The Beauty Who Loved Him by Bethany-Kris

6.

“What are you doingin my den?”

Not even the anger heating Vaslav’s tone could make Vera move from where she sat. The piles of papers in her hand were just too heavy; they kept her locked in place, glued to the plush leather office chair she’d once been mesmerized by when she found him sitting there, too. Staring down with an unseeing gaze she couldn’t really look away from what she’d discovered on his desk, but the words she’d read on the paper no longer made sense.

Or maybe ...

It made too much sense.

And it hurt.

“I said, what are you doing in here?” Vaslav demanded.

His footsteps padded one after another on the hardwood floor. Closer to her, but she still didn’t move an inch. He’d used the stairwell attached to the master suite upstairs to come down. She’d only noticed the hidden door at the far end of the walk-in closet by total accident. A few dirty items of laundry caught her attention in the bedroom, and so she’d opted to pick it up and take it to the basket she knew was in the closet for Vas even though she was well aware that Mira had a job to do.

That information just happened to be one of the first rules made clear to Vera on her first trip to the house while they were walking the property.

“Vera, I know good and well you’re not deaf—”

“I only meant to tidy up the den,” she said, stopping his next words from stabbing into her like the first had. He could be so careless with the way he said things; unwilling to bend even if it meant breaking her in the process. Words hurt, too. “Like I did in the bedroom.”

Which was clearly the wrong thing to do.

It must not have taken Vaslav long to realize Vera didn’t leave right after their conversation in the bathroom as he came to a stop in front of the desk with only a bath towel wrapped around his waist. He hadn’t even taken the time to dry his hair; his trembling shook the water droplets down from each dark strand to his shoulders.

Igor hadn’t given her a time frame, and she wasn’t scared to make the walk back to the guesthouse, anyway. It wasn’t that much more of a walk than the one she’d make almost daily to The Swan House not too long ago.

“I know I told you not to go snooping more than a cursory walk around,” Vaslav said.

Not with as much anger, though.

He’d noticed what she held.

“I didn’t snoop,” she returned hotly. “I picked up a few things because even though you have Mira to do that, it doesn’t look like she has lately.”

At least, not in the bedroom and master suites.

Or the den.

Vaslav didn’t dignify her statement with a response.

“Give me that folder,” he demanded.

Even his voice shook.

Vera held the papers, and the legal sized folder that the messy stack had been scattered over. “I wasn’t looking for it.” She pointed at the desk and ignored the way her hand trembled. “It was right there. Out in the open.”

“In my den. My locked den,” he said, a desperation clinging to the edges of his words. “Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Vera,” he said, stepping closer and using one hand to brace himself on the edge of the desk as he leaned over to attempt a swipe at the papers. She only needed to lean a couple of inches sideways in the chair to be far enough out of his reach. That earned her a cuss, and his fist slamming down on the desk. The force of his hand smacking down sent pens and other papers jumping on the desk. “Goddammit, stop acting like a child! Give me my papers or I’ll come around this desk and make you.”

“No.”

If he could yell, so could she.

Vaslav’s spine turned ramrod straight, and his gaze burned. “What did you just say to me?”

She didn’t refuse him because she planned to keep his papers; he was perfectly capable of taking them from her, too, if he meant to. Or wanted to. Yet, neither of them moved.

And for a moment, she couldn’t look at him. It took more courage than she even knew she had, but Vera dragged her eyes away from his. Staring at him was easier ... there was something magical about the way she found peace looking into his face. It terrified her, but that didn’t make the phenomenon any less true. Maybe that was why it had been so easy for her to trust every word he said as long as he looked at her while he did it.

She couldn’t fake content. That, at least, was real; the way it felt when she studied the plains of a stranger's face who didn’t seem unfamiliar at all. Like she’d known him for her whole life. Even if she had not.

Home.

“At f-first,” she struggled to say through the sudden chatter of her teeth, and her only show of nerves, “I didn’t even know what I was looking at. Maybe that’s why I kept flipping the brain imagery scans over. Just trying to figure out why there was so many and—”

“That is enough.”

His every word snapped. Like the crunch of his teeth between each word was a slap landing against her face. Maybe the real slap would have felt better.

Why did he keep lying?

Why did he feel like he had to with her?

Vera wouldn’t be quiet. As she flipped the pages back to the one that started her spiral of horrified understanding, she lifted it for him to see, thrusting it forward. Even though she couldn’t see the words printed on the beige, thin paper, she couldn’t forget them, either. When he refused to look at the paper, she turned it over and read it out loud anyway.

“Mr. Pashkov,” Vera read, “A simplified version of my unofficial assumed diagnosis and prognosis follows. As agreed, your records have been destroyed, and no one had seen or accessed your file except for me. Regards—”

“I know what the goddamn man wrote,” Vaslav interrupted before she could even finish the cover letter from the doctor who had even included his office’s address in the city. At the same hospital where Vera had spent a handful of days not too long ago. Vaslav was even less kind when he spat, “He made me suffer through an entire conversation when he delivered the reports to me by hand. He’s finally given up calling my fucking house every other damned day.”

“When was that?” she asked.

His glare shot invisible knives her way. “Stop pretending like you had any business picking those papers up and looking through them in the first place.”

“You left them out in the open, Vas.”

“Behind a locked door, hence the mess. Mira hasn’t been able to even get in my rooms for days. I left the suites upstairs unlocked for meals, but she knows better than to go beyond the gathering room. You, on the other hand, know nothing.”

Vera’s chin snapped up subtly, just enough for her to let him know she wouldn’t cower at his insults or his mood. “Would you have told me?”

“I only just found out myself.”

The cover letter from the doctor had been signed at least two months ago. Some of the dates on the reports, especially the imaging of Vaslav’s brain in everything from grayscale to three-dimensional color, had gone back over a year. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe what he said to be true; when she considered the dates of the MRIs and other medical testing documents, however, Vera didn’t think that Vaslav was telling her the whole story.

“What did you think it was?” she asked.

“How much did you read?” he shot back.

The retort wasn’t as hot as his earlier ones. Maybe because she heard the pain that soaked it.

“Why can’t you just answer the question? Just answer even one of my questions. Please.”

As hard as nails, he had the nerve to ask, “Why should I? You didn’t have the decency to give me privacy; I don’t owe you anything.”

Bullshit.

“Get off it,” Vera replied just as fast. “You want to talk about pretending? Then let’s not pretend you’re the kind of man who assumes he can trust people until they prove him differently. If the papers were out, you expected somebody to see them. Whether or not you meant it to be me is an entirely different story.”

“Me!” he exploded. “I had them out for me!”

The loud shout startled her in the chair. It was nothing compared to the crash of the items on his desk, and the desk itself, made when he used both hands to lift the piece of large furniture over to its side, and then on its top. Frozen in her seat, only her chest moved when she took a few, shaky breaths. Vaslav, on the other hand, paced.

Like a caged animal.

Wild, and mean.

All at once, he stopped and pointed a single finger at her. He didn’t even act like he’d ruined the desk and every item on or inside it, never mind that it laid just feet away. It was as if the furniture still sat between them. The only thing keeping him from crossing the space to get to her even though she found hatred there.

“You had no right,” he uttered.

Betrayal clung to his heavy brows.

Vera hadn’t expected the last piece of her puzzle to click together at that moment. When she found the papers, complete with a short, succinct cover letter and a typed, one-page explanation of a probable progressive, and aggressive, brain disease, she stupidly thought she had it all figured out. Or rather, that she had him figured out.

She didn’t.

Until that very moment.

He didn’t want her to know.

She bet that he didn’t want anyone to know, really, but especially not her. When the list of symptoms included things like behavioral and personality changes; when it ranged from confusion, aggression, paranoia, and even violence—well, one saw Vaslav a little differently.

Vera sure did.

The man she knew could make another cower from just his presence alone. Every off-handed remark that had been made about everything from his nickname to his cold demeanor fit the mold of exactly what Vaslav Pashkov wanted everyone else to see.

Because they couldn’t see him.

Not the human.

The man.

Him.

“Would you at least tell me what you thought it was?” she asked quietly.

Had he noticed the tears that tracked lines down her cheeks? She couldn’t think of a reason to wipe them away.

Vaslav scoffed, and slapped his thigh overtop the towel that hadn’t come loose in his earlier rage. Somehow. “Isn’t it always cancer?”

“Your humor is offensive.”

“I didn’t say it was fucking funny.”

Vera sucked in a sharp breath, and raised the papers a bit higher as she asked, “Would that have been better or worse to you than this?”

All the fight in Vaslav left the moment that question left her lips. He hadn’t been expecting her to ask it if the lift of his brow was any indication, but the man was terribly good at hiding his emotions.

“It would have been final,” he said. “I at least wanted that. To know for sure. I could go somewhere from there.”

Right.

He probably felt like he couldn’t go anywhere now.

Vera remembered what the doctor had included in his letter to Vaslav that was basically a simple report to explain what he believed the brain disease to be and why he thought it was so. Apparently, something like chronic traumatic encephalopathy wasn’t confirmed until after death when the brain could be removed and studied.

It was only after the appearance of many symptoms ranging from mental to physical, all of which Vaslav had just based on what Vera understood to be true about him, and specialized testing to rule out other known diseases and illnesses, on top of a pattern of documented, repeated brain trauma, would a doctor make an assumed diagnosis of CTE. It still couldn’t be verified until after death, though.

When she was a professional ballerina, Vera had been at least partially aware of the sports world for a time. Through competition, and the like, she was often kept informed on the topics that mattered amongst the elite athlete circle. The very acknowledgment of CTE as a real disease being found in the brains of famous football players, boxers, and even some veterans that had suffered multiple brain injuries during their service, was a huge debate that still wasn’t entirely over.

Vera was not completely unaware about what she had found in Vaslav’s office. It simply never occurred to her that she could somehow tie that disease to him.

Now, she couldn’t unsee it when she stared at him. Vera couldn’t sit there and act like she didn’t know what she did. That his future would be bleak at the very least, and tragic at most. Early on-set dementia was a real possibility, but so was chronic, debilitating depression and even suicide.

The doctor had made it a point to note to Vaslav in his short report that medication and monitoring would be helpful for both those things. She bet he hadn’t taken either of those suggestions well.

“How many brain injuries have you had?” she asked.

His left eye squinted in obvious irritation. “You think I’ve kept track between what, the metal ladles my mother cracked me in the head with when I was kid, or the cement walls that guards made my best and most acquainted friend?”

“Well, is there a definitive start and end to it?” She considered the confusing question, mostly brought on by the stark reality he laid at her feet about his previous abuse, and clarified, “A timeline of ones you can point back to? I mean, if you remember those—”

“Don’t do that! I’m not here to go over history with you.”

“Stop yelling,” she said calmly.

It took more effort than she cared to admit. She willed herself to show him the compassion he so clearly struggled to find for everyone else around him. It wasn’t his fault, though. Not one goddamn thing that made up the horrifying, terrifying spectacle that was The Beast of Moscow to the world was his fault.

The very thought sobered Vera.

She couldn’t help but ask, “What happens if all the people who are scared of you find out you’re not a homicidal maniac living out in the woods, you’re just ... sick?”

“Shut your mouth.”

He hissed every word.

Vera blinked down at the papers she still held, and more tears gathered on her lashes and fell. “I bet, nothing good,” she continued like he hadn’t said a thing. “I bet, you know it, too.” He gestured with the papers again. “I bet knowing it doesn’t help with the symptoms, does it? The paranoia and the erratic, destructive behaviors. That’s why your doctor destroyed your files; why you wouldn’t even tell the truth to me.”

What could she do?

How could she hurt him to simply know?

Vera looked back up at Vaslav then only to find he blankly stared at the wall somewhere behind her head. His distant expression and lack of attention didn’t stop her from saying, “Making everything about it disappear won’t actually make it go away, Vas.”

“I know,” he whispered.

But treating it would also make him vulnerable. She didn’t need to hear him say it. That didn’t mean it made sense to her.

“You’d rather suffer and deteriorate alone than risk people knowing you’re sick, even if it means you could have more good years?”

Better years.

Years he intended to spend with her, apparently.

Vaslav gnashed his teeth. The sound pained her, but she didn’t show it. It was the sardonic sneer that stretched his cheeks, and put his scar on prominent display, that cut her deep. Especially when he said, “See, that’s the thing, I won’t be alone. Isn’t that why I have you?”

If he meant it to sound cruel, the tone did the job. If only he could comprehend the way it sliced at her heart to know he thought she would only stay if he made her.

He didn’t wait for her to respond.

Maybe he didn’t care.

Vaslav fisted the towel around his waist to keep it in place as he stepped over the mess on the floor, and headed for the back hallway where he’d first come into the room. She heard his footsteps pad down that hallway to the stairwell at the back before they fainted as he climbed the stairs back to his rooms.

She was left in chaos.

Surrounded by his anger and destruction.

“And all because you wanted to help,” she said to the empty room.

The room seemed to exhale the swell of tension and anxiety that had filled it full. It left her feeling even more alone.

A scary state, considering the alternative that waited for her upstairs. Even then, she wanted to be with him more than she needed to sit there holding papers that also wouldn’t change a thing. Of course, she understood.

She had looked right through the beast’s mask that was only there to hide the man, and the complex, guarded, hurting soul she found underneath was not at all what she expected; she didn’t fault him for holding his secrets and fears close. Never mind, how his soul called to hers. Even then, as she clutched the papers tighter to her middle and her tears fell more, she had to stop herself from going to him.

Vera couldn’t.

Hadn’t she done enough?

Not while his anger spilled out upstairs in crashes and unintelligible shouts. Not when he couldn’t stand the very sight of his own presence, and even the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling overhead rattled from something else being toppled over.

He didn’t scare her.

His rage didn’t keep her away. That’s not why she waited. Everyone was entitled to their peace, and Vaslav was allowed his private pain. Alone if that’s what he needed. Even if that meant sitting an entire floor lower than him, safe away from any line of fire, was what killed her the very most.

Didn’t he know?

She’d hold him when he cried, too.

If only he’d let her.