Red Sparrow

“It just seems that way,” she would reply, never explaining that the bloom of passion-purple around the man flared when the woman came around the corner. Mikhail laughed and looked at her in amazement when it turned out to be right.

As Dominika focused on these practice sessions, her refined intuition told her she was having an effect on Mikhail. Even though he initially featured himself as a stern instructor from Directorate T, she would catch him looking at her hair or stealing darting glimpses at her body. She mentally counted the times he contrived to bump into her, or touch her on the shoulder, or put his hand on the small of her back when going through a door. He radiated desire, a dark crimson fog lingered around his head and shoulders. She knew how he liked his tea, when he needed his glasses to read a menu, the rate of his heartbeat when pushed close against her in the Metro. She could see Mikhail stealing looks at her unpolished nails, or watching her dangle a shoe off her foot at the café table.

It was a monstrous risk to sleep with him. He was an instructor, and a psychologist to boot, charged with evaluating her personality and suitability for operations. Yet she knew he would say nothing, she knew she had an indefinable hold over him, and making love, a grave dereliction during training, was an edgy thrill, more than physical pleasure.

Of which there was a considerable amount. An afternoon after a street exercise, they found themselves in the apartment Mikhail shared with his parents and brother, all at work or away from the house. The coverlet from his bed was on the floor and her thighs trembled and her shoulders shook and her hair framed her face as she straddled him, pulses running up her spine and down to her toes, especially those of her once-broken foot. She knew what she wanted, her secret self had been neglected of late, what with school and training and barracks. She trapped him—who was impaled upon whom?—and rocked strongly downward, giving herself what she needed, while she was still fresh. There would be time for softness and cooing and sighing later. Right now her eyes were half-closed, and she concentrated on coaxing the building pressure, stronger, stronger—povorachivaisya! come on!—into the sudden teetering flush that made her double over, too sensitive to continue, too sweet to stop. Her vision cleared and she brushed the hair off her face, aftershocks cramping her thighs and toes. Mikhail lay wide-eyed and silent beneath her, a bystander unsure of what he had just witnessed.

Afterward, he kept taking sidelong glances at her while he made a pot of tea. Wrapped in a sweater and sitting at the kitchen table, Dominika guilelessly looked at him, and the psychologist in Mikhail simultaneously knew the sex had had nothing to do with him. He likewise knew he would say nothing about it, ever. And that they would never do it again. In a way, Mikhail was relieved.

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The operations course was coming to an end, the last leg of the tripod of training nearly complete. The exhausted pensioners who trained Dominika had long ago nicknamed her mushka, beauty spot, also the colloquialism for the front sight of a gun, the sight that picks up the target first. Completing their evaluations, they positively assessed her industrious spirit, they remarked on her intellect and wit and on her sometimes inexplicable intuitions on the street. Her loyalty and dedication to the Rodina were unquestioned. One or two pensioners noted that she was impatient. She could be argumentative, she needed to develop more flexibility in recruitment approaches. One old-timer alone wrote that despite her superior performance he believed she lacked true patriotic zeal. Her natural independence eventually would unseat her devotion. It was a feeling, an impression; he could not cite any examples. The comment was discarded as the addled thought of an old fool. In any case, Dominika was never shown any of the evaluations.

All that remained was a final practical exam on the street, using techniques, honing her tradecraft. A final exercise, a written examination, an exit interview. She was almost through. Before any of that happened, however, and to the consternation of her instructors, Dominika disappeared from the course: summoned immediately to the Center, “required for special duty,” was all they said.

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