The Beauty Who Loved Him by Bethany-Kris

12.

“You know, I was lookingforward to a drive back to the city with Kiril,” Vera said from the backseat.

It wasn’t a lie. Despite his chatty nature, Kiril didn’t mean any harm. She hadn’t seen very much of him over the past couple of weeks as he came and went from the property without much interference from Vaslav or Igor since being given keys to a new car. Strangely, she missed him being around, putting in his occasional smartass comment, or lurking the property line, whistling for Marrow.

She hadn’t seen much of the dog since her father left, either. Although, she understood the dog hadn’t gone far because he howled a lot at night. Like the wind, his howls carried as far as they could go, but it never stopped her from falling asleep. Frankly, other than the dog, there wasn’t much else to hear but for the rolling mountainous forests and maybe the wind and rain when a storm came barreling through.

She’d quickly learned not to worry about Marrow ... the dog was practically wild, and the closer he was to the house determined a lot about Vaslav’s mood and pain level. She wouldn’t lie and say she liked Marrow, but she enjoyed watching him from afar. The dog was easier to appreciate that way, and less growly and quick to snap.

The neighbors couldn’t even keep chickens, according to Mira, likely too scared to shoot the dog because of who he belonged to, if they could even see the black beast slinking through their properties to hunt at night.

“At least Kiril has decent conversational skills,” she said to her current chauffeur. Vaslav and Igor could not say the same, and Vera dared them to try.

Igor, manning the SUV from the driver’s seat, passed a fleeting look into the rearview mirror before his attention was back where it needed to be. On the road. “Take that to him. I’m sure he’ll be around your place by the time I get you there. That was the plan, anyhow. If it makes you feel any better, I think Kiril is fond of you, too, yeah? He’s still young enough that he thinks anyone over thirty is old, and you’re just experienced enough to realize that when you constantly live life on the edge, you never learn to see beyond what’s right in front of your face. It works.”

Huh.

“I take back what I said, you’re not such a bad talker, it just takes a bit to get it out of you,” Vera said.

Igor chuckled. “Thank you. I think.”

She had not forgotten about Kiril, though. By the time she woke up, late in the morning because Vaslav didn’t fall asleep until well after three, Kiril was already gone, and the makeshift bed he’d made out of blankets and pillows on a couch in the sitting room had all but disappeared. If he was supposed to be with her all the time, like Vaslav had implied, then what was important enough to take him away?

“Did something come up, or—”

“You’re awfully nosy today,” Igor interjected, making his reflection in the rearview mirror known again so she was able to see the way he’d lifted his brow high. “Any reason for that?”

“Curiosity. Maybe I’m bored.”

“Didn’t you hear? It killed the cat,” he deadpanned.

Vera smirked to herself, and shook her head as she turned back to the rural landscape passing by their fast-moving SUV. Igor had no issue with returning his focus to the long road ahead when his passenger no longer wanted to talk. Or so he thought.

She just wanted to enjoy the view.

One of her favorite parts of Russia was when autumn arrived. Even if it never lasted for very long.

Every bright yellow, burnt orange, and fire-red leaf that changed and fell was a different piece of a massive, beautiful canvas that made up the countryside. Roads that had certainly seen better days connected small rural communities. One couldn’t really appreciate the entirety of Russia as it slipped into the fall if they never went further than the city limits, but it was hard to look away from the miles and miles of the season’s colors in full, fall glory.

It certainly made the nearly two hour drive back to the city a lot more bearable. Especially when she was trying to distract herself from the real question she wanted to ask Igor.

The longer the silence stretched on, only breaking when Igor hit a pothole that provoked a curse, the worse Vera felt. Like she was sitting on bees. Unable to keep the question in any longer, she blurted, “When did you know something was wrong with Vaslav?”

A dangerous question, she knew.

It had become painfully clear to Vera that Vaslav’s worst, and one of his most prominent, symptoms of CTE was his ever growing paranoia. It was why he couldn’t stand to have people even talk about him when he wasn’t in the same room without obsessing over it at times. She’d tried not to count the hours she noticed that he spent peering through the heavy curtains on every window over the last week. There was a gun in every single room. Not that she had pointed out the discoveries to Vaslav, and it wasn’t like guns made Vera nervous. Quite the opposite, her grandfather had been a gun trafficker; her father later took over the family business. They had a special love for weapons, and their prominence in her life had left her almost numb to the sight of a weapon.

Except when every gun she found was carefully hidden. As if they had been put in their respective spots because Vaslav needed to know where each and every one was, but no one else would. She couldn’t imagine that with the amount of time Igor spent inside the house, or even Mira, that they’d never stumbled upon one of the many weapons he kept hidden.

She didn’t know how to admit to Igor that she worried more about Vaslav’s easy access to the guns than she did the fact they were there in the first place. That, coupled with his almost constant paranoia, could lead to a very bad situation.

“I only ask because—” She couldn’t quite get the words out when Igor remained tense and quiet in the driver’s seat, their vehicle still cutting down the miles of rural road at a speed she rarely tried to think about. Not if she valued her life.

“I know why you ask,” he eventually muttered.

“Do you?”

At least, she always put on a seat belt. The belt engaged to keep her tight against the seat when Igor pulled off the road without warning. She didn’t know if he hadn’t liked her tone, or he felt the conversation was better held when he wasn’t driving, but the tires slid over gravel for longer than she was comfortable before the SUV finally came to a stop.

Igor’s gaze slammed into hers in the rearview mirror as he put the vehicle into park. “Vera—”

“I get it ... okay? The entire point of you is that you make sure he knows when someone is talking or ... asking things,” Vera rushed to say, her voice strained because she couldn’t stop the sudden swell of emotions lodging in her throat. “But I worry about him when I’m not sitting across the room giving him something else to focus on except what’s outside of his goddamn windows!”

Igor turned fast in his seat and scrubbed at his forehead. Eventually, he unbuckled his seat and turned to get a better view of where Vera sat in the row behind him in the middle.

“Do you know,” he started to say, stopping to pull in two deep breaths before starting over entirely. “Do you know, Vera, what would happen to me today if I returned you home safe and sound, and didn’t immediately call him to confirm what he already knows? And I will tell you how he already knows it, too, yeah?” he asked, grinning although it felt cold. His mirth faded as fast as it appeared. “Because I guarantee he has kept meticulous track of every trip to and from your home that I have made over the past months. Do you know what would happen to me?”

Vera swallowed back the nerves flapping like the wings of a butterfly in her throat to say, “No, I don’t.”

“Consider yourself lucky, then. Because I certainly fucking do.”

“Igor—”

He gripped the headrest of the driver’s seat, giving him better leverage for when he pointed a finger at her, quieting her from saying one more thing. “Here’s another thing you don’t know, but goddammit, somebody’s got to fill you in, sweetheart. Vaslav draws an invisible line in front of every person unlucky enough to give a shit about him to a degree that they’ve found themselves attached to him in one way or another. That line? It’s where he decides if you live or die. It’s your betrayal, whatever you do, you don’t even need to have done it yet. He knows what that line is, and you won’t until you cross it. It’s different for everybody, and it’s apparent to me that he’s given you a lot more grace than everyone else, but don’t for one second think it makes you safe because you lie in bed next to him, Vera.”

Right.

“Because you can’t tame a beast,” Vera whispered.

Igor dragged in another heavy breath and released it through flaring nostrils. “I knew something was wrong when he asked me the same questions he had already asked me before, about me and him. The first time we met; why he liked me. Those were things I knew he knew,” the man said, falling back into the seat and slumping further down. “But every so often, he’d ask me the same questions again like he didn’t know. I tracked down his doctor, then, the one he’d started seeing a while back. I paid the man to get back on the phone with Vas, but it’s taken almost a year for them to have a face-to-face conversation.”

“Does he know you had contact—”

“I had to take a risk,” Igor muttered fast. “I had just enough information to go on to do it. It was worth it. I’ve got the seizures under control, and he's not self-medicating with whatever cocktail he likes for the day. He’s back to barking orders into the phone and when you’re around, he actually gets out of the house. I consider that winning”

He was taking another telling her that information, too.

Vera thought that counted for something. She grasped on to the proverbial olive branch because she had a feeling that even with counting the people sitting in that SUV on the side of a rural road, she could use one hand to name the number of people who had the access and ability to look after Vaslav.

“It’ll only get worse,” she said, wondering if Igor even realized the reality in front of them. “It doesn’t matter how unstable he thinks he is now or how many walls and trees he puts around himself to shut out the world, what’s happening inside his head won’t get any better. Especially not living like he does.”

“Yeah,” Igor replied, his voice a croak, “I know.”

“Does he?”

That was the real question.

“Making him do things is one of those lines I mentioned earlier,” Igor said “And I have a pretty good guess about where he draws mine just based on history. I enjoy my place and perhaps that’s another thing you don’t understand just yet. Don’t worry, I’ll fill you in.”

His head fell to the right, giving Vera a good view of the emotionless expression Igor leveled on her as he said, “I have been the right-hand man to Vaslav for a long time. It’s allowed me a great deal of power and privilege inside a world you will never get to see, you should be thankful for that, too, they’d eat you alive.”

She didn’t even blink at the subtle threat. Whether or not he meant for it to be threatening was another thing, but that didn’t change the way it made her feel.

“If what Vaslav wants to do is hide and wither away in the hills of Dubna with you by his side beside him to pass his time, then that’s exactly what I intend to let the man do. Comfortably. We all make sacrifices for the life we’ve chosen. His has led him to where he currently is, mine hasn’t quite arrived at what I consider a satisfactory end just yet, but at least he’s given me some insight on how it will be, and I can’t fault him for that. Because someday when the threat of him coming out of hiding isn’t enough to control the kind of people waiting for him on the other side, I’ll be the only one standing in the middle of the war, Vera.”

“But why?”

Why would he want to be the man standing there?

Vera thought she already knew the answer.

“You care,” she said, speaking it into truth.

“Yeah, well, so do you,” Igor accused. “I guess we make quite a pair, no?”

*

Igor hadn’t lied. Kirilwaited, relaxed and bored in his staple leather jacket, on the front steps of her villa. As they parked behind the black, two-door coupe that Kiril now called his, he barely reacted to their arrival beyond a lazy wave.

“I trust that everything we’ve spoken about regarding Vaslav will remain between the two of us,” Igor said, his sharp gaze jumping to her in the rearview mirror as Vera unbuckled the seatbelt.

“Why wouldn’t it?”

Kiril, who had already pushed himself up to his feet and was brushing off the knees of his acid wash, distressed denim jeans, looked their way expectantly. Vera’s attention jumped between the young man waiting to be let into the villa, even though he was perfectly capable of finding a way in, and the man with his hands still on the wheel.

“Some people forget he’s just a kid, is all,” Igor said, shrugging one broad shoulder. “Even if he doesn’t entirely look or act like it most of the time. Adult problems are better left to those who can understand their complexities.”

“Yeah, I’m not one of those people,” Vera returned dryly.

“Good,” she heard him say as she exited the vehicle.

Vera didn’t bother with her two small bags in the back because Igor was already heading that way. Instead, she made a beeline for the walk leading up to the villa as she dug the keys from the pocket of her hoodie.

Kiril tucked something away into his back pocket as Vera tossed him the ring of keys. “Look at that, today you get to use the legal way.”

The kid had the nerve to grin. “Didn’t really need it, though. I already popped in next door for a drink of water and a piss.”

Vera side-eyed the kid as he flipped through the keys. “Seriously?”

“The old man’s plants needed to be watered, too. They don’t know he’s dead.”

“Did you actually do that? Water the plants?”

“I will,” he muttered, defensively. “When I go back later.”

Vera chose not to push it. All the while, she secretly hoped none of their villa neighbors ever noticed Kiril’s odd propensity for breaking and entering. It wasn’t like he stole anything, but that didn’t change what his behavior was at the end of the day. Dangerous and criminal.

Like someone else she knew ...

By the time Kiril found the correct key, he wouldn’t let her help, and got the front door open, Igor had already produced the bags from the back of the SUV and deposited them on the bottom of the stoop. He pointed at them, looking only at Kiril.

“I assume you’ve got these, yes?”

“Of course,” Kiril replied as Vera stepped beyond him to enter the villa. “And I’ve got something for you, too.”

“Da?”

“Yeah. Found it taped to the door.”

Despite not spending any time in her villa in weeks, and desperately wanting to reacquaint herself with the familiar floors and walls of her home, Vera spun right back around to watch Kiril pull a folded piece of paper from his back pocket and hand it over to Igor. The older man flicked the paper open and squinted one eye as he held it a bit closer to his face to read what was written on the paper.

A grunt passed his lips.

Half amused.

Mostly annoyed.

“Yeah, that’s what I fucking thought, too,” Kiril said like he could read Igor’s mind.

“What did I miss?” Vera asked. “Was that on my door? What does it say?”

Igor lowered the paper and arched a brow her way. “You’re still nosy, I see.”

“This is where I live.”

“It’s not serious. Just a message.”

That didn’t explain shit to Vera.

“A message from who?”

Kiril swung his head in Igor's direction, already on pins and needles for the man’s response. “Yes, Igor, from who?”

“Shut up.”

“You’re not fun at all,” Kiril replied, bored.

Igor eyed the paper again. “Feliks, Vera. He wrote to let Vas know that he would like his payment now. Whatever side of the arrangement he made with Vaslav is fulfilled. He expects Vaslav to do the same on his side of things. I have to say, if nothing else, Feliks deserves credit for his tenacity. He always knows what buttons to push with Vaslav. Never fails.”

“Vas doesn’t even know he left anything at all for him.”

“But he will,” Kiril put in, grinning, “and that the prick left it with you.”

Igor crumpled the note into his pocket. Despite the fact it had been left on her door, Vera didn’t see what was written on it, and needed to trust that Igor told her the truth. She didn’t think he had a reason to lie.

“Which just means he wanted the message to get through faster,” Igor said. “Nothing more, likely.”

It didn’t help the way Vera suddenly felt. Or the way Vaslav might perceive the message. Those butterflies came back with a vengeance in her throat, and deep in her belly, too. She couldn’t shake the nerves or the anxiety that came with it.

“He won’t overreact, will he?” she asked. “Because this isn’t exactly a good week for it.”

“Oh, right,” Kiril said. “The chick, Hannah, she’s coming! When is your friend getting in from Italy? I liked her.”

Hannah was only one reason why it wouldn’t be a good week for Vaslav to throw a fit. Vera didn’t see the point in explaining all the other reasons why, too.

“You didn’t even meet her,” she said.

Kiril shrugged. “I liked what I saw.”

“That’s enough, Kiril,” Igor muttered heavily. “Date girls your own age.”

“Have you met girls my age?” the younger man returned.

Igor didn’t pay him any mind. “And I don’t know, Vera. Like everything else with Vaslav, it just depends on his mood.”

Right.

And maybe the fucking moon, too. Neither of which she could predict.