PART ONE: THE HANDOVER

The message arrives at 11:42 on a Tuesday, and it is four words long.

**Viktor:**Are these your wife?

You're in bed. Elen is asleep beside you with her back to you, chin-length hair fanned across the pillow, dark red going almost black in the low light, one small pale shoulder out of the covers. You've been awake for an hour doing nothing. You open the message and there is a link and then, under the link, a screenshot of a comment thread, and you feel your whole stomach drop through the mattress.

The link goes to a post from fourteen months ago. You remember posting it. You remember it because it took forty seconds and you were drunk.

r/wifeshare — "she has no idea i posted this"

Three photos. The first is the bathroom mirror one: Elen bent over the sink with her thong pulled to the side, no face, just the long pale line of her back and the small high curve of her ass and the mole on her left hip. The second is the same night, later, and she's turned around and grinning and you can see the ring. The third is the good one, the one you actually chose — her on her back on the hotel bed in Lisbon with her arms above her head and her tits small and pale and lovely and her face fully in frame, eyes half-shut, mouth open, and you can see the freckles across her collarbones and the ring on the hand above her head.

Four hundred and twelve upvotes. Ninety-one comments.

You posted it and forgot about it. You never told her. Well — you told her you posted a photo. You told her it was "the one in the bathroom," you told her it was "a little subreddit, nothing, like twelve people saw it." She said oh cute and went back to her phone and that was that, fourteen months ago, and you have been carrying that small lie around ever since like a coin in your pocket.

The comments are what Viktor screenshotted.

God the freckles

those are perfect little tits, barely a handful, love them

ring on, she's married, that makes it better

the mole on her hip is doing something to me

OP you are a lucky lucky man and you should be showing her off more

somebody should tell her

somebody should tell her what we've all been doing to her for a year

You stare at the ceiling for a long time. Then you type back.

**You:**yes. how did you find it

The reply takes four minutes. He is not in a hurry. He is never in a hurry, you will learn.

**Viktor:**The ring. Marquise setting with the baguette shoulders, unusual. I have a good memory for bodies. I run a bathhouse on Sokolská. Come by. Bring nothing.

───

He is not what you expected. He's sixty or so, heavy through the shoulders, in a soft grey shirt with the sleeves rolled and forearms like a butcher's, and he sits you in a small office that smells of eucalyptus and cedar and he pours you a glass of something clear and homemade that takes the top of your head off.

He explains it the way a man explains a job he's done ten thousand times.

He runs the bathhouse. Four floors of it: steam, plunge, a legitimate massage floor with legitimate girls. And on the third floor, four treatment rooms, and each of those rooms has one wall that is not a wall.

Behind each wall is a long dark gallery with a chair in it.

"They're mirrors," he says. "From her side. She sees herself. That's all she sees. We sell the seats. Twelve seats, and the lights on our side stay down, so from in there you're just a row of shapes." He drinks. "Four hundred a seat on a good night. Eleven men in that gallery on Friday, and every one of them will have paid, and every one of them will know that the woman on the table is somebody's wife."

You ask the obvious question.

"No," he says. "The girls don't know either. Not until the end, most of them. Some of them never work it out. You'd be amazed what a woman will accept if nobody tells her anything."

Then he tells you the terms, and the terms are almost insulting in how small they are.

"Friday. Nine o'clock. You bring her, you tell her it's an anniversary massage, you tell her nothing else. There's a fee, four hundred — waived, don't worry about it." A small movement of his hand, like waving away a fly. "And you sit in the chair."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

You should say yes. You're going to say yes. And then he takes his phone out and sets it face-up on the desk between you and opens the folder and says, "One more thing, though," and you understand, suddenly, that the four hundred was never the point.

The folder has eleven photographs in it.

You posted three.

He scrolls slowly. Four, five, six — the Lisbon set, all the ones you cropped and never posted, the ones where her mouth is open and the ones where it isn't. Seven is the one from the lake. Eight is the one from her birthday, the one with the cake and the stockings and the hand down the front of her underwear. Nine. Ten.

Eleven is the fourth one.

The one you took after, when you thought she was asleep. On your side of the bed, the sheet kicked down, one leg bent up and open and slack, her arm across her eyes, her stomach still wet and drying in the low light, mouth soft and stupid and satisfied. It is, by a distance, the most private photograph of your wife in existence.

"I never posted that one," you say.

"No," Viktor agrees. "You posted the set. The set had a folder. The folder had a link." He smiles without any particular warmth. "You gave four hundred men your wife and then you gave them a key."

He lets that sit.

"So. Friday. And if you don't bring her, I send her the folder. From a stranger. With the comments attached." He turns the phone around so the comments are facing you again, and then he finds a particular one, a long one, and turns it so you can read it properly:

the one on her back, jesus. somebody should get her in a room and find out what she's actually for

"She thinks twelve people saw one photo in a bathroom," Viktor says. "You want her to find out from me, or from you?"

───

You have nine days. You use them badly.

You tell her on day three, in the kitchen, while she's making coffee, in the most casual voice you own. You tell her you booked a massage for the two of you. Anniversary thing. Fancy place, steam rooms, the works. You tell her the place is on Sokolská and she says oh, the bathhouse, I've walked past it, and you say yes, that one.

She says, "Is this one of your things?"

You say, "It's a massage."

She says, "Mm," in a way that means it's one of your things, and goes to work.

On day six you tell her what to wear, and this is the part you get right, this is the part you'll think about later. You tell her: they give you a robe, but wear something nice underneath, they take a photo for their records. Which is true, technically, in the sense that all true things are technically true.

She goes upstairs and comes back down forty minutes later with the robe open over it, showing you, doing a turn in the kitchen doorway.

Black lace. A bra with small cups and a soft strap of lace over the top, and the cups don't quite fill — they sit a little empty at the very top where her tits are small and high and finish earlier than the lace expects, and she has to tug the band down and the lace still gapes, and she says "I know, I know," before you say anything, and pulls the robe closed. A matching thong. A garter belt, real, satin, with four straps and the clasps done up neat. Black stockings with a seam up the back.

She has shaved her legs for this. She has shaved carefully. She has trimmed into something deliberate and small, you'll find out later, and the hair on her head is chin-length and dark red with a slight curl through the ends and blunt little bangs straight across her forehead, and she has done her mascara properly, two coats, and her lipstick is a deep red that is nearly the same colour as her hair, and she has done all of this, all of it, because she thinks it's for you.

She thinks it's for you.

───

The bathhouse at nine at night is steam and yellow light and a smell of cedar and chlorine and something herbal. It is busier than you expected. Men in robes on the stairs. A woman at the counter, forty, black hair pinned up, who looks at Elen and then looks at you and then looks at Elen again, and something small and satisfied moves across her face.

"Katya," she says, offering a hand to Elen. "You're the nine o'clock. Good, good. Come."

She gives Elen a robe and takes her up two flights, and you follow, and on the third floor the corridor is warm and low-lit and there are four doors and she opens the second and stands back.

The room is bright. Bright like a clinic, four downlights, white tile halfway up, a table in the middle with a folded towel on it and a dish of oil and a small brass bowl, and on the far side, the whole wall, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, a mirror.

Elen stops in the doorway and looks at herself in it.

She looks good. She knows she looks good. She puts her bag down on the little bench and steps in and adjusts her bangs in the mirror, tucks a curl behind her ear, tilts her chin, checks her lipstick, pulls the robe closed at the throat. Then she turns and gives you a look, half smiling, half suspicious, the is this one of your things look, and the mirror is right behind her and she has no idea that she is standing in front of eleven men.

Katya says, "Robes off, please, on the hook. Face down on the table. Your husband can stay for the first part."

And she does.

She unhooks the robe and lets it fall and hangs it up and then she is standing there in black lace and a garter belt in a bright white room, and the little cups are gapping at the top, and she climbs onto the table and lies down on her front and folds her arms under her chin and puts her cheek on them and closes her eyes.

Katya oils her hands.

And then, for twenty-five minutes, nothing happens.

This is what you'll remember. This is the part that makes the rest of it possible. Katya is good, Katya is genuinely, professionally good, and she works Elen from the neck down with heavy slow strokes, and she talks to her about nothing — about the weather, about a restaurant, about Katya's sister who is doing a course in Vienna — and Elen goes slack and boneless under it, and after ten minutes she's murmuring, and after fifteen she's basically asleep, and after twenty she's making small contented noises into her folded arms, and every muscle in her body has agreed that it is safe in this room.

Katya does her shoulders. Her back. The long stroke down either side of the spine, thumbs in. The hips, the top of the ass over the lace. Down the outside of each thigh, then the inside, unhurried, all the way to the knee, and back up.

She does Elen's arms, one at a time, working down to the fingertips.

Then she steps back and wipes her hands and says, in a normal voice, "Right. Someone else will finish you."

Elen says, "Mm," without opening her eyes.

Katya opens the door and two men come in.

───

You get about ninety seconds with them.

The first is mid-thirties, shaved head, short, built like a wrestler gone slightly soft, in a black t-shirt and shorts. He looks at the table with the expression of a man checking a delivery. The second is older, forties, enormous — not fat, just big, with forearms like Viktor's and a chest that makes the t-shirt look borrowed, and hands that end in fingers like cigars.

The first one says, "Elen."

"Elen," she says, half into her arms, correcting the vowel, because everyone says it wrong, because it's E-len and not Ellen.

"Elen," he says again, getting it right, and she lifts her head a little and looks at him, pleased, and then he takes a step and picks up the oil and pours a line of it down her spine, right over the garter belt and the lace and the small of her back, and she goes oh and puts her head back down.

You feel a tap on your shoulder.

Katya, at the door, jerking her head.

"Where are we going," you say.

"Out. You're watching from the other side." And then, before you can argue, "You signed the form. It's on the form."

You look back at Elen. She's face down with a stranger's hands on her and her eyes shut, and she has no idea, and you leave her there.

───

The gallery is behind the second door down the corridor and it is dark and it is longer than you expected.

It's a corridor, basically, twelve feet of it, black walls, black carpet, one long bench along the back and then, at the centre, one chair. Not a bench. A chair, an armchair, worn black leather, arms scuffed pale at the ends, positioned dead centre and about three feet from the glass, and it is angled so that from it you are looking through the wall of Elen's room, straight at the massage table, at the level of the table.

The glass from this side is not a mirror. It is a window. You can see everything.

Eleven men are already in there, in the dark, on the bench, in robes or in shorts or in jeans, sitting along the wall in a loose row, and they are not doing anything yet, they are just sitting and looking and waiting, and there is a low murmur and someone laughs quietly and someone says she's tiny and someone else says shut up, it's starting.

A man at the back, near the door, says, "You're the husband. Sit in the chair."

You sit in the chair.

The leather is faintly damp.

And there she is.

Three feet away, on the other side of three inches of glass, your wife is lying face down on a massage table with a garter belt on and a stranger's hands on her spine, and she is still half asleep, and she is looking directly at the mirror, which means she is looking directly at you, and she cannot see you.

The man at the back, behind you, in the dark, says it in a flat, bored, practiced voice, the voice of a man who has said it a thousand times.

"Rules. You don't touch. You don't speak — she can't hear you anyway, but you don't. You don't leave. If you come, you come on the glass." A pause. "That's the chair. There's a towel under it if you want one. There's a box of them."

You don't move.

On the table, Elen lifts her head, slowly, lazily, because the hands have stopped.

Anton has stepped away from her. He's standing at the end of the table with the oil bottle in one hand, and he's looking down at her, and he's waiting, and he lets her feel the pause for a good five seconds.

Then he says, "Wrists."

She puts her hands out in front of her, palms up, obedient, easy, thinking nothing.

He takes one wrist, and then the other, and lifts them up, up, and over her head, up off the table, and she starts to say something, and then there's a sound.

A metal sound. Two sounds. Two clicks.

She tries to bring her hands back down and they come about eight inches and stop.

Elen's head comes up off her arms.

"Uh," she says. "Hello?"

Above her, in the ceiling, you can see it now — you couldn't from inside the room, because it's flush and white — a plate, and a harness, and two short chains hanging from it, and her wrists in cuffs at the end of them.

She turns her head and looks at herself in the mirror, three feet from your face.

She tugs. The chains don't give.

"Hello?" she says again, louder.

She is smiling. She's still smiling.

For about four more seconds.

Then Marek, who has said nothing and has not yet been looked at, steps up behind the table and puts both his enormous hands flat on her ass and pulls her thong down to her knees in one movement, and behind you, in the dark, eleven men lean forward at the same time.

END OF PART ONE.