— No, Dad, wait.
— What do you mean, no?
— I don’t want quick revenge, not instant gratification. — Snezhana sat down opposite Ulyana, who was already typing something, and her voice was calm. — I want total destruction. Let them think they’re winning, let them relax and drop their guard. And then I’ll pull the rug out from under their feet with such force that they’ll never get up again.
Ulyana looked up from her laptop and, for the first time that evening, smiled the smile of a predator that has scented its prey.
— The apartment is legally yours, we know that, the documents are ironclad, — she began, bending her fingers. — But they’re confident they have rights because the money went through his account. We’ll use that. We’ll slip him a prenuptial agreement disguised as an insurance claim.
— How exactly?
— We’ll say the house has historical value, Belgian construction from the beginning of the century, and requires a ‘clean title’ to reduce insurance risks. In the document, we’ll insert a clause waiving all spousal rights to the property in exchange for a lower insurance premium. A saving of 12,000 hryvnias a month for a greedy man is an irresistible bait. He’ll sign without reading, I’ll bet my head on it.
— And the finances? — her father asked, having calmed down and joined the planning.
— We’ll leave the joint account with the wedding money as bait, let them pull from it and feel like winners. But, Fedor Grigoryevich, if he’s dishonest with his wife, he’s dishonest at work too. Have your detective check his sales at the car dealership, his expenses, his connections with suppliers.
— And the baby? — Snezhana asked quietly. — I need proof of his connection with Angelina.
— DNA tests are long and complicated, — Ulyana shook her head. — We need a confession. A public one, with witnesses, preferably on camera.
Snezhana stood up and went to the window, where the sky over the sea was lightening, painting the water in the pink and gold tones of a new day.
— I’m going back to him.
— Snezha, don’t. — Her father stepped toward her, and there was a plea in his voice. — We’ll send the documents through a lawyer, you can get a divorce in absentia, you don’t have to see that bastard.
— He thinks I’m stupid and weak, bland as kefir. — She turned to her father, and there was something new in her eyes, something steely. — I’ll go back and play the idiot he thinks I am. I’ll gather enough evidence, not just for the divorce court. For prison.
At dawn, she returned to the hotel, sneaking down the hallway, and lay down next to Vadim, who hadn’t woken up all night, hadn’t noticed her absence, hadn’t worried. When he opened his eyes and sleepily asked where she had been, Snezhana smiled the softest, most loving of her smiles.
— Downstairs, darling. Planning our life.
The month that followed became an exercise in patience and acting for Snezhana, skills she never knew she possessed. She ordered expensive breakfasts to the room without consultation, for 7,000 hryvnias, including oysters and champagne that no one had asked for. She booked them for spa treatments, 15,000—a non-refundable amount. She “accidentally” dropped Vadim’s phone into an ice bucket, after disabling the biometrics to access his messages.
She cooked dinners, adding salt instead of sugar to pastries and over-salting meat until it was inedible. She washed Vadim’s cashmere sweaters in hot water, shrinking them to a child’s size. She forgot to pay the internet bill for three days, disrupting his work calls.
When they moved into the apartment on Frantsuzkyi Boulevard, she mistakenly washed Larisa Arkadyevna’s mink coat with bleach, turning it into a pathetic rag.
— Are you completely brainless?! — the mother-in-law screamed, shaking the ruined fur, from which water was dripping. — 70,000! 70,000 hryvnias!
— I just wanted to help… — Snezhana sobbed in a fake voice, the tears coming more easily each time. — I don’t know about expensive things, I’m just a simple girl, how was I supposed to know…
The more she made mistakes, the more confident they became in their superiority, in their rightness, in the inevitability of their victory, and the more careless they became with their words and actions. An irritated Vadim increasingly escaped to Angelina, not even bothering with plausible excuses, and the GPS tracker installed by her father’s detective on his car recorded every visit, every overnight stay, every minute spent at a different address.
The same detective discovered something much more interesting than infidelity. Vadim was involved in a kickback scheme with auto parts suppliers for the holding, inflating purchase prices and receiving the difference in cash, which was then transferred in small sums to his mother’s account. The theft amounted to over one and a half million hryvnias in the last six months, and all correspondence with instructions on how to structure the transfers to avoid tax authorities’ attention was saved on the company’s servers.
Snezhana brought Vadim the documents waiving his rights to the apartment three weeks after the incident with the coat, choosing a moment when he was particularly annoyed by another of her blunders and wanted to get the conversation over with quickly…
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