation at the soft consonants, a distinct rhythm that betrayed distance. When she pronounced «борец» (wrestler), it came out almost like «borrèts» — elegant, but ever so slightly amused.

She had not returned to Russia until this very summer, when her editor, with his usual mix of cunning and cowardice, suggested she cover «these Slavic spectacles of sweat and masculinity.»

«I trust you’ll bring back the scent of testosterone and tallow,» he’d said.

She almost laughed. What she intended to bring back was power. Reclaimed. Reframed. Perhaps even relished.

The cab swayed as it turned a corner, the smell of tar rising from newly patched streets. She peered out the window — rows of shuttered shops, a man carrying two geese by the neck, a boy washing the windows of a bakery with a bundle of rags. A woman as foreign as she would always remain so, even among echoes of her own blood.

But today, she was not here to remember.

Today, she would step into the lion’s den — or the ox’s stall — and watch them not from the margins, but within the heat. She would walk among them. Speak to them. Perhaps even touch them — a hand on a shoulder, a fingers-length from a wrist — long enough to take note of skin, of breath, of truth.

She smiled, lips barely parting.

Let them try to impress her with strength.

She had her own kind of force — silk-wrapped, ink-tipped, and older than any muscle.

And if one of them dared press back?

Well.

Then the real story would begin.

The cab left her on a side street she would not have walked alone after dusk. The kind of place where the gutters never quite dried, where dogs moved like shadows and women watched from behind curtains. But in the generous indifference of morning, all was forgiven. She stepped down, paid the driver with an economy of motion, and walked the remaining dozen yards past a bakery that sold only black bread and a tobacconist with three dead flies in the window.

The building stood discreetly, with no sign above the door. Only a set of iron steps, a wooden entrance worn smooth by hands and boots, and a single brass plate engraved in Cyrillic that read:

«Общество физического воспитания» (Society for Physical Education).

She entered without knocking.

Not out of arrogance, but because her presence had already been arranged. Quietly, unofficially, but undeniably. A week prior, she had come accompanied — translator, photographer, all the trappings of legitimate journalism. They had let her see the grounds, the bathhouses, the plaques on the wall.

But not the hall.

«Там у нас мужчины, Madame,» one had said with a smirk. «Всё в поту и без гимнастёрок.»

(«There we keep the men, Madame. All in sweat and without shirts.»)

That had made her smile.

Later, over tea in a cramped office that smelled of gun oil and linseed, she had spoken with a certain Sergei Dmitrievich. That was his name — broad, square, too long for the tongue, but not unpleasant. A man who had once wrestled for medals, now wore a mustache with quiet pride, and treated her with a mixture of bemused politeness and measured authority.

She had seen the way his eyes followed the movement of her wrist as she poured her own tea. She did not encourage it, nor did she discourage. She asked her questions in crisp French-accented Russian. He answered with a soldier’s clarity. When she requested access to observe the real work, he considered, rubbed his thumb along the line of his jaw, and finally said:

«Завтра утром. Без журналистов. Без камер.» («Tomorrow morning. No journalists. No cameras.»)

And so — today.

She opened the door, stepped inside, and was met not with silence, but with breath.

The air was already warm. Not hot, not stifling — but alive with the work of bodies in motion. Chalk dust hung faintly in the beams of light that fell in from high windows. Somewhere in the back, rope slapped against canvas. She could hear the rasp of a whetstone on leather, the grunt of effort just beneath speech.

And then she saw him.

Sergei Dmitrievich.

He stood beside a wooden vaulting horse, one hand resting casually on its spine, the other holding a stub of pencil and a clipboard too clean to be for real accounting. He had a thick neck, peppered hair, and the kind of arms that still looked capable of breaking ribs if need required.

His face lit up when he saw her — not with surprise, but with a kind of quiet claiming. As if her arrival confirmed something he’d already decided.

«Good morning, madame,» he said.

She inclined her head just enough to acknowledge the greeting — no more.

«Comme promis,» she replied. Then, with a flick of her glove: «I’m here to see the sweat. Not the ceremony.»

He chuckled, the sound deep and dry, and gestured toward the far end of the hall.

«You know the way.»

But he didn’t leave.

She moved past him — not too quickly — and felt his eyes follow her, not hungrily, but proprietarily. As if reminding her, without words, that she was here not by right, but by his indulgence. The favor had been granted — and she was now, in some measure, his guest. His to manage. His to watch.

She did not like being watched.

And yet.

The wooden floor creaked beneath her boots as she walked the length of the hall. Ahead, two wrestlers grappled near the mats — not boys, not yet men, their bodies still finding the balance between will and weight. One slipped, cursed softly, and fell with a muffled thud. Another stood in the corner, shirtless, shadowboxing in slow rhythm, muscles tense in morning readiness.

And then she saw him.

The one from before.

No shirt. Barefoot. His back to her. But unmistakable — that stance, that stillness, that sense of something withheld. He was adjusting a leather belt at his waist, pulling it tight, fingers rough and certain.

She slowed.

She could feel Sergei Dmitrievich still watching from behind, perhaps measuring her reaction. Perhaps amused.

She said nothing.

But inside her, something coiled — like silk drawn taut between teeth.

She did not sit.

The benches lining the walls were occupied — some by discarded jackets, some by men catching their breath, toweling sweat from their shoulders or rubbing chalk into their palms. Others had been left empty on purpose, perhaps in deference to those who knew better than to rest too long between matches. She moved among them without hesitation, her gloves still on, eyes alert, her posture neither deferent nor intruding.

She was watching, but she was not there to admire.

Not in the way a girl might admire.

She had been a wife. And then, for nearly a decade now, a widow — though the word felt dusty, inexact. Widowhood in Paris had the texture of velvet: soft, black, and expensive. It gave her a kind of access that neither virginity nor marriage had allowed. Men, particularly older ones, addressed her as madame with a slight bow, never quite certain whether to be wary or eager.

She had learned to live in that uncertainty.

So she watched these men — not boys, not amateurs — but the trained and training, whose bodies had been carved and burnished by repetition. And it struck her: there was no beauty in them. Not in the sculpted sense of Greek statuary, not in the elegance of dancers. No — their strength was raw, utilitarian. Shoulders not built to inspire, but to lift, to grip, to crush. Backs dense with muscle, hips held low like wolves ready to spring.

She paused near the rope wall, where one of them — a tall figure with a broken nose and a profile like a falcon — was leaning against the wooden frame, sipping water from a tin cup. His skin shone, bronzed by effort, and a vein ran like a tributary down his forearm, thick as a pencil. His breathing had slowed, though a pulse still flickered at the hollow of his throat.

She stepped closer.

«Vous êtes en repos, monsieur… sorry… you are at rest, sir?

He blinked. Turned toward her. Not startled — but surprised, perhaps, by the music of the words. Her Russian was good, but the French in her vowels was unmistakable. She did not try to hide it.

«Yes, madam. A little.»

«Good,» she said, switching languages with a smile, «Then I can ask you questions. It is easier when a man is not panting like a horse.»

He grinned — or half-grinned, careful of his bruised lip. «Ask, madam.»

She leaned a little closer, studying him not like a woman might study a man, but the way a botanist studies a specimen — cataloguing tendon, assessing posture, noting scars.

«What happens,» she asked, «in the moment before you grip? When you look at another man and know you must touch him — pull him, hold him, bring him down. Is it anger you feel? Hunger? Or just… habit?»

He hesitated.

His answer — when it came — was simpler than she expected.

«Concentration,» he said. «And breathing.»

«Not very poetic,» she replied.

«We are not poets.»

«No,» she said. «You are borrèts.»

He blinked at the word. She had said борец, but with that same amused accent — borrèts, the final consonant softened, like the edge of a wine glass.

«You say it strange,» he said.

«I say it how it sounds in my mouth.»

He did not argue.

She thanked him and moved on.

Each man she approached gave her something. A phrase, a look, a refusal. One told her that grip strength came from the fingers, not the arms — «like a cat, madam.» Another offered a demonstration, standing up too quickly, eager to impress. She declined with a glance. «No, no. You are still sweaty. I have already imagined enough.»

But always — her gaze drifted back to him.

The one from before.

He had begun wrestling now, circling with another, shorter man with the thighs of a stallion and hair cropped almost to the scalp. They didn’t speak, didn’t smile. Their contact was full of friction and economy, no flourish. Bodies met, disengaged, gripped again. The taller of the two — hers — moved with deceptive slowness, as if gravity played by different rules around him. His movements were grounded, full of pressure, the kind that bent knees and tested breath.

She realized she was staring.

And worse — that Sergei Dmitrievich had noticed.

He was still leaning near the vaulting horse, arms crossed now, watching her watch. His expression was unreadable, but there was a small muscle twitching near his cheekbone, a kind of suppressed satisfaction. As if to say: You see? I told you. There is something worth writing here.

She turned away, briskly.

But her mind had already begun sketching.

The words came in French, of course. Always first in French — her true thinking tongue.

Ce ne sont pas des hommes comme les autres. Leurs corps ne sont pas faits pour séduire, mais pour saisir. Ils n’offrent rien — ils prennent. Et ce qu’ils prennent, ils ne le rendent pas.

(These are not men like the others. Their bodies are not made to seduce, but to seize. They offer nothing — they take. And what they take, they do not give back.)

She would write it tonight. No, perhaps tomorrow. She would write with her sleeves rolled up, the window open, her thighs still tingling from the memory of chalk and sweat and breath. But first — she would watch a little longer.

She crossed the room slowly, heels echoing dully on the wooden floor. The two men were separating. The match had ended — or paused. Her borrèts stood with hands on hips, chest rising in steady rhythm. He turned slightly, as if sensing her gaze, and their eyes met across the air.

She did not smile.

Nor did he.

But something passed between them — not recognition, not flirtation. Something more ancient. Like the scent of iron. Like steam rising from stone.

And still — she had not written a word of him. Not yet. Not the weight of his gaze. Not the silence between them. Not the way her breath had changed. That would come later. When the page could bear it.

She approached him without announcement.

Not in haste, not with any deliberate seduction — simply as one might approach a tree one intends to touch, or a stair one means to climb. Purposefully, without apology.

He had just finished wiping the sweat from his neck, one arm raised behind his head, his bicep pulled taut like a rope soaked through and twisted dry. The towel still hung loosely around his shoulders when he saw her approach. His gaze dropped first — almost involuntarily — as if checking the firmness of the ground beneath him. Then rose, slow and reluctant, to meet her eyes.

She stopped close enough to smell him.

Not unpleasantly. It was a scent not of filth, but of effort: iron, salt, sun-warmed rope. It clung to his skin in the way hay clings to horses, honest and irreducible.

«Vous vous êtes bien battu,» she said with a faint tilt of her head. (You fought well.)

He stared, unreadable.

His hair was still damp, curling slightly above his temples. The bridge of his nose bore an old scar — not white yet, still red-tinged — and his jaw bristled with the kind of stubble that comes not from style, but neglect.

«You understood?» she asked. «What I said?»

A nod. Brief. Reluctant.

«I speak,» he said, voice low, as if dredged from somewhere deeper than the lungs. «Enough.»

She offered him a small, professional smile — the kind that Parisian waiters use before telling you they are out of oysters.

«Good. Then I will ask, as I asked the others.»

He didn’t move.

She withdrew her notebook, small and leather-bound, from her coat pocket. Didn’t open it. Only held it, a token of legitimacy.

«What is the part of your body you trust most?» she asked. «Not strength. Not size. Trust.»

He frowned.

That frown — it was not anger, not truly. It was the face a boy makes when he must recite poetry aloud in front of the class. She recognized it. She had seen it on husbands forced to dance, on soldiers asked to explain their dreams. And she saw something else too — a flicker of movement at the waistline of his trousers. Subtle, but unmistakable. A tension. A shifting.

She knew immediately what it was.

Not desire, exactly. Not yet. But alertness — the body’s indecent anticipation. The way the blood sometimes speaks faster than the mouth.

She said nothing of it, of course. Not aloud.

But her glance flicked there — just once, like a candle guttering in wind — and returned to his eyes with a private smile.

He noticed. She knew he noticed.

«Maybe legs,» he muttered. «They don’t lie.»

«Interesting,» she said, tapping her notebook with a fingertip. «And what do they say?»

He hesitated. Then, grudgingly:

«They say how tired you are. Or if you want to run.»

She let the silence stretch for a beat too long. Then:

«And do you want to run, borrèts?»

She said it again — the word mangled slightly, elegantly, with a French lilt: borrèts — softening its martial bluntness. It should have irritated him. Instead, it seemed to unsettle him. His jaw tensed. His shoulders shifted — not in threat, but discomfort. Not because she was close, but because he didn’t know how close he wanted her to be.

«I don’t run,» he said.

«Of course you don’t.»

She stepped slightly to the side, slowly circling — just half a turn — letting her gaze sweep over him again. There was a damp patch under one arm, another across his abdomen where his sash had pressed in. His trousers, pulled high and bound at the waist, did little to conceal anything. And now, as she looked again, the earlier suspicion was confirmed: a bulge, firm and angled slightly leftward, rising just enough to strain the fabric.

She exhaled softly — not surprise, not approval. Something cooler. The breath of a woman measuring grain at market.

«You are… nervous,» she said. «Why?»

His mouth opened, but the answer stuck.

«Because I am a woman?» she continued, one brow arching. «Because I watch like a man?»

«You write,» he said, quietly. «About us. About me.»

«And this makes you nervous?»

«You mock.»

Ah. There it was.

She stopped. Tilted her head.

«I write what I see. If it mocks — perhaps it is because the pose is false. You wear pride like a belt. I only tug it.»

His eyes flashed. He looked down.

There was shame now — not because of what she said, but because she had seen. She had noted what the others politely ignored.

She softened, almost imperceptibly.

«I am not your enemy,» she said. «I am not here to laugh.»

His throat worked. He looked to the side, to the wall, to the rope, anywhere but at her.

«Then what?» he asked, hoarse.

She leaned in, until the scent of her filled the narrow space between them. Lavender, ink, and something like clove.

«I am here,» she said, «to understand what a man becomes… when the world allows him to use his body the way others use words.»

She stepped back.

He didn’t follow.

She smiled.

«Thank you,» she said, and wrote nothing. Not yet. Not here.

But later — oh yes, later — the page would have to carry the weight of this. The pulse in his throat. The shadow under his navel. The unbearable honesty of a man whose body had betrayed him.

And the woman who had witnessed it.

* * *

That night, the air in the small room refused to cool. The window, thrown open wide to the summer dark, brought nothing but the faint scent of dust and horse dung from the street below. Somewhere in the alley a dog barked once, then silence. A lamplighter passed with slow, deliberate steps, his pole clicking softly against the stones. It was long past midnight.

And still, she lay awake — naked, twisted in the sheets, her skin glistening from sweat and from something less nameable.

Not arousal, not quite.

Not yet.

But the ache before it.

The heat that presses against the belly, that makes even the sheets feel insolent against the thighs.

She had not lit a candle. There was enough light from the street to paint the ceiling in restless shadows. Her body felt too alive — not fully rested, but fully alert. Each time she shifted, the linen whispered against her hips; each time she pressed her knees together, the friction seemed to call forth a memory.

His body.

She tried to push it aside — not out of guilt, but from pride — and failed.

That moment in the gymnasium, when she had stood so near him that the heat of his chest seemed to brush her own, had remained with her like the scent of metal after handling coins. There had been no contact, no impropriety. But the way his gaze dropped, the strain at the front of his trousers, the way his jaw clenched when she said borrèts — it was enough to keep her awake long past sense.

And it had not been only him.

She had looked too long at others, too. At backs broad as carriage doors, at torsos glistening with honest labour. At thighs that strained through fabric, at necks knotted with muscle and sunburn. Men who did not pose but moved in rhythms shaped by repetition, by training, by the crude dignity of sweat and survival.

She had thought herself immune to such men. She was not a girl. She was not easily stirred.

And yet—

In her mind now, she imagined stepping into that room again. Only this time, the others were gone. Only he remained — the silent one, the scowling one. He was angry again. No, not angry — humiliated. She had seen too much. She had written things she should not. He stood before her, shirtless, jaw dark with stubble, fists at his sides. He was saying something — accusing her of something — but the words melted in her mind.

In this vision, she said nothing in return. Only walked to him slowly, calmly, like a woman in a dream who knows the ending. She stood close again. Closer. Their bodies nearly touched. He told her to leave. She did not.

And when he took her — not with violence, but with that sudden, explosive tenderness of a man who has waited too long — she didn’t resist. In the privacy of imagination, she gave herself over, not like a victim, but like a sovereign: I permit this. I allow this storm.

Her thighs pressed together under the sheet.

She shifted, one leg drawn up, the other stretched long and bare in the stale air. Her breasts moved with the motion, nipples brushing the warm linen, sending a cruel little shiver up her spine. Her hand moved — not by will, but by instinct — down her belly, pausing just below the navel. She breathed in, long and slow.

But no — not yet. Not now.

She was not that kind of woman, she told herself.

Not alone. Not just for a shadow.

Instead, she rose from the bed, her body bare and luminous in the half-light. She crossed the room, each step felt through the ball of her foot. At the mirror she paused, looking at herself not as a lover might, but as a witness: the high curve of her hip, the shadows between her thighs, the sheen along her collarbone. A widow’s body, yes — but not yet resigned to solitude.

She lit no candle.

Instead, she opened the drawer of the writing desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and began, at last, to write. Not an article. Not a report. But a note to herself. A confession she would never sign. A sentence that felt like a provocation:

There is something in the way they sweat that makes my mouth dry.

And then, a second line:

Strength without language is a kind of poetry.

She paused. Her body still hummed. The night offered no relief.

She would need more than words, she thought.

She would need the weight of him. The silence of him. The stubborn, maddening masculinity of him — not as an object, not as conquest, but as a force. Something to push against. Something to press into her until thought dissolved.

Yes. That, perhaps, could quiet the storm.

But only if she dared.

And she would.

Soon.

* * *

The next morning, she arrived earlier than usual. The carriage deposited her at the familiar stone entrance of the Society for Physical Education, its facade still damp from last night’s brief rain, the scent of wet brick and iron heavy in the air. Inside, the building throbbed with its usual rhythm: the thump of bare feet on matting, the barked commands of instructors, the low, guttural exhalations of men lifting, twisting, straining against each other.

But today, she did not linger in the gallery. She did not circle the training hall with notebook in hand, nor flirt with the younger wrestlers over glasses of watered tea. Instead, she made her way directly to the stairwell — and ascended, deliberately, her footsteps echoing faintly in the vaulted stone.

Sergey Dmitrievich’s office sat above the hall, with a narrow corridor leading to a single lacquered door. The door was already open.

He stood when she entered. He wore his institutional suit jacket slung across the back of the chair, and his white shirt clung faintly to his back, damp with morning heat. He had clearly come from the floor below.

«Madame Fournier,» he greeted her, his voice gravelled but courteous, touched with the careful reverence Russian men reserve for cultured women. «You honour us again.»

«I hope not too often,» she said, smiling. «Or you’ll begin to suspect I write more for pleasure than profession.»

«I already suspect it,» he replied, with the faintest smile. «Please, have a seat.»

The office was small, functional — a desk, several chairs, a samovar steaming quietly in the corner. But the far wall was remarkable: a tall rectangular window, framed in aged oak, offered an unimpeded view of the gymnasium below. From here, the scene was half-theatre, half-menagerie — a play of torsos in motion, of sweat and fabric and intent.

She stood before it a moment, observing.

Below, the young men moved in disciplined pairs. One, stripped to the waist, had pinned his opponent belly-down and now arched his back, sinews standing proud beneath his skin. Another stretched his arms over his head, the motion revealing a long swathe of abdomen down to the band of his trousers.

«They are… magnificent,» she said softly, not turning her head.

«Yes,» Sergey Dmitrievich replied, coming to stand beside her. «Though it’s not only nature. We make them that way.»

«Oh, I don’t doubt it. I’ve seen the drills. The discipline. The form.»

He glanced at her sideways — a flicker, but he caught the shine in her eye.

She turned at last and took the seat offered. He returned to his desk but did not sit; instead, he leaned back against it, arms crossed loosely.

She had begun innocently, or at least in the manner of someone who wished to appear so. A few casual inquiries, nothing more. Questions about lineage, about technique. Kak nashe bor’ba otlichayetsya ot frantsuzskoy? How does Russian wrestling differ from the French? Her tone was playful, the accent charming — that languorous French softness tugging at the consonants like a silk scarf against stubble.

He answered with the patience of a man long accustomed to speaking about things that mattered to him — village matches held in snow-slick fields, barefoot men straining for balance, sweat steaming in the winter air. Belts wrapped around torsos, used not for show but for leverage. Peasant boys with forearms like shovel-handles, whose names were never recorded, but who could lift a full-grown sheep and toss it over a fence. His voice grew deeper as he spoke, richer, warmer — as though the telling itself restored something in him.

«And you?» she asked then, tilting her head. «You must have been one of them. The way the others look at you — it’s not merely respect. It is… memory.»

For a moment, something flickered in his face — not vanity, but a recollection of standing in the ring, sun burning his back, an entire village watching in silence as two bodies collided. He looked away.

«I fought,» he said, gruffly. «Yes. For many years. Until my knees reminded me I wasn’t made of iron.»

She allowed her eyes to drop — not dramatically, but just long enough to rest on his legs, which even now, beneath modest trousers, held the posture of planted strength.

«I find it hard to believe they’ve ever failed you,» she said.

He cleared his throat and turned to the samovar. «Tea?»

«Gladly.» She smiled, folding her gloves with meticulous grace, each movement quiet but suggestive — as if she were drawing invisible seams up the length of some imagined silk stocking.

They drank in silence at first, the steam curling lazily between them. Through the large window behind him, the sounds of the gymnasium drifted in — low grunts, the rhythmic scuff of bare feet on mats, the occasional barked command. Young men wrestled below, their torsos shining in the August light, muscles working in harmony and resistance.

She sipped delicately. Then, as if following a private script, she let her fingertip trace the rim of the porcelain cup.

«Tell me something,» she said. «Did you know that in the original Olympic Games, the athletes competed without clothing?»

He turned to look at her. The question was not crude, nor even provocative — but something in the way she asked it made the room feel warmer.

«I did,» he said evenly.

«Do you know why?»

His lips quirked, but not into a smile. «To imitate the gods?»

«Perhaps,» she said, and placed her cup gently down. «But also — because nothing was to interfere with the body. No cloth between muscle and motion. No friction but that of skin. The purest contact. The purest form.»

There was a beat of silence. Then he said, almost wryly, «A beautiful idea, in theory.»

«Oh, of course,» she replied, wide-eyed. «In Russia, such a thing would be… inconceivable.»

The word hovered between them like perfume.

She rose then, slowly, and moved toward the window, her shoulder barely brushing his as she passed. They stood side by side, their reflections faint in the glass. Below, the bodies tangled and reformed. Grip. Pull. Collapse. Rise.

She waited, then said, «I’ve always believed the truth lives in the body. The effort. The limit. The grace. Not metaphorical truth. But the actual truth of strain, of movement, of flesh doing what it was built to do. Don’t you agree?»

He did not reply at once. His gaze stayed fixed on the two men below — shirtless, young, locked in a hold that resembled an embrace.

«I’m told,» she added softly, «that the painter Gérôme once said, Le nu est la vérité. The nude is the truth.»

His voice, when it came, was lower. «What are you looking for, Madame Fournier?»

She turned her head. «The answer depends. On whether I’m here as a journalist. Or a woman.»

The silence that followed was not empty. It was thick — like steam in a bathhouse, like cream stirred into tea. Languid. Charged.

She did not smile — not quite. But her eyes lingered on his mouth just a second too long.

«There are things a uniform hides,» she said. «The curve of a shoulder. The shift of weight in a haunch. The effort in a grip. Clothing… lies.»

«And so you suggest we remove it?» His tone was dry, but there was something else beneath it — a stirring.

«Not in ceremony,» she answered. «Not in public. But in training, perhaps. Among men. Among those who seek truth.»

He turned his head toward her, fully now, and for the first time did not disguise his scrutiny. Her hands rested lightly on the sill, ungloved now. Her blouse, though high-collared, clung faintly where the heat touched her. A strand of hair, freed by the window’s draft, clung to the softness beneath her jaw.

«You’re not asking about history,» he said.

«No.» She met his gaze. «I suppose I’m not.»

He looked once more at the wrestlers. One had the other pinned now, flat on the mat, breath heaving from both chests. The moment held. Then the whistle blew, and they parted.

«Wrestling,» he said slowly, «is not simply contact. It is consent. Each man agrees to give the other his full weight.»

She closed her eyes for a breath, as though she had tasted something rich. «Exactly.»

He stepped away from the window, and the air between them shifted. He did not touch her. He did not need to. The nearness of him was enough to suggest every possibility.

She looked down at the desk, then back at him. «You must understand, Sergey Dmitrievich — I write about sport because it gives me a language. But I pursue something else entirely.»

He waited.

«I want to know,» she continued, «what happens when strength is seen — really seen — without costume, without posture, without translation. Not the story of the body. The body itself.»

He said nothing.

But the silence between them was no longer restraint. It was decision forming.

And in that silence, it became clear that she had not come to observe.

She had come to unmake the distance between observer and subject.

She had come to see.

Sergey Dmitrievich stood near the window, his profile cut in half by the light. Below, in the gymnasium, the wrestlers moved with their slow, methodical grace, torsos gleaming with exertion, their movements echoing faintly upward — the slap of skin on canvas, the low grunt of breath, the shuffle of bare soles on the mat. It should have been distracting. It was not. What held him now was her — or rather, the silence she created in which all manner of possibility began to stir.

She rose without a word, crossed the room with a feline unhurriedness that made the space seem narrower, the air more humid. Her perfume reached him a heartbeat before she did — sandalwood, citrus, something deeper, like heat against silk. She stopped within arm’s reach, her chin tilted up, lips parted as if mid-thought.

«You hesitate,» she said softly, her accent curling around the consonants like ribbon. «Is it me… or the idea?»

He regarded her carefully, not moving. «It is not hesitation. It is judgment.»

«Of me?» she asked, brows lifting with mock injury.

«No.» His voice was low. «Of what it would mean to grant what you’re asking.»

She smiled — not triumphantly, but as one might upon recognizing the path through a thicket. She reached forward and, with an exquisite slowness, adjusted the collar of his jacket — a gesture domestic in appearance, but suggestive in execution. Her fingers brushed the base of his throat, lingered a moment longer than necessary. When she spoke again, her voice was almost inaudible:

«You said wrestling reveals the truth of the body. What if I want to see that truth? Completely?»

His breath slowed.

She saw it — the pause, the pull. He wanted to speak, to retreat, to close the window and offer her tea again. But some older instinct held him there, rooted like a stag sensing the tremor of a predator’s approach, not out of fear — but out of awe.

She moved closer, so that her torso nearly brushed his, and her hand, slender and warm, rested lightly against his chest. Through the linen of his shirt, she could feel the measured rise and fall of his breath — deliberate, contained.

«Give me this, Sergey Dmitrievich,» she whispered. «Not for scandal. Not for thrill. For knowledge. For art. For the discipline of the eye… and the discipline of the flesh.»

«And what would you give in return?» he asked, his voice rougher now, the consonants ground slightly against the molars.

She looked up at him, her eyes dark, half-lidded.

«Something equal,» she said. «Something earned.»

Her fingers trailed down, not lasciviously — no, she was too clever for that — but with the poise of a woman offering not seduction, but access. Access to something men of his station, his age, were not often offered without consequence. A glimpse behind the veil. A moment in the forbidden gallery.

«You’re not a child,» he said slowly, almost as a warning.

«No,» she answered, stepping even closer, until her mouth was barely a hand’s width from his. «And you’re not a fool.»

For a heartbeat, nothing moved. Not the dust in the sunbeam. Not the air. Not even the sounds from the gym below. It was a tableau — a moment carved from possibility. He could lean down, press his mouth to hers, and the world would tilt. Or he could step back into safety, into protocol, into mediocrity.

Instead, he spoke.

«If I agree,» he said, voice ironed flat, «if I grant what you’ve suggested… what then?»

She didn’t answer immediately. Her palm, still resting against his chest, shifted slightly — a whisper of movement, barely felt but unmistakable. Her breath was warm against his jaw now.

«I want to see them,» she said, her tone that of a museum curator requesting access to a sealed wing. «Unencumbered. In pure form. In honest motion. Nothing between body and discipline. I want to write what I see. I want to understand.»

«And that understanding,» he murmured, «is worth what?»

She tilted her head. Her cheek brushed his. She spoke not into his ear, but against the edge of it.

«It’s worth everything,» she whispered. «And perhaps… worth me.»

His hand, until now resting at his side, lifted slightly — hesitated — and then curled against the back of her waist. Not possessively. Not roughly. But as one might steady an instrument of value. She didn’t flinch. She had known it would happen. She had led him here, note by note, breath by breath.

«I’ll arrange it,» he said at last, his voice as low and weighty as a verdict. «A private training. One session. No uniforms. No audience. Just you, the mat, and the truth you claim to want.»

She closed her eyes for a beat, exhaling softly, and when she opened them again, she looked younger — or perhaps simply more dangerous.

«I knew you would understand,» she said.

He stepped back then, just enough to look at her directly. His hand fell to his side. His expression was unreadable — save for the faint tension at the corner of his mouth, and the faint pulse visible at his throat.

«Go now,» he said.

Her brows rose. «So soon?»

«Yes.» His gaze flicked downward. «Before I ask for more than your promise.»

A slow, knowing smile spread across her lips. She reached for her gloves, slipped them on with the same care she had taken in removing them. Each button fastened with deliberate grace. She placed her hat atop her head, pinned it in three quick motions, then met his eyes once more.

«Until tomorrow, then.»

And with that, she turned, her skirt swaying behind her like a curtain at the end of a performance. The door closed with a gentle click. Only when the sound had faded did he move, pressing both palms to the edge of the desk, as if it might steady him against the flood of something he had not felt in years.

Desire, yes — but not the desire of a man for a woman.

The desire to disobey propriety.

To break something sacred.

To touch truth — in sweat and flesh and shameless motion.

And she — she had not seduced him. She had freed something in him he thought long buried beneath order and routine. He stood there a long time, listening to the sound of training below, already hearing it differently. Already imagining how it would sound when nothing was left between the body and the eye.

* * *

The hour was still early enough that the summer light filtering through the tall windows of the gymnasium bore the soft opalescence of milk. Dust motes drifted in shafts of sun, curling lazily like cigar smoke. The floor had already begun to hum with life: the thump of bare feet on worn mats, the rustle of linen shirts being shrugged off, the low grunt of stretching men. Warm bodies gleamed faintly, like varnished oak, their scent sharp with soap, leather, and yesterday’s sweat.

She arrived not with fanfare, but with a kind of serene precision, as though the timing of her entrance had been rehearsed in advance — and, perhaps, it had. Fournier stepped through the side door beside him, gloved hands folded lightly around a notebook she had not yet opened. The hem of her walking skirt swept clean across the dusty threshold, and her hat was simple today, pale straw with only the faintest ribbon. Nothing to distract from her presence. She did not greet the room, did not wave, but allowed the sheer incongruity of her being there — a woman, and a foreign one, in a sanctum of male discipline — to settle into the atmosphere like heat into iron.

She smiled at no one in particular. But she stood very near him.

Sergey Dmitrievich was already changed — not into formal attire, but his usual training clothes: linen shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled high, boots firm against the wooden boards. He had not spoken much since her arrival, only nodded once, and now walked a few steps ahead, his hands clasped behind his back.

The wrestlers had begun to take note. Conversations softened. One by one, heads turned, some furtively, others with open curiosity. Their instructor did not stop walking until he reached the center of the hall. There, he turned. His voice, when it came, was quiet but cleanly projected — that special register known to teachers and commanders, designed to pierce both muscle and thought.

«Gentlemen,» he said, «we have, this morning, the honour of a visitor.»

He did not gesture to her. Did not need to.

«This is Madame Fournier, of La Gazette de la Société — a Parisian publication with wide readership across Europe. She has been tasked with documenting the Russian school of wrestling. Not as mere sport. But as heritage.»

A ripple of posture passed through the men. One stood a little straighter. Another adjusted the fold of his belt. No one spoke.

Sergey Dmitrievich went on, his tone still calm, but with the hint of iron beneath it.

«Yesterday, during our discussion, we spoke of origins. Of traditions both ours and older than ours. Some of you may recall that in the ancient games of Greece, the athlete presented himself — not in fine cloth, nor in uniform, but in nothing at all. Entirely nude.»

He paused. The word settled into the silence like a pebble dropped into a pond.

«It was not for vanity. Nor for spectacle. It was philosophy. Nothing must come between the man and his movement — no cloth to hinder the line of the muscle, no laces to betray the grip. Purity, they called it. Of form. Of effort. Of flesh.»

Now he allowed his eyes to sweep the room. He saw some faces blank with caution, others tightening around half-swallowed smirks. One of the younger men shifted his weight.

«This idea,» he said, slower now, each word more deliberate, «may seem strange to us. Foreign. Even uncomfortable. But madame has expressed a scholarly curiosity — a desire to witness a training exercise in such form, as a kind of experimental reenactment. For observation only.»

He let the phrase for observation only hang there, gently but unmistakably.

«No names will be printed. No sketches will be made. Nothing improper will be required — only the discipline to participate in a task older than any of us. The hall will remain closed to all others. This is not a performance. It is an exercise.»

Another pause. The only sound now was the dull squeak of someone shifting on resin-scuffed boards.

«This is not compulsory,» he said, softer. «But I will say this: those who agree will not be forgotten. Not by history. Not by those who study strength. And not,» he added, turning slightly — just slightly — toward her, «by those who choose what the world learns about Russian men.»

Still she had not moved. But her face was alive with watchfulness — not gloating, not even pleased, but richly attentive. She did not avert her eyes. She looked straight ahead, chin gently lifted, as if she herself were being assessed as much as those around her.

Sergey Dmitrievich took one final breath, then stepped back.

«Those who are willing,» he said, «remain. The rest may return this afternoon.»

And then, silence.

But it was not an empty silence. It was full. Full of breath, heartbeat, hesitation. Of glances cast side to side — not to judge, but to measure. What would the others do? What did this mean? What did she want to see?

She had not spoken a word. But every man in that room had heard her.

He stood beside her, arms at his sides now, not folded, not clenched. Just still. Waiting.

She turned her head then, only a little, and offered him a glance — not a smile, but something quieter. A flicker of heat beneath cool water. The promise of something not yet touched.

And so they stood, two figures at the edge of the old world and something new, while the choice, at last, was no longer his.

The silence did not shatter — it breathed. Long and slow, like the heavy chest of a draft horse in winter, steaming from the nostrils, unsure whether to pull or remain still.

Then — a creak.

One man moved. He was tall and dark, with the broad shoulders of a river barge and a broken nose that gave his face a kind of permanent apology. Pavel, his name was, and he had been wrestling since childhood in the far north — where the snow piled like judgment and men said little. He said nothing now. He simply bent, undid the knots of his training belt, and let his shirt fall away from him like an old skin.

Another followed. Blond, thick-necked, younger — Volodya — who always laughed too loudly at mealtime and cursed like a sailor when thrown. But now, no grin. Only a slow exhale through the nose, as he stripped down to the waist. Then lower.

Boots were tugged off. Linen drawers loosened, hesitated, then slid to the floor.

Some looked to Sergey Dmitrievich, but most looked to her. Not directly — few had that kind of boldness — but they watched the way she did not avert her gaze. Watched the measured calm with which she stood, arms still loosely folded at the wrists, head tilted slightly in professional attention.

She was not smiling. But neither was she blank. Her expression was something richer — a painter’s patience, a naturalist’s curiosity, and a widow’s private warmth, folded tightly behind her lips.

A few men left.

One excused himself quickly, muttering that he had a shoulder strain. Another, red in the ears, turned and walked out without a word, fists clenched at his sides. No shame. Just threshold.

But most… remained.

A dozen, maybe more. In various stages of undress, they moved with a strange sobriety — not the careless swagger of young men in dormitories, but the inward focus of something ceremonial. As though this were no longer about her. Or him. Or them. But about the act itself — the courage of vulnerability, the power of obedience, the body freed from its shell.

The hall shifted.

Flesh took the place of cloth. Sunlight licked across shoulder blades, down spines, over the subtle tension of thighs and calves, knees scarred with old effort. The colour of skin varied: some ruddy, some pale with fine golden hair, others browned by sun and work. But all of them shared one thing — a silence now deeper than before.

No one laughed.

No one whispered.

Even the air grew denser, thick with salt and something older.

She allowed herself to breathe.

Carefully, without drawing attention, she stepped a little closer to the edge of the mat. Not quite invading. Not quite distant. Her notebook remained closed, clasped to her chest like a missal.

Sergey Dmitrievich stood beside her, arms folded now, eyes alert — not just to the men, but to her.

He was watching her. Always.

And she knew it.

Her voice, when it came, was low and warm, but carried like silk tossed through the air.

«Merci, messieurs,» she said. «This… this is courage. And beauty. I am grateful.»

She did not apologize. Did not shrink. And in that moment, it was not she who was the outsider, but something older — shame, perhaps, or custom — banished, for now, to the threshold outside the door.

«Shall we begin?» Sergey Dmitrievich asked. But he looked at her when he said it.

She gave the slightest nod.

The bodies began to move.

Slow at first — the warm-ups. Bending, lunging, shoulders rolling back in fluid arcs. Muscles tightened and released, torsos twisted, hips lowered. Feet shifted across the mat, searching for balance, seeking ground. And all of it — every stretch, every slow inhale — unfolded under her gaze.

Not as a voyeur.

Not as a girl.

But as a woman.

A widow.

A witness.

And though the sunlight outside grew brighter, and the clock somewhere struck another hour, inside that hall, time had thickened. Stilled.

A dozen men. Bare as statues.

One woman.

And the man beside her, who had made this moment possible — and whose word, now, was hers.

She no longer heard him.

Sergey Dmitrievich stood beside her still — broad-shouldered, hands clasped lightly behind his back, the silver thread at his temples catching stray flecks of sun — but she had ceased to feel the weight of his presence. Somewhere in the deep, shrouded theatre of her mind, the curtain had dropped on his role.

Her eyes were elsewhere.

No, not even her eyes — her whole body had leaned into the sight before her like a sunflower to the blaze. She watched as they moved: bare limbs twisting, the arch of a back flexing under strain, a spine rippling like a banner in wind. The room had become a low, golden furnace. The scent of exertion rose like incense. Skin shone. Muscles bunched. Breath grew louder.

It was not lust.

It was something older, more elemental — like watching a cathedral rise from quarried stone. She marvelled. And marvelled again. Her victory — this strange, unthinkable arrangement she had conjured from words, insinuations, and a smile at the right moment — bloomed now before her in living, heaving flesh.

She stood, utterly still, at the edge of the mat, notebook forgotten in one hand, the other resting lightly at her throat. Her lips parted slightly, not in shock, but in reverent calculation.

How would I describe this?

But language came slow. Her mind was trying to make poetry from sinew, metaphors from torsos, philosophy from sweat. The boyish curve of a hip, the solemn frown of a brow mid-grapple, the way fingers curled instinctively when grasping another man’s shoulder — it was all form, all ritual.

And in her quiet ecstasy, she did not hear him shift.

She did not hear the soft brushing of wool trousers as Sergey Dmitrievich turned away, nor the clearing of his throat — more for her sake than his own. But he did not blame her. On the contrary, there was something in her absorption that pleased him, in the way one might admire a horse finally broken to saddle. She had been given what she wanted. That meant the balance now tilted.

«Je vous attends dans mon bureau, madame,» he said quietly, not so much a command as a marker laid on the table. (I’ll wait for you in my office, madame.)

Then, softer, with just a trace of mirth:

«Pour régler notre petite dette.» (To settle our little debt.)

And without waiting for acknowledgment — he knew he would receive none — he turned, his steps precise, measured, like a man descending the last stair of a long, victorious climb.

She did not move.

It was not until the door shut quietly behind him that she exhaled — a soft, instinctive sigh that carried no anxiety. Only the slow, awakening awareness that she was now alone.

Alone among twelve men.

And none of them were clothed.

The realization came not with shame, nor fear, but an almost perverse tranquility. They were aware of her — oh yes, she could feel their glances the way a skin feels warm air before a storm — but they were not staring. Not one had spoken to her directly. Not one had laughed. And yet, in some wordless way, she was the axis of the room.

A dozen naked men circled her in orbit — in warm-up routines, in partner drills, in the grunt and thud of muscle against muscle — and she stood at the centre like the eye of a storm.

She turned her gaze now, one by one, over them.

There was Pavel again, heavy-limbed but light-footed, face set in quiet concentration as he adjusted his stance. There was Volodya, playful even now, flipping his partner too sharply and catching him with a crooked grin. And others — darker, leaner, sweatier — each a study in manhood as seen through the lens of discipline.

She watched them touch.

She watched hands slide across slick backs, palms pressing against flanks, fingers splaying in the search for leverage. She watched thighs tense, chests collide, feet slip and recover. She watched one man fall, and another pull him up by the arm, both of them breathing hard and unbothered.

Her skin prickled.

Not from embarrassment, but from the poetry of it — the raw, unapologetic presence of the male form in motion. Here, nothing was hidden. No mystery. Only flesh, strength, fatigue. Truth.

She opened her notebook.

Finally.

The first line came not in French, but in her native Russian, as if summoned from something ancestral:

«Стыд — это одежда души.» (Shame is the clothing of the soul.)

She let the ink dry.

A second line came. Then a third. She began to write in swift, precise phrases — not reportage, but incantation. Her pen danced over the paper with the quiet fervour of a woman who had finally stopped imagining and begun translating the real.

And still — she did not look toward the hallway.

Not toward the office where Sergey Dmitrievich waited.

Not yet.

She walked along the perimeter of the mats as though admiring sculpture in a warm museum hall. And it was then that she noticed him again — the sullen one. The peasant boy with the hawkish brow and deep-set, brooding eyes. He stood a little apart, stretching a shoulder with slow, animalistic rhythm, the thick cords of his back shifting like ropes beneath skin tanned from sun and labor.

He had not looked at her. Not once.

That alone intrigued her more than all the others.

She paused nearby, but not intrusively. Watched him pivot, flex, squat low on his haunches. The musculature of his thighs was almost grotesquely powerful, shaped not by aesthetic design but by years of fieldwork, of lifting, carrying, pushing. His penis hung heavy between his legs — not aroused, but full, uncircumcised, with that distinct, unapologetic frankness that some men possess even in repose.

He raised his arms overhead, spine arching, and her eyes followed the movement with a hunger that was not entirely professional.

«You don’t like to look,» she said softly, finally, in Russian.

He did not glance at her.

«Or you don’t like to be looked at?»

He turned his head then, slowly, eyes hooded but clear.

«I came to fight. Not to show.»

She smiled, just slightly. «The two are not so different.»

She stood close to him now — closer than the situation demanded. Her gaze rested not on his eyes, but lower, following the line of his abdomen, the disciplined geometry of a young man shaped by labour and obedience. Her fingers, as if acting independently, drifted lightly — almost idly — to rest against the curve of his right buttock. The contact was neither lewd nor hesitant; it had the offhand ease of someone placing a hand on a marble statue to test the chill of the stone. And yet the flesh beneath her palm was warm, alive, and solid as quarried granite.

She felt it before she saw it: the sudden, involuntary twitch through his body — a tremor that travelled forward and downward. Her eyes flicked to his groin in time to see his member stir, lift, and rise perceptibly, as if startled by her touch into self-declaration.

She tilted her head, voice low and smooth. «Will it get in the way when you fight?» she asked, with a hint of clinical curiosity — as if inquiring about a bandage or a bruise. «I wonder… simply because I do not know. We women are given no such distractions.»

He made no reply. His jaw was clenched, his nostrils flared, and yet he neither pulled away nor met her gaze. The muscle beneath her hand had hardened — not from arousal, but tension, a refusal to retreat or yield.

«What is your name?» she asked.

He hesitated.

«Mitya.»

She repeated it, tasting the syllables. «Mitya. And your opponent today?»

He nodded toward a tall, reedier man across the mat.

«Then let me watch.»

Still not waiting for permission, she moved to a low bench at the edge of the training space and sat, arranging her skirt so it would not trail on the dusty floor. Her gaze did not waver as the two men stepped onto the mat.

The match began without ceremony. A clasp of hands, a quick circling, the first clutch of flesh to flesh. Fournier felt her breath catch.

There was nothing erotic in their expressions, no performance — only instinct, reaction, the pure logic of bodies contesting space. But that very purity made it more potent. Sweat began to appear quickly; she could see it forming at the base of Mitya’s neck, running down the concave of his spine. She could see the flush rising on his chest, the quiver of his thigh as he resisted a takedown, the twitch of his buttock as he pivoted out of reach.

She leaned forward.

At one point they fell together, a heavy collapse that echoed. Her hand came instinctively to her mouth — not in shock, but in quiet awe. They rolled, limbs tangling, breath loud and ragged, torsos sliding against one another with the intimacy of combat. The sight was primal. It bypassed her intellect entirely and lodged somewhere in the base of her spine.

And then — without thought — she rose.

She stepped lightly onto the mat, as though crossing a sacred line. The two wrestlers paused, glancing up, uncertain.

«Continue,» she said softly.

And they did.

She circled them slowly, like a choreographer inspecting dancers mid-rehearsal. Her eyes were bright, lips slightly parted. At one point, as they grappled, she reached out — not quite touching, but hovering near Mitya’s flank, her palm trailing the arc of his movement. The heat radiating from his body was intense.

When he caught her eye, there was no surprise in his face. Only something harder to name: acknowledgment, defiance, the barest ghost of invitation.

She felt the pulse quicken in her wrist. Her fingers trembled with restraint.

The room was full of bodies, of movement, of flesh. But in that moment, she was alone with him. And she knew with perfect clarity: she had crossed a threshold.

She could not, would not turn back.

The room pulsed with motion. Twelve men — now perhaps only ten still sparring — feigned ignorance of the woman in their midst, yet every limb betrayed their awareness. No one had asked her to leave. No one had dared to question why she remained. Sergei Dmitrievich had departed, yes — after offering her a final glance laced with promise and warning — but his absence had only deepened her ownership of the moment.

They were not ignoring her. They were enduring her.

Their eyes never lingered. But their bodies did. Flesh is more honest than the gaze. One man, locked in a collar-tie with his partner, shifted his hips too often to be necessary. Another grunted with effort — or was it restraint? — as he drove his knee upward into the inner thigh of his opponent. In that contact, as in all contact now, there was something newly charged.

She felt it as surely as she saw it.

Mitya and his new rival — a stockier youth, broad in the chest but slower in the leg — closed the distance between them with a fluidity that belonged to animals more than men. Their torsos met with a slap of skin, their arms winding around each other in the ancient calculus of balance and advantage. Mitya’s foot hooked behind his opponent’s, his left hand pressing low against the other’s flank.

Their bodies, once distinct, became one.

And Fournier moved closer.

She circled them again, this time like a priestess at an altar, her eyes fixed, not hungry, but analytical. There was something almost maternal in her gaze, and yet entirely inappropriate in its intimacy. She stopped beside them as they twisted again — the stockier youth driving forward, Mitya resisting with a backward lean that made every muscle in his thigh swell and tremble.

Her hand lifted.

She did not ask permission. There was none to ask. With the same careful pressure she might have used to test a piece of fruit in the market, she placed her fingers on the outer hip of Mitya’s opponent — a bold, calloused hand, but steady. The skin there was hot, alive with the friction of exertion, and the young man flinched just enough to betray his knowledge of her.

Still, they fought.

She shifted, dragging the pads of her fingers across the firm sweep of a gluteal muscle, and then — audaciously — slid two fingers along the cleft of the lower back, where sweat pooled and heat rose like steam from a samovar. The boy gave a low growl, whether of discomfort or anticipation she could not tell.

Their legs tangled again. The other wrestler slipped, and Mitya took the opening. He twisted — and the pair collapsed onto the mat with a thud that reverberated through the floor.

They breathed together, chest to chest.

She crouched beside them, not touching now, but close. Her gloved hand rested on her knee, her head tilted slightly. The pose was unhurried. Her breath calm. Her gaze wandered down between their hips — to where bodies, though parted, did not conceal their arousal. Mitya’s manhood lay semi-tumescent against the mat, thick and responsive, and his opponent’s fared no better.

«You see?» she murmured, barely above a whisper. «You feel it as much as I do.»

Neither answered. But neither moved.

Behind her, more bodies shifted. A pair of men on the opposite end of the mat paused — not from fatigue, but from distraction. One of them, his hands still gripping his partner’s shoulders, risked a glance toward the trio at the center. She caught his eye. Held it. He flushed, and looked away — but not before she noticed the stiffness growing between his thighs.

They were all seen. And in being seen, they were bared more fully than nudity alone could allow.

Fournier stood again, gracefully, and turned her attention to Mitya. He had risen onto one knee, his chest rising and falling with exertion. His skin glistened with a fine sheen of sweat, and along his side, small red marks bloomed where his opponent’s grip had been strongest.

She extended her hand.

To anyone else, it might have looked like assistance — but they both knew otherwise. It was not the gesture of help, but of claim.

He did not take it. Not immediately.

Instead, he looked up at her — his eyes dark, unreadable — and then stood on his own. Taller than she had remembered, or perhaps it was the closeness that made him loom larger. His chest nearly brushed her silk blouse, and she smelled him now, fully — the rich musk of young virility, of friction and breath and something almost metallic.

Her hand moved — lower this time. Not to the hip, but to the base of his abdomen, just above the pubic bone. There was nothing casual in the gesture now. It was too direct. And the reaction came instantly.

His member, already thick, pulsed once — rising, unmistakably, between them.

She tilted her head.

«Still sure it won’t get in the way?» she asked, not smiling now, but calm — like a doctor, like a priestess, like no woman he had ever known.

He said nothing.

But his hands flexed at his sides.

The mat beneath them was alive with sound now — of other bodies, other breaths, but quieter. Their rhythm had shifted. Not all had paused, but none fought with full attention. She had become the hidden axis of their gravity, and they orbited her with the mute reverence of men who knew they had stepped outside of custom, into something older and more dangerous.

And Fournier? She felt it in her bones: the turning of the tide, the swell of power and peril, and that delicious, almost religious knowledge — that she had not merely witnessed this spectacle.

She had authored it.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Her fingers, feather-light yet unmistakable in their purpose, hovered at the very threshold of propriety — that tender place where a man’s body shifts from flesh into urgency. She felt the faintest tremor beneath the skin: not just of muscle, but of blood quickening in response. A pulse, deep and male, asserting itself not with violence, but with inevitability.

Mitya stood utterly still.

His chest rose, not with effort now, but with something more primal — tension, resistance, perhaps even disbelief. His arms hung at his sides, loose but alert, and his eyes, narrowed before, now widened by a fraction. Not in outrage. Not even confusion. It was something stranger. A stunned awareness. As if he, who had grappled grown men to the floor with the ease of a seasoned bull, had suddenly found himself caught, not by force, but by a gesture as soft as breath.

And she — Mme Fournier — she did not flinch.

The corners of her lips curled, barely. Not the smile of seduction, no. Not yet. But the smile of a woman who had long passed the age of being surprised by her own daring, and who now watched its unfolding consequences with quiet, cultivated pleasure.

Then, like a dream half-remembered, she stepped back.

Not in retreat, but in invitation. Her eyes dropped, only briefly, to the organ now thickening between his thighs — no longer resting, but poised. Then she turned, deliberately, and walked a few paces from the mats.

Behind her, Mitya exhaled — long and low, almost inaudible. But he followed.

The other men were still grappling, pretending not to notice, yet unable — utterly unable — to remain unaffected. Their movements had become just slightly disordered. Not enough to break the discipline of the room, but enough to shift its pulse. The rhythm of flesh against flesh now bore a strange undercurrent — not erotic in itself, but aware, intensely aware, of observation.

Because she did not merely watch. She studied. Her eyes were not the hurried glances of a woman stealing glimmers of forbidden anatomy. They were open, searching, greedy in the most unapologetic sense. She looked at torsos as one might look at ancient sculpture: weighing proportions, admiring musculature, noting symmetry, imperfection, the arc of ribs, the depth of a spine’s shadow.

And when she moved again — approaching two men locked in a contest of strength and sweat — it was without hesitation.

She crouched near them, like a naturalist in the field, observing the movement of creatures in their wildness. One man was down, the other pinning him with forearm and thigh. Both glistened with effort. Her gaze lingered where thighs met, where the male form pressed in dense geometry against itself.

She reached out.

Not brashly. Not with the impudence of a harlot or the presumption of one drunk with power. But gently — slowly — she laid her hand on the back of the standing man, where the lats fanned out like wings. Her fingers moved along the ridges, tracing them with something close to reverence.

And they said nothing.

No one pulled away. No one gasped. Her presence — the feel of her breath, the scent of her skin, the faint brush of her silk cuff against bare haunches — had woven itself into the very air of the room.

She moved lower.

Now her palm rested on the gluteus, firm and straining with balance. A quick glance sideways revealed, as before, the tell-tale effect of her touch: a thickening, a lifting. And this time, she smiled fully. Not for him, but for herself. For the knowledge of what her fingers could provoke without command, without demand. Pure presence.

Mitya watched from behind.

His hands were clenched. Not in anger — no, not even in jealousy — but in containment. He was still visibly aroused, still standing firm, unmoving, while the others bent, rolled, strained, and accepted her proximity. He had not joined them. Not yet.

But her glance found him.

Over the shoulder, just a flicker of an eye — but she knew it would reach him like a tug on a rope.

«You are not fighting?» she asked, her voice velveted with amusement.

He didn’t answer.

«Perhaps you prefer…» — her gaze dropped, unmistakably, to the swelling at his groin — «to wait until you can use that?»

There was a ripple through the room — a held breath, a pause in motion. One of the men chuckled, low and rough, and resumed his grip on his opponent. Another made the sign of the cross — half-joking, half-defensive.

Mitya stepped forward.

She turned to face him fully now, calm and ready.

And though his expression remained unreadable, his body told her everything. The tension in his thighs. The curve of his arms, now flexed. The way he lowered his center of gravity, assuming position.

Without another word, he lunged — not at her, but at the man nearest to her — catching him in a waistlock that lifted both bodies off the ground.

The fight resumed. But it was different now.

She stood among them like a flame in the dark — illuminating, reshaping, dangerous in her very stillness.

She was alone with her prizes. And she knew — with a deep, secret certainty — that this was only the beginning.

Mitya had just unhooked his grip from the other man’s torso — a brutal, glistening hold broken only by mutual exhaustion — when she stepped forward once more.

His chest was rising quickly now, the rhythm of it no longer quite aligned with exertion alone. Sweat slicked down the cleft of his spine, drawing trembling rivulets over the bronzed surface of his back, and his flanks glowed with the effort of physical mastery. He had won — but the prize now stood before him, not in the form of triumph, but temptation.

She did not speak.

There was no need. Her approach carried its own language — one of silk against tile, of footsteps that refused to hurry, of composure honed to a sharp, feminine edge.

The other men lingered on the mats in partial repose, stretching, drinking, pretending to be too fatigued to watch — and yet their glances flicked toward her, again and again. There was no shame in their curiosity now. It was hunger, poorly disguised as indifference.

Mitya straightened, slowly. He was breathing through his nose, trying to tame whatever storm had begun to roll through his belly — not of appetite, but of something more volatile. Rage? No. Lust? Not entirely. It was the helplessness of being seen, completely, and not being able to hide.

And she kept watching.

Her gaze took him in like a painter preparing to sketch the male form for the hundredth time, and still finding wonder in the raw lines of sinew and shadow. His neck, thick from training; his shoulders, blunted with muscle; his chest, rising and falling with restraint — and between his legs, the evidence of their shared secret, still alive, still lifting, still refusing to be tamed.

She stepped closer.

Mitya didn’t move. But something in his eyes changed — the rigidity melted just slightly, like wax at the edge of a flame. His hands were no longer fists.

And she, without permission and without resistance, reached up once more.

This time, her touch was not exploratory, but familiar. Her fingers grazed his abdomen, still trembling faintly from effort. They slid downward, not in haste, but with that same maddening patience she had mastered the evening before. When she reached the hipbone, she paused — just long enough to draw his breath in deeper. Then her hand curved around the outside of his thigh, following it to where the root of his manhood stood, heavy and thick, nearly brushing her wrist.

She looked up into his face.

«I see,» she said softly, with the faintest lilt of amusement. «You fought well.»

Still he said nothing.

«So well,» she continued, now letting her palm trace the contour of his pelvis, «that I wonder how much strength remains.»

Her hand moved forward, wrapping — not fully, not yet — but enough that the heat of his flesh pulsed directly into her palm. It wasn’t an act of domination. Nor was it precisely seduction. It was something stranger — an experiment with the solemnity of science and the thrill of transgression. Her eyes held his like a question to which she already knew the answer.

And it answered.

The thickening in her hand turned unmistakable. Alive. Responsive. His body, once defiant, now trembled just beneath the skin.

She did not stroke. Not yet.

Her thumb merely rested near the base, where the shaft met the lower belly — and she pressed, slightly, watching as the head of his sex lifted and twitched, the foreskin sliding with it, the veins tightening. The rest of the room was lost now — melted into stillness, into the sound of bare feet shifting awkwardly on mats, the hush of breathing just held.

«It’s beautiful,» she said at last, her voice lower now, breathier, as if speaking only to herself. «So strange… to be capable of such strength, and still surrender like this.»

He shifted his weight — only a little — but did not pull away.

She released him, as slowly as she had taken him.

Then her hand rose again, brushing over his hip, his side, the edge of his ribcage, and finally resting just below the line of his pectorals. The gesture, now reversed, became almost maternal. Almost.

«You may continue,» she murmured, stepping back just slightly. «Unless you prefer to remain… at attention.»

A ripple of movement stirred among the other men. One, stretching, adjusted his stance and revealed his own state of arousal — less controlled, less concealed. Another, already half reclined on a mat, pressed the back of his hand against his groin as if to temper the evidence.

But none of them left.

And she made no gesture to depart.

She simply turned, slowly, her back now to Mitya, and began walking again — through the thick air of musk and heat and unshed desire — as if the entire room were hers. And in a way, it was.

The goddess of the ring, fully clothed.

Among the naked warriors who now obeyed something deeper than instruction.

The silence in the gymnasium was not absolute. It breathed — with the quiet shuffling of feet against mats, with the subtle shift of muscle on skin, with the withheld sighs of men who pretended not to look. Light streamed in from the high windows, bathing the room in a cool, dusty gold that softened nothing. Every line of every body was etched with uncompromising clarity.

Fournier moved slowly, like one walking through a gallery after hours, when the hush was sacred and even one’s breath felt profane. The dozen athletes before her stood or reclined, trying in vain to disguise their alertness. But they were too alive — too blood-filled, too warm — to be still like statues. She saw them flicker with tension. She felt them see her, though they averted their eyes with a discipline grown thin.

She began with the tallest — a flaxen-haired boy with the slope-shouldered nobility of a Nordic figurehead. His arms hung heavy, as if carved from ashwood, and his abdomen held the serenity of a temple column. She raised her hand and touched the curve of his deltoid — her fingers barely pressing the warm, taut flesh.

«Comme le marbre d’un tombeau grec,» she murmured. Like marble — but warm, living marble.

He flinched — almost imperceptibly. But his chest rose a little too sharply with the next breath, and she noticed a ripple low on his belly, a flicker of life beneath the sculptural calm. Her fingers, light as a veil, drifted to his waist, then brushed the hollow at the top of his thigh, as though examining the finish of a casting. She leaned in, her breath grazing his collarbone.

«Vous tremblez,» she whispered, a tease, not unkind. You tremble.

The next lay flat on his back, one arm over his eyes as if pretending to rest. A classic pretense — the illusion of ease to hide vigilance. He had the thickset build of a Balkan ox — broad and furred, with a chest like a blacksmith’s anvil and thighs that met without apology. She knelt beside him, her skirt pooling around her legs like spilled ink.

Her hand settled on his sternum, then drifted, as though following a pattern only she could see — to the taut stretch of his stomach, the fine line of hair descending lower. She spoke to his skin more than to him.

«Такой гладкий…» she said, admiring the contrast between his rugged size and the silken resilience of his body. So smooth…

He said nothing. But his arm shifted, ever so slightly, and she caught the twitch in his leg, the lift in his hip — involuntary, unmistakable. She ran a finger along the crest of his pelvis and rose again, as if completing a step in a silent dance.

She approached the third like a scholar before an anatomical model. He was slimmer than the others, but exquisitely defined — his ribs like a lyre, his limbs long, his back a living drawing of tension and grace. He was seated, cross-legged, palms on his knees in mock meditation.

She crouched beside him, studying his spine, the elegant articulation of shoulder blade and muscle. Her hand, curious and unhurried, followed the curve down to his lower back, then brushed his side — tracing the edge of the iliac bone, the breath-shallow basin just above his groin.

«You look carved by someone who understood restraint,» she said in English, her tone gently ironic. «But the Greeks would have left less to the imagination.»

He turned his face toward her — a boy’s face, blushing despite himself. But between his legs, what had been resting now stirred, shifted, hardened — giving lie to his feigned composure. She smiled, not cruelly, but as if marking a point on a chart.

And then she came to the fourth — dark-eyed, broad-nosed, with a build that spoke of peasant fields and iron kettles rather than drawing rooms. He stood, arms crossed, attempting a glare that cracked beneath her gaze.

He had the kind of body that could frighten — thick with stored power, with the quiet menace of a bear not yet disturbed. But she was not disturbed. She reached up, took his wrist, and guided it down — away from his chest, freeing the view he tried to block.

«You don’t need to hide,» she said, softly, almost maternally. «Nothing here is obscene.»

Her other hand settled — slowly, deliberately — on his lower abdomen, her thumb grazing the edge of dark, curling hair. She could feel the throb under her palm, the swell that answered her not with consent but with inevitability. He looked away, his jaw clenched, but she leaned in and whispered in Russian:

«Красивый.» Beautiful.

It was not seduction. It was cataloguing, consecration. In her mind she was not among men, but among relics — flesh turned sacred by discipline, strength made reverent through submission to form. And though the air in the gym grew warmer, heavier with the weight of breath and blood, she moved among them like a high priestess performing rites none dared question.

Each one she touched bore the same dual truth: resistance and response. And though they kept their silence, their bodies confessed. Skin awakened under her fingers. Muscles tensed in unison with the quiet rise of heat. And always — always — that betrayal between their thighs, those silent testaments to the presence of desire, even beneath the mask of stillness.

Fournier did not laugh, nor sigh, nor give herself away. Her smile remained faint, ironic, impersonal — the kind a connoisseur offers a rare vintage. But in her eyes flickered something more dangerous: hunger disguised as appreciation, and mastery disguised as play.

She was not just among them. She possessed them — one glance, one touch, one measured word at a time.

Then, with a voice that needed no elevation, no hardness — only the stillness of certainty — she spoke:

«Line up. Along the mats. Face forward.»

No man questioned. There was no rustle of hesitation, no glance for guidance. Her command passed through them not like a lash, but like gravity: inevitable, silent, obeyed.

Their bodies moved, slow and weighty, like columns of flesh stepping into the symmetry of her design. Each man took his place, bare soles brushing the canvas, shoulders squared, arms at ease by their sides. Twelve forms now stood in a long, unbroken procession — not soldiers, not statues, not slaves. Something older. Something both humbled and exalted.

She walked before them, hands still gloved, the rhythm of her heels now absorbed by the softened hush of the mats. No man turned to follow her with his eyes, but she knew they felt her. The way trees feel the approach of fire. The way animals sense the nearing storm.

She did not look at them all at once.

She would take them one by one.

As was her right.

The air inside the training hall was warmer than it had any right to be — dense not merely with breath and sweat, but with something subtler, more potent. It pressed against the skin like the weight of expectation before a rite; it vibrated along the ribs like the preluding hum of some unspoken chorus. And she — Madame Fournier, in her slate-grey gloves and narrow-waisted coat — entered not as a visitor now, but as one who presides. As one invited, yes, but with a purpose beyond mere observation.

The men stood in a line, twelve in total — bare, braced, bodies alert in stillness. Their limbs held in casual readiness, their torsos carrying the language of discipline, toil, and pain transmuted into beauty. The light from the high, eastern windows poured onto them like the morning sun upon statues at Delphi — showing not only the contours of flesh, but the integrity of form, the promise of might.

They waited. Not in obedience, but in solemn anticipation. She had not spoken. Yet they knew.

Her heels tapped softly against the wooden floor, each step deliberate, as though echoing a procession known to her alone. She walked not as a woman among men, but as a sovereign among her cohort — unhurried, not questioning her place. She passed the first man, a wide-shouldered fellow with a cropped flaxen beard, his jaw tight, gaze fixed ahead. Her gloved hand rose — unrushed, ceremonial — and settled lightly on the plane of his chest. Then, lower. The gesture was not intimate; it was precise. Her fingers pressed into the fullness of his abdomen, traced the path of tension that hummed beneath the skin. And when she paused at the juncture of his pelvis — not grasping, but resting there, palm to flesh — the man did not flinch. Yet something within him surged, unmistakable in its readiness.

She moved on.

The second bore the scars of older trials — marks that no oil could polish away. His thighs were vast, his breath already deepening. Again, her hand came — not coquettishly, but with the gravity of touch that declared: I see you, and I mark you as worthy. This time, her palm lingered a moment longer upon his flank, slid in a quiet arc over the prominence of his hip, and then settled at his core — not to claim, but to acknowledge. As one might touch the hilt of a blade before battle.

The third, younger, eyes wide and unsure, trembled beneath her approach. His body, though no less prepared, betrayed a ripple of uncertainty. Her touch came softer here, her fingers barely skimming his abdomen before curling at the crest of his thigh. And then — lower, precisely centered. The boy exhaled as though something vital had been named within him. The flesh stirred, not in rebellion, but in assent.

By the fourth, it was no longer the woman who passed among men — but something else entirely: a current, a force, a rite unfolding. She no longer needed to measure each breath or weigh each gesture. Her presence had become the ceremony. Each man awaited his moment not with shame, but with still, wordless gravity.

Some bore her touch in silence. Some shuddered faintly, a tightening of the jaw, a twitch of the lip. Others — those who had once known her gaze as distant or skeptical — now accepted her palm as seal, as consecration. There was no mistaking the rise of flesh, the answering swell beneath her hand as she passed. But it was not lewd, not vulgar. It was the reflex of iron summoned to the forge, the flesh’s vow that it, too, could bear the weight of the ideal.

When she came to the ninth — taller, dusk-haired, his eyes half-lowered — she did not pause at his chest or his arms. She stepped close. Her gloved hand reached, unflinching, to the place all the others had yielded. Her fingers closed — not tightly, not possessively, but with the certainty of one who accepts a sacred offering. He did not stir. But she felt the silent thrum, the tension that coiled and held — like a bow drawn back, waiting for release.

At the eleventh, she did not use her hand. She only stood, close enough that her breath might have kissed his skin, and watched as his body answered the mere possibility of her gesture. A wordless nod. A slow rise, involuntary, yes — but not unearned. She smiled, just slightly. This, too, was power.

Behind her, unnoticed, a door clicked shut. Sergei Dmitrievich had left the viewing room. Whether in displeasure or admiration, she could not say. It did not matter. His role was done. This was hers now.

She turned to the twelfth — Mitya.

He had not moved since she started. But the coiled storm in his eyes, that quiet resistance he wore like a mantle, had not left him. His breath came slow. Controlled. But the body betrayed what the mind withheld. She approached, the air between them heavy with recollection. Her hand rose. He did not flinch. And when her fingers — still gloved — came to rest on his chest, and then his lower belly, and then…

His gaze locked with hers, unblinking.

Yes, she thought. This one does not yield. He allows.

And that, more than anything, made her hand tremble.

But only for a second.

Then it passed, and she continued. Queen. Priestess. Judge of the flesh. Keeper of the unspoken rites.

And all twelve stood — bare, alert, and acknowledged.

She did not need to speak loudly. Her voice was low — yet it cleaved through the humid air of the hall like a blade through silk.

«Gentlemen,» she said, the faintest glimmer of irony behind the word, «you may go now. To the baths.»

A pause. One heartbeat — two — before the shift began. Twelve men, already standing in a rigid row, naked and glistening, turned in silent synchrony — as though summoned not by her voice, but by an older, deeper command. Their bodies, tall and bronzed, held an unnatural stillness for a breath longer, members jutting proudly forward like unsheathed blades in a ceremonial line. Then, slowly, the shuffling began: broad backs pivoting, thighs flexing, the rhythm of footsteps echoing softly on the boards as they moved, one by one, toward the waiting mist of the baths.

She did not move from her place.

Her words had been casual. Her gaze was not.

And as the men, half in disbelief, half in wary submission, began to file toward the far end of the training hall — toward the tiled threshold of the bathing chambers — she followed.

Not behind. Among.

She walked at their pace, flanking them like a sovereign might accompany a procession of champions. The cadence of her steps, deliberate and sharp, echoed off the bare walls. Her heeled boots clicked like a metronome of command. Click — click — click — a rhythm more intimate than the sound of breath, more insistent than heartbeat.

She had not removed her gloves. She had not let her hair fall. She had not so much as adjusted the collar of her riding jacket. The air was warm, thick with the musk of male exertion and the sharp metallic tang of chalk dust and mat oil, but she wore the scene like a second skin — untouched, unsullied, sovereign.

One of the younger men — the flaxen-haired Georgian with the bent nose and lion’s shoulders — glanced back over his shoulder, perhaps unsure whether to hold open the partition door. Her eyes met his. He flinched, and turned again, vanishing into the tiled steam beyond.

She passed the threshold like a queen entering the throne room of flesh.

The bath chamber was bright — white-tiled from wall to ceiling, with a skylight overhead that poured a wan morning glow into the vapours. Benches ran along the walls, wooden slats darkened by decades of use, and in the centre, a stone basin with faucets and buckets stood like an altar to ablution.

They gathered around it, some reaching for the soapstones, others already sluicing water across their chests and flanks, heads bowed beneath the gurgling pipes. It might have been a scene from the mythologies of the East — warriors in the hammam, washing away the dust of combat, each muscle and sinew a testament to discipline, to hunger, to the glory of male form unadorned.

She entered the mist. Not hurriedly. She did not ask permission.

They parted.

Not obviously — not like supplicants — but in a ripple of unconscious space-making, as though the mist itself recognised her passage. She did not jostle or dodge. Her gloves brushed a shoulder here, a ribcage there. Each man, even those who dared not meet her eye, tensed as she passed, their bodies registering her nearness before their minds allowed the thought.

She walked past the marble basin. A drop of water struck the toe of her boot. Another followed. But she did not flinch. She paused — and with the gravest of care, removed a single glove.

The sound — leather against skin — was louder than it should have been.

She held the glove in one hand, like a duchess might hold a fan at the opera. And with her now-bare right hand, fingers long and narrow, she reached for the nearby faucet.

The water struck her palm with a hiss — warm, almost scalding. She let it wash over her hand for a moment, as though cleansing something invisible — not dirt, perhaps, but restraint.

Then she turned.

There they stood, naked and dripping, their shoulders hunched in false nonchalance, but the blood in their veins unmistakably stirred. The steam clung to them like breath to mirrors — and to her, as she stepped forward, hand wet and gleaming.

«Let us not rush,» she said, voice silken but edged. «The body is not merely to be scrubbed. It is to be understood.»

They looked at her now.

Not openly. But with sidelong flickers, with the eyes of men on the brink of something nameless — not lust, not shame, but the trembling at the edge of rapture and command.

She stopped before the first of them — the dark-haired Ukrainian with the heavy pectorals and hands like millstones. Water trickled down his stomach in rivulets.

With a grace so slow it was ritual, she reached out — and placed her hand flat against his chest.

Not above the heart. Lower.

Beneath the sternum, where breath gathers before it dares rise.

Her fingers glided — slow, measured, downward.

But she did not speak.

Not yet.

Because this — this was only the beginning.

Until now, her experience of the male form had been confined to one — her late husband, a kind man, gentle, reticent, whose body she had come to know as one knows the cadence of an oft-recited prayer. There had been affection, even tenderness, but never the raw, declarative force of the masculine in its untamed form.

And now — twelve of them.

Not hidden beneath cotton or propriety, but revealed in the full, living sculpture of their nature. They stood like carved pillars of some pagan temple, unashamed and immovable, as though their nakedness were a uniform in itself. She did not leer. She studied. As a botanist might observe the secret life of flowers, or as a sculptor might run her fingers across cooled marble to trace the shape of potential.

The steam rose in wavering ribbons, catching the light from the high windows and turning it into soft gold. Droplets clung to their skin — glistening like oil poured over carved cedar. The scent of male exertion, faint soap, wet stone, and heat thickened the air, not unpleasantly, but like something one could taste on the tongue.

She moved slowly, her heels muted against the tiled floor, her one glove still on. No longer an intruder, no longer merely tolerated. She had crossed some unseen threshold, and now she belonged to this space as much as the tiled walls and copper spigots.

They parted for her — not as subjects do for a queen, but as initiates might for a high priestess, their gaze level, intense, unflinching. Not a single man covered himself. Not one shifted to hide. On the contrary. Backs straightened. Shoulders widened. The curve of strength, resting or tensed, seemed to declare itself louder in her presence.

Her first touch was deliberate.

Not apologetic, not searching. She reached — not up to a face or down to a foot — but to the most central symbol of their manhood. She chose the Ukrainian, again, because he did not look away.

Her hand, still gloved, wrapped gently — not gripping, not teasing, but acknowledging.

The contact was warm through the damp fabric. Flesh met leather. And in that meeting, the man before her did not flinch, but something unmistakable passed through him — a ripple of breath held and then surrendered. His body acknowledged her presence in the oldest language known to humankind.

She moved along the line.

To the second man — a Georgian with a warrior’s beard and a boy’s uncertain eyes. She pressed her palm low on his abdomen, just above the origin of his virility, then traced downwards in a single, slow arc, fingers brushing the weight of him — not arousing, not ornamental, but declarative. As if noting: This, too, is part of you. I see it. I do not shy from it.

The third — fair-haired, freckled, with thighs like marble columns — stood already half-swollen from her mere approach. She paused, tilted her head with a kind of aristocratic curiosity, and then let her fingers drift — not across his chest, not his arms, but straight to the origin of that hunger his body could not conceal. She held him, not tightly, but firmly, like testing the warmth of bread just pulled from the hearth.

Each man was different. Each form, a study.

Some were taut and alert as bowstrings, others heavy with dormant power. Some thick, others long. Some swelled instantly under her palm, others responded with slow, aching inevitability. But all reacted. All offered her their weight, their shape, their readiness — not in speech, but in that singular, rising gesture the male body makes when it recognizes both touch and command.

She said little, but sometimes murmured.

A phrase in Russian:

«Ty slishkom bystro reagiruiesh’, mal’chik. Voyna tol’ko nachalas’.» (You react too quickly, boy. The war has only just begun.)

Or in French, low and silken:

«Voilà une force qui n’a pas encore appris à se contenir.» (Here is a force that has not yet learned to restrain itself.)

It was not flirtation.

No one laughed. No one smiled. Even she, in her velvet control, did not smirk. The ritual had weight. And her movement along the line took on a gravity that grew with each man touched, each shape measured.

She stopped before the sixth — a dark-eyed Lithuanian with a thick mane of wet hair and a scar over his hip. His sex hung heavy, still wet, twitching ever so slightly under her gaze alone. She did not look away. She placed both hands — not just one — at the root of his power, thumbs parting the space between thigh and base, index fingers curling lightly along the curve. Her touch was not sensual. It was sovereign.

This was not a woman lost in temptation.

This was not desire played out in secret.

This was rite.

She, the officiant.

They, the offerings.

And in that space where the scent of steam and salt filled the lungs, where no words seemed sufficient, twelve bodies awaited the next gesture — not of conquest, but of confirmation.

She looked back, once, toward the high window.

Sergei Dmitrievich was there, behind the smoked pane. Watching. Unmoving. A shadow made of judgment and heat.

She did not beckon. She did not smile.

But she lingered a little longer on the seventh man — pressing the base of his shaft as if testing whether a sword might withstand the forge. And when he drew breath — sharp, fast, and shallow — she whispered, almost reverently:

«Yes… this one remembers what it means to serve.»

The eighth man was taller than the others — long-limbed, with a torso that narrowed to a waist etched in shadow and tendon, as though his entire body had been carved from a single length of ash wood. His manhood hung low, curved slightly to one side, glistening with the same water that beaded along the plane of his abdomen. He did not look at her as she approached — not from arrogance, but from submission so complete it had forgotten how to defend itself.

She paused before him — not out of hesitation, but out of reverence.

Here was no boy. No shy recruit to her strange rite. This was a man already half-sculpted by the gaze of women, and yet untouched by one who chose him not for pleasure, but for purpose.

Her right hand — the gloved one — reached between his thighs, fingers curling not under but around, drawing the fullness of him into her palm. The gesture was firm, clinical, almost brutal in its clarity. Her thumb pressed slightly along the underside, not to provoke, but to affirm. She tested the weight, the density, the readiness.

There was no moan. No tremble.

Only a long exhale from his nostrils, and the twitch of muscle across his jaw. He stood taller, not from pride but from instinct.

She released him with the same silence, her glove now damp in a way not entirely from steam.

The ninth — a dark-skinned Tatar with sloped shoulders and a chest like a dray horse — watched her with narrowed eyes. There was challenge there. But not insolence. He wanted to be tested. To be singled out. To be chosen.

She rewarded that hunger not with words, but with both hands.

He had grown hard before she touched him — the only one to do so. And still, she did not flinch. One hand cupped the root, heavy and pulsing; the other glided along the length — not swiftly, not teasingly, but with an almost sacred patience. The way a priest might anoint a blade before battle. Her fingers, wrapped in dampened leather, left no ambiguity in their gesture: you are seen, you are measured, you are not yet spent.

He shuddered — not from lust, but from the unbearable dignity of being acknowledged.

The tenth — auburn-haired, with a nose broken more than once and a scar running from collarbone to navel — flinched when she drew near. His shame was visible. Not for his form, which was beautiful in its raw brutality, but for the emotion written across his face. He was too open.

She did not pity him.

Instead, she stepped closer — far closer — and placed her hand not only on him, but beneath, where the sac swung heavy, tender, and exposed. She held him there, like one might cup the future, fragile and weighted, and leaned forward just enough for her breath to brush the skin where leather met flesh.

«Courage,» she murmured — not as comfort, but as decree. «Courage is not absence of trembling. It is standing still while the goddess passes through you.»

He did not move. But a tear mingled with the wet already on his cheek.

The eleventh stood before her like a statue wrought of trembling gold. He was the youngest — that was plain. Barely twenty. His chest still bore the smooth tautness of youth untested, and the line of his jaw had not yet learned defiance. But it was not weakness that trembled in him. It was something older than strength — awe.

She paused before him, the silence between them stretched tight as a drawn bow. Steam drifted around her shoulders like smoke from a thurible, and her gloved hand, already damp with the labors of her prior anointments, rose once more.

Not high.

Low.

She touched him not like a lover, but like a seer — as if to read in the straining pulse beneath her palm the future he himself did not yet understand. Her fingers closed around him, slow and deliberate, testing heat, heft, resistance — but also obedience. For this was the moment: the trial not of the body, but of command.

His breath hitched.

His thighs braced.

He was ready, she thought — or at least, he thought he was.

«Do not spill,» she murmured in Russian, voice a single drop of ice within the steam. «Not yet. Contain it. Not from shame. From strength.»

But even as the words left her mouth, she felt it — a tension no longer mounting, but breaking. The shudder began in his knees, climbed his back like a sudden flame, and reached her hand with a pulse not of life, but of surrender. The young man gasped — not with pleasure, but with horror, as if the heat that surged through him were betrayal made flesh.

He came.

Not with pride.

Not with triumph.

But with shame, his seed caught not in darkness, but against her gloved palm — a sacrilege, a failure, a spill upon the altar. And her fingers, still closed around him, did not move.

Not yet.

His breath came in choking little spasms, and his eyes, wide with dawning comprehension, met hers.

«I — I didn’t mean — » he whispered.

Her gaze was cold, not cruel, but exacting. She said nothing. Only withdrew her hand — slowly, deliberately, letting the cool air strike him now where her warmth had been.

Then, in French, quiet but final:

«Tu n’étais pas prêt.»

(You were not ready.)

She turned.

And left him there — standing in the steam, shivering, not from cold but from the shame of having proven himself unworthy of the rite.

And now, the twelfth.

He stood apart — not in distance, but in presence. A man of few words and fewer expressions. His build was not the most imposing. But there was a stillness to him — a self-possession — as though he had known her touch before, in dreams or lives long buried.

She stopped. Looked up.

And for the first time, she ungloved her other hand.

The leather fell wetly to the floor. Her bare palm — white, slender, trembling just slightly from the temperature or from something deeper — reached out and closed around him.

Skin to skin.

No barrier.

He was not yet hard. But he thickened under her grip like earth stirred by rain. Her thumb stroked across the head — once — and her fingers pressed inward, testing him not as an object, but as a vessel.

He did not speak.

But his whole body tilted forward, barely perceptible, as though he would have fallen into her if she had let him.

She did not.

Instead, she looked toward the steam-veiled mirror behind them and saw herself reflected — hair damp, eyes sharp, arm extended like a rod of verdict.

A woman not of fantasy, not of lust, but of judgment.

And she said, aloud:

«Now… you are ready to be bathed.»

The sound of her voice — calm, precise, unhurried — cut through the mist like the draw of a blade from its sheath. At once, the twelve forms straightened. The bare wet floor, slick beneath their calloused soles, became the stage of a rite not yet complete.

She did not move toward them. She waited.

And one by one, they approached.

They did not speak. Warriors do not speak before the blessing.

The first stepped forward — massive, thick-necked, his breath ragged from anticipation. She gestured, and he turned. Water traced his spine like melted metal, pooling along the ridges of his hips. She drew nearer.

Her gloved hands — she had decided it would be easier to wash them this way, and so she had drawn the gloves back on, their leather already softened by earlier heat — moved over his back, then lower. Not in haste. With the solemn pace of someone cleansing a relic, not a man.

The soap she drew from the basin foamed richly in her palm. She pressed it against his skin, and the bubbles burst slowly, surrendering to heat. Across his flanks. Down the cleft where tension gathered. Along the thighs where strength lay dormant like a lion in sleep.

When she reached forward — between his legs — he inhaled. His chest swelled; his hands curled at his sides.

But her touch was not lascivious. It was firm. Unapologetic. Intent.

Her palm circled the base of him — not to coax, but to claim. Her fingers slid upward, spreading lather along the shaft, not lingering, not teasing. Simply asserting: This too is under my hand.

He remained silent.

But she could feel it — the surge of blood, the tightening of breath, the unspeakable confession of flesh rising, unbidden, under judgment.

«Good,» she murmured. «You do not flinch.»

She released him, stepping aside with the same fluid authority. «Next.»

And so they came — each man, each body — with its own burden of tension and its own moment of surrender.

The one with a scar along his ribs — she traced it gently with soap, then washed the ache beneath it.

The tall, flaxen-haired one — his hips twitched beneath her touch, but he held still, jaw clenched, as her hand slid along him once, twice, then drew away.

The red-bearded veteran — already half-aroused before she even reached his loins — she washed without comment, then looked him in the eye.

«You carry memory there,» she said, her glove trailing foam along the root of him. «But memory does not rule you.»

He bowed his head. «No, madame.»

She moved on.

To the quiet Georgian with eyes like coal, who breathed only once when she took his weight into her palm, cleansing it with measured circles, like polishing a blade.

To the boy with trembling knees, whom she steadied with one hand on his hip as she bathed him with the other — not out of pity, but to show him: You can endure this.

And finally, to Mitya.

He did not step forward. He stood, watching, until the others had passed through her hands like offerings laid before fire.

Then, without being summoned, he came.

She turned toward him. And for the first time, her breath shifted.

Not faster. But deeper.

He was not the largest. Not the most muscled. But he was the one she had touched first — before the mirror, before the others. And now, to touch him again was not repetition. It was return.

She lathered her hands anew.

And when she reached him — her gloves slick, her wrists bare — he parted his legs of his own accord.

She did not need to command.

Her hands found him already half-erect, the flesh heavy and responsive, the skin hot against the thin barrier of her glove. She worked the soap along him slowly — not just once, but until the foam turned thin and shivered against his skin.

His head bowed, but his eyes remained on her.

When she looked up — her hand still enclosing the full weight of him — she said only:

«Do not think. Only feel.»

And then she let him go.

Water rinsed the foam away. But not the fire.

She turned to the group again.

Twelve men, silent and shining, cleansed but unquiet.

Her voice did not tremble.

«Now,» she said, «you are mine.»

They stood before her once more — twelve bodies sculpted from sweat, stone, and sun, freshly bathed, but still burning with something that no water could extinguish. The steam curled around their ankles like obedient mist, and overhead the lantern-light flickered as though in deference to the gravity of the moment.

She moved with the poise of a woman born to ceremony. Not slow — no, there was nothing languid in her gait — but with the measure of one whose very tread carried purpose. Someone had placed a small wooden stool behind her, low and plain, the sort of seat one might find in a monastery or stable. She did not look at it as she sat; the gesture was too natural for affectation. Her back straight, her chin level — and now, seated, her eyes aligned perfectly with the plane of their hips.

Her voice, when it came, was low. Steady.

«Step forward, one at a time.»

And so began a second anointment.

The first was the Georgian — broad and quiet, with a torso like a fortress wall. As he approached, she took a small copper ewer from a basin beside her and poured water over his loins. Not briskly — as one would wash dirt — but in slow, deliberate spirals, watching how the rivulets clung, how the flesh beneath awakened again to contact.

She did not speak. Her silence was heavier than command.

With gloved hands — donned once more not from modesty but from function, as if she were handling sacred instruments — she began to cleanse him anew. Her fingers did not glide indiscriminately; they explored. Testing, acknowledging. Not arousal, but audit.

He did not flinch. But the tendons in his thighs stood out like ropes, and his breath, though deep, was tight in his chest.

She moved to the next.