Four in the morning. The brokerage app made me sick. The red numbers stubbornly slid down, like beads of pus from an unhealing wound. I closed it and opened Instagram. The first photo was of Karina. She was sitting on the windowsill in my shabby room, the dank courtyard, a well of damp brick, behind her. But she looked like an alien who had wandered into a dump. Dark hair pulled back into a careless bun, eyes that knew the value of their beauty. Cunning, damn it. Followers in the comments called her "angel" and "goddess." They didn't see the way she looked at me when she wanted to. VKontakte was buzzing with memes about deadlines and perpetual poverty. I scrolled through them like shuffling my bare feet across a dirty floor. Then I switched to Telegram. Karina shared a sticker—a lewd anime hentai where the character's eyes were the size of her own breasts. And the caption: "Miss your boobs?" The air in the room was stale, smelling of dust, cold tea, and my unwashed body. I replied, "Yes. And not just them." She sent a voicemail. A whisper laced with laughter: "Your dick sounds so funny when you're mad about your trades. It's like he's lost everything too. Want me to come over and entertain him?" This duality of hers drove me crazy. By day, she was unapproachable, cold-eyed, stern, from a family that spoke a beautiful, guttural language and frowned on people like me. But at night, her words, her desires, were dirtier than the entrance to our five-story building. She loved it when I told her what I was going to do to her. She loved dirty words: cunt, sperm, balls. She said she felt like a depraved hentai heroine, possessed by monsters. I got out of bed, my bones creaking. I went to the computer. The graphs were in the red again. Everything I'd toiled through in strength of materials and theoretical mechanics classes, everything I'd crammed at night to escape this mess—it was all turning to dust. And Karina was my only tangible asset. A precious asset. She arrived without knocking. She was wearing a cloak and a hood, like a spy. When she took it off, she was wearing only a short black dress. A predator's smile. "So, Pasha, did you screw it all up again?" she asked, coming closer. She smelled of expensive perfume and the cold street. Her hands slid down and found their target. “Not such a loser,” she whispered. Then there she was. Naked on my musty-smelling sheets. Her body was the perfect contrast to the squalid surroundings. I kissed her breasts, nibbled on her firm nipples, and she made soft purring sounds and looked down at me like she was her pet. "Tell me," she demanded. "Tell me dirty words." And I spoke. Whispering into her earlobe, while my fingers explored her wet cunt. I spoke of how I wanted her, how her body drove me crazy, how I wanted her cum to flow down her legs. She clenched and moaned, and in her moans there was not just passion, but victory. Victory over my mediocrity, over my insignificance. At the end, when I was already on the edge, she suddenly turned over, taking a pose. "Cum all over me," she ordered. "I want to feel everything." And I came. Hot sperm streaked down her back, drops congealing on her perfect skin. She lay there, breathing heavily, then stood up and, without looking at me, went to the shower. It was my brother's apartment. He'd gone off to Poland to earn money, leaving me the keys and an empty fridge. He was supposed to be back in a couple of months, but for now, this was the only place I could fuck Karina without the walls hearing. Not that anyone in the dorm would be bothered by it, but here there was at least some hint of privacy. Right now, I wasn't thinking about Karina. I was staring at the candlesticks on the chart, forming a clear bearish flag that I'd driven long. My stop-losses, lined up like strings of pearls, were swept away by a single market move. Scalping on volatility had become a hellish fire, devouring my deposit. A margin call hung in the air like the smell of burning. I closed all my positions, locking in my losses. All that remained was dust. Just dust from what I once called money. Okay. I slowly packed my things. Charged my laptop, swept scattered T-shirts and dried mouse paste into my backpack. Headed to my university dorm. Back to that concrete box that smelled of fried potatoes and despair. And then the thoughts overtook me. Karina. She was gorgeous, and everyone knew it. And she knew it better than anyone. The moment she entered the classroom, the air became thick, electric. The men followed her with glances that revealed not just admiration, but a kind of awe. And she hovered above it all, cold and unapproachable. To everyone. Except me. But behind this gorgeous picture lurked several problems. No, not problems. Peculiarities. As our math teacher used to say, "special points." The first was her fetish. And no, it wasn't stockings or lace. She was infatuated with smells. Of a man's body. Sweat, skin, life. She really loved the smell of my feet after a whole day in sneakers. It was her quirk, her secret secret. She dreamed of me buying combat boots and wearing them for a week, and then letting her bury her face in them, inhaling that concentrated, thick scent of fatigue and earth. I... even liked this fetish. It had some kind of animal sincerity, or something. There was no lie in it, unlike everything else. The second peculiarity was her father. I'd never met him, but I knew everything about him. A ruthless despot, a man with a stone face and iron principles. He wasn't just looking for a husband for Karina. He was looking for someone who would "steal" her. He would build her a gilded cage, befitting their status, their rules, their faith, which was unspoken in their home but which hung in every glance, in every hint. I didn't fit into this picture. I was a dirty, loser student from the dorm. A stain on the flawless façade of their lives. And the third. The most dangerous, perhaps. She was a gambling addict. She didn't just love dirty talk or thrills. No. She needed risk, playing on the edge. She would send me explicit photos of herself sitting at the same table with my father. She would start caressing me in a taxi while the driver looked at us in the mirror. This double life, this constant deception, turned her on. She played with fire, and I thought one day she'd decide to set everything on fire. And I'd be lucky if I burned first. I slung my backpack over my shoulder. I slammed the door to Brother's apartment. Ahead lay the dorm, debts, and Karina. Beautiful, cunning, smelling of expensive perfume and craving the scent of my sweaty feet. And now we get to the beginning of my real problems with Karina. As I already said, she's a gambling addict. And her passion wasn't limited to me or the obscene stickers on Telegram. Her next game was betting. On everything: tennis, eSports, political events. She lost a couple of tidy sums, which I was afraid to even think about. I saw her glued to the screen with the abacus, her fingers trembling, trying to win back. But I didn't interfere. Not my problem. Her money, her demons. I watched this circus from the front row. There she is with her father. She sits with her eyes downcast, wearing a modest hijab. She speaks in a quiet, almost angelic voice, quoting verses from Scripture that she studied especially for this purpose. He looks at her with pride, seeing the perfect daughter. And under that fabric, imagine? Only a lace thong that dug into her skin, and a body that still bears the marks of my fingers. But what does a casting mean to you, reader? You probably think of the spotlight, meteoric careers, and glossy magazine covers. That's one type. There are others. Casting at a modeling agency, where girls are examined like cattle from head to toe, groped, and forced to turn around. Casting for a juice commercial, where you have to feign bottomless happiness ten times over after sipping the juice from the carton. And there are even worse castings. In closed chats, under the guise of "shooting for an art project." They post photos in underwear, sometimes even naked. Payment is in cash, and questions are minimal. Karina, with her looks, went through all the rounds of these castings at the same time. The rain pounded the window, steadily and monotonously, as if beating out the rhythm of my worthless life. I stood up. Thank goodness I had my second period today—I could recover a bit after the night. I looked in the mirror. A chubby guy with glasses. The hair on top of his head was already thinning, betraying the skin beneath. Thank goodness, Dad, for the genetics. It seems all I got from you was this and a perpetual lack of self-confidence. But the morning, surprisingly, was a lucky one. Or rather, it was like this: the night had been hellish, and the morning brought relief. After a week of nervous trembling, sitting in front of the monitor like a leash, watching every tick, luck finally smiled on me. $2,000 arrived in my account. Clean. I could say I'd recouped the losses that had been piling up for seven long months. Seven months of feeling like a piece of shit, incapable of even this—the mindless clicking of buttons. I stood under the shower, the warm water washing away the sticky sweat of fear. Damn, I did it. I pulled myself back from the bottom. Maybe for a little while. Maybe at the cost of every nerve I had. But now, at this moment, I wasn't a loser, I was almost a winner. Almost. All this fragile positivity was ruined by a single casting. Or rather, the thought of it. Karina's casting. She mentioned it yesterday casually, as if we were talking about a shopping trip. "I'm going to a casting tomorrow. For a brand. Nothing special." But for Karina, "nothing special" existed. Her "castings" were always playing with fire. I imagined the scene. Her, so proud and predatory, in a white-walled studio. Some sly guy in a trendy sweatshirt, his gaze tracing her body appraisingly. Asking her to turn around, to bend over. "Can you take off your top? It's for art." And Karina, with her eternal thirst for risk and approval, with her certainty that she'll outsmart everyone... she'll do it. For the "project." For the thrill. So that later, in the evening, with shining eyes, she can tell me how everyone was crazy about her. I imagined her photos, her body, circulating through the chat rooms of some horny producers. How they would discuss her "status," giggle, and make plans. My Karina. Transformed into a commodity. An object. The class dragged on tediously. The professor droned on about kinematics, but I couldn't hear a word. The exchange I was trading on had crashed due to technical issues. No charts, no candlesticks, nothing but this vacuum of silence in my head that needed to be filled with something. I took up my favorite pastime – searching for porn. But this time, everything was different. I was looking for Karina. Stupid? Yeah, sure, it's fucked up. There are hundreds of these fly-by-night companies in the city, dozens of channels with "exclusive content." Try finding them. But my gut instinct, pierced by paranoia and knowledge of her nature, whispered one thing: Karina is being fucked right now. She doesn't text, doesn't call. Silence. The idea that her "casting" was a porn casting didn't just pop into my head. It was whispered to me by her friends, Alina and Sveta. They were sitting in the row in front, and snatches of their words reached me like shrapnel from an exploding bomb. I pretended to be asleep, my nose buried in my textbook, and listened. I listened to every whisper, every stifled chuckle. "...but seriously, she said they pay in cash there. About fifty thousand for a shoot, if you're lucky," Alina hissed, her voice wet and excited. "Fifty? What's that for? A striptease?" Svetka snorted, but there was envy in her tone. "No fucking way! This isn't for a magazine. They warned me right away—it's your own lingerie, lacy, see-through. And... they watch how you move. How your breasts jiggle. They might ask you to run your hand over yourself... you know, like you're enjoying yourself." I felt my stomach twist into a cold lump. “Fuck, what if… next?” Svetka no longer concealed her curiosity. "Next comes the second round. This time with a partner. Some guy, pumped up. With a dick, fucking like a horse's, I'm not kidding. And you have to... well... work with him. First with your hands. Then with your mouth. And they watch, filming you doing it. Watching your drool, watching your eyes glaze over." I almost flinched. My fingers dug into the skin under the table. "And they fuck? Right there?" Svetka's voice wavered. "No, damn, in church! Of course they're fucking! That's the main shoot! On a dick, like on a stick, in front of the camera. And they have to cum on your face, or your breasts, or your mouth. Absolutely. So that everyone can see the sperm flowing out. This is porn, what did you expect?" The word "porn" sounded like a death sentence. Not an "art project," not a "daring photo shoot." Porn. Naked, concrete, without metaphors. "And Karina agreed to this?" Svetka squeezed out. Alina chuckled condescendingly. "She was the one who was eager to get in. She says it's a thrill to have other men watching you while you do the most vulgar things. And then they even pay for it. She..." And then Alina turned around. Her gaze slid over me, sitting with my eyes closed. She immediately turned away and whispered even more quietly, but I still heard: "...she said she wouldn't tell her Pashka anything. Let him think she went to a regular casting. And as for herself... while we're sitting here, she's probably already getting double-fucked. Close-up. On camera." I couldn't listen to it anymore. I jumped up, grabbed my backpack, and, without looking at anyone, wandered towards the exit. Just as I was imagining this vile image, my phone shuddered in my pocket. The vibration echoed through my bones. I pulled it out, expecting another spam message, but it was her. Karina. Literally at that very second, as if she had eavesdropped on my inner hell. The message was serene. An "online" status circle was next to her profile picture, where she smiled, squinting against the sun. "Pash, hi, just woke up, sorry I passed out yesterday, my phone died," the text read. And then, finishing off the last of my paranoia: "Missed you. See you tonight?" That's it. The damned lock in my head clicked, and the adrenaline slowly began to drain, leaving behind emptiness and shame. I felt like a complete idiot. I'd let those bitches and my imagination play the fool. Karina was home. She was just sleeping. We met in the evening. It was an ordinary, even boring evening. We strolled through a chilly park, drank coffee from a vending machine, and she laughed, squeezing my hand. She was real. That same Karina—sly, vulgar, but mine. And yet, a worm of doubt gnawed at her from within. As we sat on the cold bench, and she finished her croissant, I, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible, asked: - So, how was that casting? I watched her closely. Her eyes, her lips, the slightest movement of her eyebrows. She froze for a second, the crumb frozen on her lower lip. It seemed to me—no, I imagined it—that she was taken aback. But no. She simply took out her phone. "Oh, this?" she said, leafing through the gallery. "Nothing special. Boring." She showed me a photo. A studio with white walls. Several girls in identical gray robes sat on stools. No hint of intimacy. No "partners with dicks like horses." Just an art class. "It's for the local art school," Karina explained, shrugging. "Models for drawing. Nudes. But it was mostly girls. There were maybe five men, and even those… not so much." She pursed her lips, feigning mild disdain. And we discussed it. Right at the beginning of our relationship. She wanted to model for artists. I didn't mind. It had its own charm—her body like a piece of high art. It was flattering. It felt safe. "Did everything go okay?" I asked, handing her the phone back. "Yeah," she put the phone in her pocket and hugged my arm, pressing her cheek to my shoulder. "Boring. It's much more interesting with you." And I calmed down. The worm fell asleep. I believed her. I believed these photos, her calm tone, her embrace. I was a complete fool. Because I didn't ask the most important question: why were her friends, Alina and Svetka, discussing the porn casting with such gusto? Where did they get such precise, disgusting details? And why did Karina, cunning as a fox, show me only one, the most innocent photo from the entire series? That evening we fucked. It was even kind of rough, kind of vicious. I penetrated her with a kind of fury, trying to erase those vile whispers of her friends from my memory, and she dug her nails into my back, as if challenging me. But the worst part came at the end. When I couldn't take it anymore, she, sensing it, suddenly wrapped her legs around me and pressed me hard, not letting me pull out. "Cum inside me," she whispered with wet, hot breath in his ear. It wasn't a request, but a command. And I came. The sensation was both disgusting and blissful—a dull thud, and my sperm bursts straight into her, deep, into her womb. She did that sometimes. She said it was a "symbol," that this was how she felt, that I was completely hers. In those moments, I felt not power, but a strange, sinister dependence. She was marking me. Anchoring me. But even this brutal act didn't erase the conversation with my friends. That morning, I got up early while she was sleeping, her black hair scattered across the pillow. Quietly, like a thief, I took her phone. I knew the password—the birthday of her younger brother, whom she cared for so tenderly. She had no idea. My heart was pounding in my throat as I scrolled through the gallery. I was looking for anything that would confirm or dispel my suspicions. And then I found it. A photo taken that evening, on the very day of the "casting." A selfie. She didn't show it. And it became truly scary. Karina took a close-up photo of herself, somewhere on an empty street, perhaps in an underpass—the peeling tiled walls were visible behind her. But it wasn't the background. It was her. Her face. It was bare of makeup, haggard, with an unnatural flush on her cheekbones, as if from prolonged strain. Her eyes shone unnaturally, her pupils too wide, as if she'd just experienced a terrible fright or... ecstasy. Her gaze was absent, glassy, staring somewhere inward. But the most repulsive thing was her hair. Her usually perfect, silky hair was parted to one side, and a few strands at her temple and forehead… they were slightly matted. Not from sweat. But from something whitish and sticky that had already dried but left a greasy shine and unnaturally stiff waves. It looked as if some liquid had gotten onto her face and hair, and she'd simply brushed most of it away with her palm, unable or unwilling to rinse it all out. This selfie didn't look like a photo from an art studio. It looked like a shot from behind the scenes of a porn shoot. Like a picture taken by a tired, exhausted girl, documenting her state after being ejaculated on by strangers for hours. It had that same detachment and traces of someone else's semen dried in her hair. I dove headfirst into trading again. Charts, candlesticks, support and resistance levels. It was digital heroin that allowed me to forget about that selfie. I decided to wait it out. Two weeks. Just observe. But the first thing I did was hire a hacker. Ha-ha. Spy movies are so full of crap, really. You don't think spying is just for governments, do you? No. It's much simpler, dirtier, and cheaper. I found someone who works as a system administrator at a major mobile phone company. For a modest cash fee, he kindly sent me the signal logs from Karina's phone. Where and when her device goes. These days, a phone with a SIM card is a person. It's the same thing. And you know what's most perverse? I started to like it. I wasn't possessive in this relationship. Moreover, I wasn't a classic cuckold—that's too simple, too primitive. More like something in between. An observer. An accomplice. I liked this dark, vulgar side of her. I liked knowing what I wasn't supposed to know. It had its own twisted thrill. So, over the course of two weeks, she went to several places. The university. The shopping mall. Home. A couple of times to a yoga studio. And to an industrial area. Too often. And here her gift came into play. Her genius. Because Karina, as a girl, was the embodiment of everything I loved. For those two weeks, she behaved exactly as she always did. There was not a hint of tension, not a hint of deception. She was the same cunning, vulgar, bold Karina. She sent me dirty stickers when I was sitting in a boring class. Demanded that I buy those same combat boots. Whispered in my ear how she would be waiting for me in the evening. She was perfect. And it wasn't just her looks, her delusional curves—those breasts of hers that fit perfectly in the palms of her hands, that firm ass and thin waist. It was her gift—her acting, her ability to live in two, three, ten realities at once, without confusing them or giving herself away. She was a genius at deception. And I, sitting in my dorm with her coordinates on the screen, couldn't help but admire it. She was a masterpiece. A dirty, vicious, dangerous masterpiece that belonged to me only in the small role allotted to me. But even geniuses make mistakes. And my sysadmin sent a new message. Yesterday, between university and home, her phone froze for three hours at an address that wasn't listed as bukvoeb.run in any of her usual locations. That same industrial area. An abandoned building that, as I quickly Googled, was bought a few years ago by some LLC with a vague business profile. "Video content and advertising production." Everything should have worked out by now. According to all the canons of shitty dramas and cheap novels, I should have gotten up, found her, grabbed her hand like a whore, and brought her to justice. She, naked and fallen, cries, says she's to blame, and I'm like this – stern, unyielding, "I won't forgive you." But, firstly, she was beautiful. Painfully, tearfully. And I, a chubby, balding student with the soul of a clerk, would hardly ever have another encounter with such a girl. This thought was more humiliating than any of her deceptions. And secondly, life loves to turn everything upside down. Knocking out the last support not when you're ready, but when you think you have everything under control. First of all, my work and the money I spent on the system administrator were useless. I figured out the location, but I didn't have time to do anything. Because the blow came from an unexpected direction. I was sitting in class, staring blankly at the table. The teacher was scribbling something on the board, and all I could see were those same coordinates—an abandoned building, three o'clock. My ears were ringing. And then the phone on the table vibrated. Not a message from Karina. Not even a notification from a trading app. It was a notification from VK. From a fake account, with an anime girl's profile picture. I mechanically poked at the screen. There was no text. Just one line, written in Latin, crooked like a smile: "Enjoying my future wife." Enjoy your future wife. My heart sank into absolute emptiness. No fear, no rage. Just a black, bottomless hole. Below was a video clip. It hadn't even started yet, with a title card. And in that card, Karina was sitting. My Karina. The one with the perfect face and predatory gaze. She sat on the edge of a shabby sofa, in a studio with dirty walls. She was wearing not just revealing, but downright slutty attire – flashy black lingerie, stockings and garters, and sky-high stilettos. That very "art project." But that wasn't all. Her posture, her gaze... It wasn't embarrassed or frightened. It was a challenge. She looked straight into the camera with that familiar, sly, vulgar smirk. As if she were saying, "Well, Pash? Look what a role I played for you." I didn't press play. I didn't need to see what happened next. That opening, that look, that caption were enough to understand. This wasn't just a shoot. It was a message. To me. The world has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. My cock began to harden violently, throbbing in my pants. It became rock-hard, pulsating, as if it was about to explode. I ran out of the classroom, not looking at anyone, and ran into the restroom on the first floor. I clicked the lock on the stall, sat down on the toilet, unzipped my fly, and freed my penis. It was red and tense, with a drop of precum at the tip. With trembling fingers, I opened the video again. I scrolled forward, skipping the scene with the sofa. I stopped at a different timecode. Karina was on her knees. A man stood before her, a large man with a belly and tattoos on his thighs. His cock, thick and sinewy, was deep in her mouth. She was gagging, her eyes watering with tears, saliva and makeup smeared across her chin. The sound was on. A dull, disgusting, wet, squelching sound. "Glop. Glop. Glop." Two other guys stood nearby, one stroking her head, the other filming on his phone. They were talking to the cameraman off-camera, discussing how she was sucking. I rewound to the very beginning. I was curious what she would say. How she would introduce herself. The frame shook, the focus adjusted. She was sitting on the same sofa, adjusting her strap. The man off-camera asked: - So, what's your name, beauty? Karina looked straight into the lens. She smiled that same sly smile I knew. “Lera,” she said clearly. “My name is Lera.” Not Karina. Lera. I sat on the toilet in a stinking stall, watching this, and my dick, against my will, throbbed in my palm, as if approving of this fucked up thing. The camera zoomed in on her face. The tattooed man, now in frame, grinned drunkenly, running his finger down her shoulder. - Lera, do you have a boyfriend?