The Lies Between Lovers (The Beast of Moscow Book 2)

by Bethany-Kris

  A grinning face peeked in the window over the kitchen sink. Every window on Mr. Anatoly’s villa matched her own in the way they featured matching awnings made with sturdy metal arms. Good thing, too, because she didn’t think the window awnings would have been able to hold the weight of a young man standing on them like her uninvited guest currently was.

  “Kiril?” Vera shrieked.

  The boy—hadn’t he said he was eighteen on the plane?—couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself where he leaned in the window. He even reached for the dish rack where Vera had spent time washing the handful of dirty dishes that had been left in Mr. Anatoly’s sink.

  “Do you know how many windows I had to check to find you?” he asked.

  Vera glowered back. “What are you doing? Get off the awning!”

  He waved one hand, and went ahead with awkwardly pouring himself a glass of water from the tap, still leaning in the window. “Ah, it’s fine. They’re stronger than they look. Hell, I just climbed up to the one at your bedroom window.”

  She blanked.

  But only for a second.

  “My bedroom?”

  “The window was locked,” Kiril replied dryly.

  As if it should have been obvious.

  Vera, horrified, didn’t know what to say or do.

  “And I didn’t go inside,” he added quieter, “because Igor threatened to cut off my dick if I did. I like that where it is, you know?”

  A blink answered that question.

  “Igor?”

  She didn’t get a reply to that—not that she really needed one because Vera had started to paint the picture all on her own. What were the chances that a young man who had sat beside her on a last-minute flight to Italy would be the same one who showed up at her neighbor’s villa and used Igor’s first name?

  No doubt, she just found her newest babysitter. She couldn’t decide whether that made Vaslav better or worse than her father, in a way.

  Goddammit.

  Kiril chugged back the cup of water, and while Vera was still stunned at the table and desperately trying to catch up to speed, the young man climbed in through the kitchen window. There was nothing graceful about the way he used the edge of the large sink basin as a foothold, and the floor shook when he jumped from the counter down without hesitating. He straightened up to his nearly six-foot height with another confident smile, fixing his worn, black leather jacket and brushing off his dark wash denim before setting the cup neatly into the sink with a soft clink.

  Then, he clapped his hands and focused on her. “So, what are we doing?”

  Finally, her shock decided to wear off. “What are we doing—what are you doing?”

  Kiril smacked his lips and passed a glance back at the window she had stupidly opened earlier to cool the room when the longer she sat at the table, the hotter it became in the kitchen. “I mean, you just saw me climb through the window, so—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Her shriek was the only thing that really seemed to get a reaction from Kiril that wasn’t sarcastic or equally annoying. He made a scrunched face and turned back on her with a shrug. “My job.”

  Her shoulders deflated. “Right, I should have guessed.”

  Well, she had ...

  Kiril dragged a hand through his dark, shaggy hair and moved to sit at the chair opposite to Vera’s at the table. “Blame Igor. He had the bright idea.”

  “For you to keep an eye on me?”

  “Guess nobody else is ... preferred.”

  “What?”

  Kiril’s nose twitched, and he muttered, “That’s what I was told.”

  Huh.

  She got the feeling he left something out, though.

  “At least they cleaned the spot on the sidewalk, yeah?” Kiril asked, his whole face brightening.

  Vera’s brow dipped low. “What spot?”

  That had the young man cringing. “Never mind.”

  Oh, God.

  “Where they found Mr. Anatoly?” she pressed.

  Kiril completely avoided her gaze. “That’s not what I said and—”

  “I don’t think you have to, really.”

  She wasn’t stupid.

  Kiril sighed, then. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset!”

  “Getting shriller there.”

  Vera dragged in a long, deep breath that rattled on the way in as she tried to blink away the blurriness from welling tears. “I’m not upset.”

  “Right.” Kiril stood from the chair, and pointed back at the window. “I’m gonna go, yes?”

  “You can’t just—” Vera hiccupped, and tears started to fall. “—use the damn windows like doors, Kiril! Is that even your real name?”

  “Da, no Smith.”

  “I figured,” she whispered, wiping away the streaks left behind on her cheeks. “Not very Russian, is it?”

  “It’s a common enough name.” Kiril lingered by the sink, eyeing her warily. “Do you need anything—something to make the tears go away?”

  “That’s not really how it works.”

  And it had been a terrible couple of days.

  “Do you need help with that?” he asked, nodding at the pile of papers on the table.

  Vera stared down at them, too, silently willing herself to just put it all away. Last night, she’d found the contact for Mr. Anatoly’s advocate information rather quickly in his small office. A cluttered space filled with years’ worth of medical textbooks and files she didn’t know where to even begin with—not to mention all the house plants.

  At least, those were the easy parts.

  The attorney had everything ready for the passing of his client, unsurprising given Mr. Anatoly’s age, but was unhappy to hear of the events surrounding the death. Vera wasn’t a big help in that regard.

  “No, I think I’ve got it,” she said. “His second cousin is flying in next week to discuss options with a lawyer hired to handle his will and estate but for the most part ...”

  Kiril raised an eyebrow when she trailed off. “What?”

  “Well, you’re looking at it. The villa will go to his estate like everything else inside, and be sold at auction. The lawyer said I was welcome to take any plants or books or pictures, if I wanted. I was just trying to organize some things I found in his office.”

  She waved at the hundreds of legal papers that spanned decades. From his documentation when he became a doctor fifty years ago to his marriage certificate. She hadn’t known Mr. Anatoly and his deceased wife had been married in Hungary, but it was an interesting bit of the man’s history to find.

  Kiril looked around the quiet kitchen, and even peered into the darkened hallway just outside the space that led to the rest of the villa. “You couldn’t do that over at your place?”

  Well ...

  She could.

  “I felt less alone over here,” she admitted.

  Even if she was still alone.

  At that, Kiril let out a disgruntled noise and a long, “Ugh.”

  She barely even had time to comprehend his problem before the young man came back to sit at the table again. He gestured between the two of them, saying, “Fine, I’ll stay. If Igor asks, you tell him I didn’t “disturb” you.”

  He even made air quotes.

  “Agreed?”

  Vera blinked. “Okay?”

  “You just look so sad.”

  Did she?

  “I don’t like it,” Kiril added, glancing away. “The sad stuff, I mean.”

  Poor kid, she thought.

  He actually had a heart.

  Vaslav Pashkov would eat him alive.

  *

  Vera couldn’t quite distinguish what the buzzing was that had woken her up, but despite the heavy confusion clinging to her senses that she couldn’t shake, she pulled off the thin Afgan blanket and sat up on the couch. Her quiet, dimly lit living room greeted her, but the muted flat screen with an unknown movie did nothing to help the thu
mping pressure causing pain in her temple.

  She tried to blink the headache away. Even rubbed her knuckles into her temple to relieve some of the pressure there, but nothing worked. It probably didn’t help that lingering hunger pains worked their way through her lower belly—making Vera both breathless and nauseous at the same damn time.

  How long was I sleeping?

  Her thoughts seemed slow, too, as she was having trouble connecting the digital time on the satellite box under her television hanging on the wall to what she last remembered. How was it after twelve in the afternoon?

  It was barely even sunset when she left Mr. Anatoly’s villa, locking it up tight and still feeling too heavy in her heart. Vera wasn’t the type to sleep on her couch, and after shoving a piece of toast and a glass of water down her dry throat the night before, she only meant to watch a bit of on-screen drama from her favorite television series before heading up to bed. She couldn’t even remember if she managed to get her phone plugged in upstairs where she kept the only charger beside her bed.

  Except you didn’t make it that far.

  Clearly.

  Even her mind was against her.

  The buzz that had first pulled her from a delirious dream came back with a vengeance. The slight movement in front of her on the oval glass coffee table had her blinking awake all over again. Not by much, though.

  Vera still thought she was in a dream-like trance when she reached for the phone she’d left sitting screen down. Not something she usually did as it scratched both the glass of her phone screen and the table sometimes. Nonetheless, she swore she counted three seconds that it took for her to grab hold of the phone.

  That churning nausea hadn’t waned.

  Neither did the pain in her stomach that had moved more to her sides and back with a searing sharpness that felt nothing like hunger rumbling in an empty stomach. Vera’s lack of concern about the new pain should have been her first sign that something wasn’t right. But she figured it out when no matter how many times she blinked or how hard she focused on the screen of her phone, she just couldn’t distinguish between the different notification banners well enough to understand the many calls and messages she’d missed since yesterday.

  Or that her phone was currently ringing.

  Ma, she read.

  Ma.

  Ma.

  All at once, Vera rushed out of the feverish state as a cold chill settled deep in her bones. She answered the call just before it would go to voicemail, but it took her more than a few seconds to be able to talk to the soft-spoken woman waiting on the other end.

  “Can you hear me?” Claire asked for the third time. “Vera, are you there?”

  “Ma,” she breathed, half relieved but still shivering. Except that for feeling as cold as she did, her forehead was hot to the touch.

  “What’s wrong?”

  As a mother does, Claire heard the new strangeness in Vera’s voice even over the phone, and an entire ocean away.

  “Isn’t it like five in the morning there?” Vera asked.

  “Your father was finishing business in Jersey this weekend. We took an early flight out, but—you sound like you’re in pain?”

  Did she?

  Apparently, she wasn’t ignoring the stabbing aches lower down.

  “I think I have to pee so it’s giving me these cramps ... or something,” Vera said, trying to brush her mother’s concern off. “I just woke up—I turned the heat up too high, and it must have put me in a bad dream, so I was sleeping too hard.”

  A pediatric nurse, back when her mother had chosen to work outside of the home, Claire heard something that sent her sirens wailing. “Fever?”

  “I’m a little hot.”

  “Where’s your thermometer?”

  “Upstairs in my little kit I have that—”

  “Where’s the pain and how does it feel?”

  Vera rolled her eyes, but went ahead with giving her mother the run-down of the odd location and how the pressure of her bladder—it was actually full—didn’t help the matter. At her mother’s prodding, and even though Vera all but refused, Claire convinced her to head for the closest bathroom and let her know what happened.

  Except she didn’t want to hang up.

  Vera had to take the phone with her.

  “You know, this is harder when you’re listening,” Vera complained in her upstairs bathroom. She opted for that one because there, she could snag the thermometer, too.

  Claire laughed softly. “Oh, come on—I was too late to potty train you, but we’ve done the period thing and everything else.”

  Vera sighed.

  Yeah, they had.

  Her bladder finally relieved—with a burning woosh that sent air rushing out of her lungs—at the same time, the thermometer in her ear beeped. She relayed the number to her mother knowing it was too high.

  “It burned when you peed, too?” Claire asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sounds like an infection in the bladder. You’re going to need antibiotics if you’re dealing with those symptoms all together.”

  Of course, Vera pined. Of course, the first time had great sex in an embarrassingly long time, she ended up with a bladder infection. If a God existed, he was laughing at her.

  “And that fever is concerning,” Claire added. “If it gets any higher, don’t wait for your regular practitioner. Just head into the nearest—”

  “I will,” Vera interjected.

  She wanted her mother to stop going in with her medical tone because it was a few short steps away from asking one too many questions.

  “Your father is flying to Russia.”

  Vera, only just gaining enough sense to get off the commode, stayed frozen to the chilly seat. “What?”

  “He’s waiting on clearance for his pilot’s flight plan and which airport will give them—”

  “Fuck,” Vera hissed, slamming her palm too hard on the sink’s white-pink counter.

  She could practically imagine her mother’s flinch.

  “You and Roman both, I swear.” God, Vera didn’t know how long it had been since she last spoke with her little brother. She didn’t have long to think about it before her mother continued on ranting, “Just like Demyan with your mouths. Honestly.”

  “Ma, I thought you had it handled?”

  Claire made a noise under her breath, then. “I did have him distracted and minding his own business for a while. He was even willing to pay for that Italy flight with a bit of half-truth. However, you still won’t get on the phone and talk to him, so he’s made calls. And apparently, he’s found something he doesn’t like.”

  Vera’s dry tongue peeked out between her quivering lips as the sharp pains came for her kidneys again. The longer she sat there, the more it felt like her bladder was filling up—or maybe that was just the pressure.

  “Ow,” Vera wailed.

  Claire’s anger melted away in an instant. “You really should go get that checked out. God, I think the last time you had an infection like that was—”

  “Another time I made a stupid choice,” she muttered, remembering the only one-night stand she’d ever had in her life.

  “What?”

  “What?” Vera parroted, internally cursing herself for letting her thoughts speak out loud.

  “Never mind. As for your father ... Vera, he’s coming for a visit. That’s all he’ll say. Will you at least tell me what in the hell is going on now? You won’t pick up calls, you’re in and out of the country without a word, and—”

  “I met a man.”

  A long time ago, six-year-old, motherless Vera made a friend. Her first best friend. A sweet, soft woman named Claire who let her pick any book she wanted to read and smelled like cotton candy. Claire was her friend before she became her mother; and in a way, a part of Vera felt like she’d chosen her, too, and that was why the universe brought Claire to her father.

  Of course, that was back when Vera was too young to know better.

 
; Claire being her friend first never changed, though. It made things easier, there was no bitterness about the mother buried under a gravestone, and she was never afraid to go to Claire ... but especially when she needed a mother more than a friend, or vice versa.

  “A man,” Claire echoed after a passing few seconds.

  It was Vera’s chance to say more. Except she didn’t know what or how.

  “When papa comes, will you ask him to bring the box?” Vera asked.

  “I don’t know what you—wait, your birch box?”

  Demyan had given her the keepsake treasure box the day she left for Russia at sixteen. But when she had sat down on her bed beside him and opened the hinged cover to see what was inside, she told him it wasn’t the right time. He promised to keep the box and its contents safe until she needed it.

  “My birch box,” Vera said. “That’s the one.”

  “Okay. And I won’t tell him about the man?”

  Vera squeezed her eyes shut; her mind searched for a way around or over the proverbial wall currently facing her. There wouldn’t be one.

  Vaslav was not a man who would be easy to love, but he had clearly decided to be hers nonetheless. At least, she wanted to make the choice he gave her—what one existed in the single option he intended for them both—before it was made for her.

  And she wanted to protect her father.

  “I’ll tell Papa about the man,” Vera said to her mother.

  “Will he like him?”

  That had Vera dying—of laughter.

  Oh, but it hurt, too.

  “Ma,” Vera said, gasping between the stabs of pain in her lower half and laughter she couldn’t control, “he’s going to hate him.”

  21.

  She should have known Feliks was a liar. Leopards didn’t change their spots, after all.

  Feliks didn’t seem the least bit interested in Vera when she came to stand in the opened doorway of the man’s office at The Swan House. In fact, he looked her straight in the face, rolled his eyes as he muttered something under his breath, and went right back to digging in the drawer of a black filing cabinet that he had pulled open.

  His blatant disregard for the fact she was standing right there only irritated Vera more than she had been when she saw the mess that waited downstairs in what had once been her studio. Her bad mood was made worse by the fact the pressure in her bladder and the pain in her lower half hadn’t eased in the last day, and the cranberry juice she’d been chugging to get her through to her late-afternoon appointment with her doctor had done nothing to help.