The Beauty Who Loved Him by Bethany-Kris

11.

“Did you know Kirilsleeps in the sitting room at night?”

Vaslav’s daydream ended the second Vera made her presence known. While moving light didn’t typically help his migraines, there was something about the flickering of a fire in a dark room that helped to pull him further into his mind and away from the physical presence of everything else around him. Including what hurt.

“Igor mentioned it,” Vaslav said as Vera padded into the room and came to sit beside him on the plush couch where he’d found some relief. The fire helped. She set the plate of snacks, a mix of cheese, cut meats, and crackers, on the coffee table and produced what waited for him in her other hand. He eyed the small glass jar resting in the middle of her palm. “What’s that, now?”

“Coconut oil.”

Vaslav squinted at the white muck in the clear jar. “Where did you find that?”

“Mira told me there was some in the pantry when I asked.”

“Vera, I told you to walk around and have a think if you needed to, not to raid my cupboards and wake up the maid at one in the morning.”

He couldn’t help that she wanted to be awake with him at all hours of the damn night. Not that Vaslav would pretend that he didn’t like it, that was a given.

“First of all,” Vera started. “I wasn’t even finished talking about Kiril sleeping on a couch in the sitting room when you have at least ten bedrooms available in the upper floors.”

Fine.

“Then, let’s go back to that,” Vaslav said in a sigh. His focus turned from the jar of goo to Vera as he squinted through the pain stabbing at the back of his head and radiating to the front of his skull with every throb. “Kiril doesn’t have the patience to sit still for the length of time it takes to drive from the city to Dubna several times a day, often a few times a week, the way Igor does. It’s part of his daily routine with me. Kiril, on the other hand, only really needs to keep an eye on you.”

She blinked. “That’s it, just me?”

“He’s certainly not here for me,” Vaslav returned dryly.

That’s what Igor was for.

“You know,” Vera mused, “I remember my father being a lot more hands on when it came to his ...”

Vaslav narrowed in on Vera. “His, what?”

“Business,” she opted to say.

He didn’t think she’d call the mafiya out by name.

She’d not yet.

Wisely.

“I doubt your father spent several years dismantling another man’s organization only to earn himself a legion of angry, distrustful men who owe him money on a monthly basis like I did. On top of health issues that would otherwise ruin him if not kept carefully hidden,” Vaslav said through a scowl. “I’m not living out the rest of my life like a sitting duck. I didn’t spend the last half of a decade scaring the hell out of every man in my vicinity just to hide behind these walls cowering in my own fear. There’s a reason that nearly every person who knows my name is all too happy to let me live alone in my house in the hills, kisska. And I don’t mind it a bit. Trust that.”

“Is that where Igor comes in?”

Vas stretched his neck back and forth to ease some of the knots he felt tightening his muscles, but it didn’t help much. “He is my gun, my face, or my mouthpiece. Depending on the day. Someday, he might even be me, and I’m not against that particular idea, either. He’s earned an easy life after dealing with me.”

“You, how could he be you? What does that mean?”

Vaslav didn’t intend on answering that question.

“So, basically, what Igor tells Kiril is what goes. And right now, he says Kiril goes where you go,” he continued, “because that’s where he serves everyone best. If that means I have to deal with him sleeping in the sitting room so I don’t have to listen to Igor complain about the fact the kid whines when he won’t stay in the apartment he has—”

“Where’s his apartment?”

“Igor got him one in the same building where he lives. Something else the two of them never shut up about.” Vaslav remembered why he didn’t like the politics of things like friendship when he was forced to sit through conversations between Igor and Kiril. Sure, it took patience to teach a young man how to be a responsible, respectable adult, but nobody said that was Vaslav’s job. He didn’t bring that boy here, but he was willing to use Kiril’s blind loyalty to who he believed Vaslav was all the same. “What does that matter?”

Vera shrugged. “Just curious.”

“What I should do and will, if they ever put the damn thing on the market is buy your old neighbor’s villa, stash the little shit there, and I’ll have one less problem.”

Vera’s brow dipped at the remark. “How so?”

“Then I won’t have to hear Kiril run his mouth about how close Igor lives, and that he’s nosy, and if all I need to do is give him a bedroom to sleep in when he has to be here, to keep you from talking nonsense, too, well ...” Vaslav waved a hand high to end his ramblings. “Problem fixed.”

Vera gave him a tight smile. “Just say your head hurts and you don’t want to talk.”

A hard breath escaped him.

Still, he muttered, “Fine, my fucking head hurts. Please shut up.”

That only made her glare.

“I said please first, kisska.”

It took great effort.

More than she knew.

Vera softened a little, but that might have been from the tense stare she found looking back when her gaze met his. His pain almost always looked like anger in his face, usually because he was mad about it; why the fuck did this have to be his life more often than it wasn’t? Why did he wake up and go to sleep day after day feeling the exact same way? Death would be a better option, and that pissed him off, too. It shouldn’t have to be one hell or another.

Except it wasn’t like that with Vera. He still hadn’t quite figured out how to stare at her and feel anger. Too many other things wrestling inside of him got in the war, too, and muddled him up in the worst way. She was that little slice of heaven amongst the rest of his agonizingly endless state of pained numbness.

Even when he didn’t want her to talk.

“Well, you never promised to be a good conversationalist,” Vera told him, but he was already digging the pads of his forefinger and thumb into his eye sockets to relieve the sudden pressure forming there.

“No, that I did not,” he agreed in a croak.

There was no hiding the pain, then, or how swiftly it changed from one thing to another. The sharpness of the pressure was like a punch to the gut. With a wrecking ball. If a head could somehow explode from the inside out, then his was.

If it happened when he was on his feet or when he was asleep, it almost always chased him to the bathroom as his stomach revolted. Since he’d been feeling it coming on for a while, the lead up kept him from falling asleep in bed earlier because he knew what would follow if he did, Vaslav handled it better than he might have otherwise.

Another gusty breath rushed past his barely clenched teeth, and he still hadn’t taken his fingers out of his eyes though he knew it wasn’t a great option for pain relief. The pitter-patter of Vera’s fingers racing along the shell of his ear and around to the back of his neck had Vaslav leaning into the soft touch. She was a blanket of warmth around him with his head in her lap. It took seconds of her light scratching and rubbing to get him to pull his hand away from his face.

“I’m glad you stayed another night,” he murmured when he could breathe without feeling like he might puke. “That you stay at all.”

“Me, too.”

Her touch was like her voice when she whispered practically airless, barely there, but real all the same. It was just what he needed. Silent minutes ticked by, but he couldn’t say how many. Vaslav had become so accustomed to losing time to his agony that he just expected it now. Something else for him to get frustrated over.

Vera didn’t say a thing, continuing her soft exploration of his head and face with gentle, slow sweeps of her fingers. Vaslav broke the stillness first, muttering, “What was the oil for?”

Her quiet laugh rocked him a bit in her lap, and Vaslav opened his eyes, despite the blinding pain that accompanied the action, to find Vera smiling above him. She shrugged down as her fingers swept soft lines over his cheekbones.

It was easier to breathe when she did that.

“When you first started into your mood earlier—”

“Right, when the migraine started.”

Vera gave him a look. “But you don’t say that until everyone else figures it out.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

Her nose crinkled. “Stop deflecting ... earlier you mentioned your face was itching. That the scar tissue does that sometimes when the beard comes in, but Mira couldn’t find you more of the oil you liked. Coconut oil will do the same thing. You work it into an oil between your fingers, rub it on, and that’s that. Something to try until she finds the kind you like?”

He’d only been muttering to himself, and apparently, she even listened to him do that. What kind of soul fell into his lap when she walked through his front door?

“Does it smell?”

“Not a lot,” she returned. “But it definitely doesn’t smell entirely like what you might think, either.”

At this point, what did he have to lose?

“Try it. I’m not going anywhere, am I?”

Her chuff wasn’t at all quiet, but he watched her with one eye closed as she reached over to grab the jar sitting beside her plate of forgotten snacks. The constant pain in his head was easy to get lost in, but all it took was the warm, oily hands of Vera Avdonin to keep him from drowning entirely in the waves. Closing his eyes once more, Vaslav settled into her lap and touch. If she wanted to be there, who was he to tell her to go to bed?

“And I didn’t wake Mira up,” Vera told him quietly.

“I didn’t really mean anything—”

“She was checking on Kiril.”

“Mmm.”

Shocker.

“I’m going to put some of this on your scar now, okay?” Vera asked.

There wasn’t a single soul, except for maybe a doctor that he paid to do so, who would touch his face willingly. Not to mention, anyone who would survive doing it. Vera, on the other hand, asked permission like she already knew what his answer would be, but the consent still mattered to her all the same.

“If you want to,” he returned.

“Wasn’t that the point of me getting it in the first place?”

Vaslav didn’t bother to respond to the obvious, and Vera went ahead with massaging the oil into the scar tissue that stretched from his mouth across his cheek. The gristly texture gave the scarring an almost-grotesque appearance when the beard didn’t hide the worst of it, but the woman holding him had never been put off by the idea of touching his face. It was a big part of the reason he didn’t care if she did.

Her thumb worked soothing circles over the scar tissue, back and forth, again and again. He wouldn’t say he particularly cared for the natural smell of the coconut oil, but she wasn’t wrong about it serving the same purpose as a specialty beard oil he liked.

“The itching is better,” he told her.

He could tell by the way her fingers pulled through his trim beard that the oil had softened his facial hair quite a bit, too. His skin around his scar and the flesh inside his mouth didn’t feel so raw. The migraines tended to make his nerve pain far worse.

“I think you’d like it with a bit of vitamin E mixed in the coconut oil,” she replied, and he could hear the smile in her tone. “It would help the scar tissue a lot. I can make some?”

“Well—”

“If you promise to give Kiril a bedroom,” she added quickly.

Vaslav popped one eye open to find a grinning Vera above him. “I already said I would.”

“You didn’t sound serious.”

“I was.”

“About buying the villa beside mine, too?” she asked.

Vas shrugged in her lap. “Yes.”

“That’s a little much, no?”

Ah, she didn’t understand.

To be fair, Vaslav never explained properly, either.

“Vera,” he murmured, settling his aching neck and head back into her lap and sweet touch, “let me paint you a picture.”

“A picture?”

“In your mind.”

“Hmm.”

“Sound more interested,” he muttered.

“I am!”

“Not that interested. With less volume.”

Her tempting fingers scratched under his jaw, but he liked it all the same. “Vas.”

They really did need to work on her patience. He sighed, and even rolled his eyes behind his closed lids. “The villa isn’t about you or even the fact he’s agreed to his job to keep an eye on you. Those are things he’s willingly chosen to do without any expectations beyond what he’s already been given for doing so.”

“Which is what?”

“Basic things that he needed, protection, money. If you want those kinds of details, take it to Igor. I only care about the kid’s loyalty. And so, the villa would be, like the apartment in downtown I bought for him, is what I consider a gift. Of sorts.”

“A gift,” she echoed.

“I don’t like to call them that. People get sentimental.”

And then they had to make a production out of it. It was one thing to buy a person’s loyalty. It was an entirely different thing to reward someone in a way that provided for them. Like a home for a kid who probably never had one of his own. Simply because he’d shown loyalty to a man who had done nothing to earn it.

“Huh.”

Vaslav peered through squinted eyes to see the way Vera stared off above him. Not down at him like he wanted, but away at something else in the sitting room that connected his master suites together.

“What?” he asked her.

Vera quickly glanced down, realizing her hands had stilled on his jaw, and pressed her thumbs into his back molars to help with the tightness and grinding of his teeth. It cracked his jaw, whatever she did, but it felt good all the same.

“I just wondered,” she said, “if you do that because you actually give a crap about Kiril, or because—”

“Igor does,” Vaslav said, “and at this point, he’s my only friend left. I think that counts for something.”

Or it should.

What did matter was that without Igor, nothing about Vaslav’s life would be the same. While it wasn’t exactly the life he had planned for himself, it was a quiet one. Which was more than he had asked for, really.

“Oh.”

Whether or not she was satisfied with his reasoning for his plans regarding Kiril, Vera didn’t say. She continued her massage of his face, jaw, and neck before moving back to his temples and scalp, and he was happy to let the conversation die. The time had to be crawling closer to two in the morning, but she didn’t complain the longer he laid in her lap.

“Will Kiril always keep an eye on me?” she asked carefully.

His answer wouldn’t be as easy to swallow. “Until I’m dead.”

It did quiet her questions, though.

“What else is that coconut oil good for?” Vaslav asked, honestly curious.

Vera giggled the most heavenly sound. “Everything. Even lube.”

Good to know.