The Beauty Who Loved Him (The Beast of Moscow #3) Read online

  THE BEAUTY WHO LOVED HIM

  THE BEAST OF MOSCOW – A SAGA: PART THREE

  BETHANY-KRIS

  For every woman who loves a beast.

  CONTENTS

  THE BEAUTY WHO LOVED HIM

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS

  Copyright

  1.

  “Vera Avdonin, I love you to death but I swear to God if you don’t answer your phone—”

  She didn’t even hear the rest of her mother’s voicemail before deleting it because frankly, the first three seconds were enough to tell Vera that it wasn’t any different than the previous three she had already heard. Just like the first handful of text messages in a string that had come in over the night while Vera’s phone charged on her bedside, turned off as it had died on the ride home after being discharged from the hospital. They held the same panicked desperation.

  And the reason why—Demyan had yet to call his wife, which he should have done the second he landed in Russia, according to Claire and the texts and voicemails her mother left for Vera, he had still yet to contact her.

  Maybe she should have turned it on the day before once she had it plugged into the wall. Yet, after she had settled into her villa, and took the time to care for the plants that desperately needed water, and rotated for the ones that were in the windows, well ... why lie? Vera forgot about the phone, and the fact she promised to call Hannah back as soon as she got home.

  Never mind Claire in New York.

  It was late by then. The first time since her childhood bedtimes ended when she went to bed before eight in the evening.

  It all caught up.

  All of it.

  Vera tried to soothe her guilt with those thoughts as she shakily dialed Claire’s international number and paced back and forth in front of her kitchen sink. It took her mother too many rings before she answered, and the groggy, confused voice on the other end damn near broke Vera’s heart.

  “Y-yeah, Demyan—hello?”

  “Ma?”

  Vera’s pacing finally came to a standstill. At least, for the entire four seconds she counted that it took for Claire to realize it wasn’t her missing husband on the other end of the call. Despite all the valid reasons her mother would have to blame Vera for her confusion, like missing every frantic phone call and message over the evening and night, Claire cursed herself.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have laid down. I couldn’t keep my eyes open,” came the regretful croak from Claire. “Have you heard from him yet? Vera, it’s been more than a—”

  “I only missed calls and texts from you, Ma.”

  And a couple from Hannah, but her friend was fine and safe in Italy at the moment. Shaken and confused about her feelings regarding the recent discovery of her ex-husband’s body in the canal, sure, but that was to be expected. Nonetheless, the same couldn’t be said about Vera’s father’s current whereabouts.

  “You’re sure he didn’t have extra layovers or an unexpected stop—”

  “Vera,” her mother cut in fast, the desperation leaking back into her high pitch, “he should be there now. Yesterday! I should have already gotten a call from him telling me he was standing on your doorstep and that I was right!”

  Vera blinked. “About what?”

  It took Clarie more than a few passing seconds to whisper her answer. “That he was overreacting to all of this. I thought you were fine.”

  “I am,” she tried to assure.

  It did little to help her mother.

  “Yes, you say that now, but Vera, where is my husband? Just who have you gotten yourself mixed up with there?” Claire didn’t even give her stepdaughter the chance to answer, although it wasn’t like Vera had one at the ready; it wasn’t that simple. “I told him not to go alone! I knew he shouldn’t just blindly go. This is horrible!”

  She didn’t want to work Claire up any more than her mother already was, but she had to be sure about one thing. “You’re absolutely positive he should have already arrived in Russia?”

  “He did!”

  “Ma, just calm—”

  “Vera, I’ve talked to his pilot. I know where he is.”

  She winced at the mistake.

  Claire stumbled over her correction, mumbling around a sob, “Where he should be.”

  Oh, God.

  That’s how she was sure Vaslav knew Demyan had arrived without her delivering the news. Who else could make her father disappear from practically thin air? She couldn’t even consider something else might be going on because Demyan wouldn’t put his wife through any suffering, certainly not the fear that he was missing.

  Claire had continued her nonsensical, panic-induced rambling. Verbally running through the last couple of days since Demyan’s jet left the states and even, what his plan had been before. Only one thing really concerned Vera enough to interrupt her mother.

  “It’s not like I could call Roman to help. He’ll lose it, Vera. Maybe Koldan could—”

  “No,” Vera jumped in fast. Even her loose-cannon, wild-to-his-core younger brother, by six years, would be better than her uncle, Koldan. The New Jersey bratva boss was loyal to a fault to Demyan Avdonin, but Vera seriously doubted a man like Vaslav would appreciate someone else he might consider a problem coming to his territory on her father’s behalf. Blood, on the other hand, he might understand.

  “Let’s not call anyone right now,” Vera added after a moment.

  Too long of one, though.

  In the next breath, her mother replied, “You better tell me why you think that’s the right choice, and be quick about it, Vera. My patience is running seriously thin.”

  The disappointment bled into Claire’s words, and Vera didn’t mind that her mother didn’t try to hide it.

  “I know as much as you,” Vera replied honestly, “but if you give me a few hours, I could probably explain a lot more.”

  A disgruntled squeak crackled through the speakers.

  “Well, it’s going to take me—”

  “Vera, you or your father have five hours—five, that’s it—to get him on the phone with me, or the next jet I get chartered will be for me,” Claire said, every word clipped and fiery into the phone. “And whoever else I choose to bring along. I am not above making a scene. Do you understand? Pass the message along to ... whoever.”

  Right.

  Whoever needed to hear it. Vera understood perfectly well.

  “He won’t hurt my father.”

  Vaslav agreed.

  “Why can’t you say that like you believe it?” her mother asked.

  *

  Vera hadn’t even been awake long enough to brush her teeth when she finally called Claire, so by the time she was presentable enough to leave her house, without even grabbing as much as a black coffee to fill the grumbling void in her stomach, the time had crawled past nine. Locking her villa, she spun around in the cable knit, grey sweater dress to find an empty street.

  Well, not entirely.

  The black, sporty coupe with windows tinted opaque all the way around except the front windshield sat where Kiril had parked it the day before. Along the side of the road at the very end of her driveway. He assured her the vehicle would
still be there in the morning. His special way of letting her know that even if she didn’t see him, the kid wasn’t too far away. Her new babysitter, hilarious considering she was almost positive he wasn’t even of legal adult age, didn’t mess around about his job.

  Keeping an eye on her, that was.

  Whoever provided him with the new wheels, likely Igor or Vaslav, was the newest bonus he pointed to when Vera asked where he planned to sleep considering he still refused to enter her villa. Unless he was leaning into a window. The little puke enjoyed that too much.

  He was still just a kid, though.

  One that shouldn’t be sleeping in a car.

  Vera took two steps down the front steps of her villa after locking up, thinking Kiril might be sleeping in the two-door car he had sworn to her would be glittering with chrome by the end of the month, but froze when she heard a low shit hissed from her right.

  Fast enough to make the world around her spin, she glanced to her right, seeing nothing and no one, and then left into the quiet front property of Mr. Anatoly’s villa. Someone had thought to water the bushes lining the fence as she could still see the water droplets on the leaves, and the hose her neighbor had once used with the long attachment to reach his hanging plants hadn’t been hung up with patience considering the extra loops of hose that remained on the ground.

  “I don’t think I gave them too much water, right?”

  That earlier curse made a lot more sense when Vera looked to her right once more and this time, actually paid attention. While her villa and the one that belonged to Mr. Anatoly were twins in architectural design, the one to her right differed in one aspect on the outside. The front stoop greeted guests from the side and featured a closed alcove that was only visible to its neighbors and not people walking by on the street.

  There stood a sheepish Kiril in the hidden alcove of her neighbors’ villa. A young couple who visited their villa occasionally throughout the year when they took time away from their country home and business; he was a dentist in an area that made travel into the city difficult, so he had a large clientele. More interesting was the sharp pick-like tool that Kiril didn’t even bother to hide dangling from his left hand.

  “Are you trying to break into their house?” Vera asked him.

  Kiril popped his tongue off the roof of his mouth before replying, “Plausible deniability. I was checking stuff out while things got a little boring.”

  “Kiril!”

  “And I already aced your other neighbor’s locks, so,” he added lower. “But he’s dead, and there’s not much else to see in there.”

  Good God.

  “Kiril, you can’t break into people’s places just because you’re bored. Download a streaming service or something on your phone, okay? Just—”

  “I thought you didn’t have any plans today?”

  His question, likely only meant to divert her from shouting at him while the rest of the street listened in on the action, brought Vera back to the bigger issue at hand. One she expected Kiril to help with whether he liked it or not.

  “Did he take my father?” she demanded.

  Kiril’s dark, thick eyebrows shot up, making his boyish features all the more innocent when he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Vera grabbed onto the railing of her steps, and leaned over the edge, pointing at Kiril. “Don’t play games with me. I’ll call a cab, go to Vaslav and ask him myself, and you can follow behind for all I give a damn.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  He sounded genuinely upset.

  Or at the very least, hurt.

  Vera wished she had time for his feelings. Maybe she was spending too much time with Vaslav Pashkov.

  Kiril added, “I like driving with you. You don’t tell me I talk too much.”

  That softened Vera’s anger.

  Not by much.

  “Did he take my father or not?” she asked.

  Kiril sucked air through his grimacing mouth, and the long pause between his non-verbal response, and the words that finally came out of his mouth didn’t make the situation any better. “I don’t really know.”

  “Kiril!”

  “Well!” His hands shot up, one still holding the lock picking tool, in peace. “Really, I don’t!”

  “What do you know, then?”

  Because clearly, he knew something.

  Kiril shrugged, and dropped his hands back down to his sides. “Just that if you call a cab, it’s gonna take like two hours to get you to Dubna. I can make it there in half that as long as we beat the noon rush.”

  Well ...

  She gestured between him and the coupe parked on the side of the street. “Let’s go. Move, you’re the one with the keys.”

  *

  Vera wasn’t even able to enjoy the view like she usually would as Kiril drove up the long, winding driveway leading straight to the looming home on the top of the hill. The panic that had been steadily growing inside now simmered under her surface as Kiril parked.

  Despite what her mother said, Vera did believe what she said about Vaslav. He told her that he wouldn’t hurt her father as long as she had agreed to be married to him by the winter, and she expected him to follow through on that. Even if her agreement to his proposal didn’t exactly come with her own set of terms.

  It shouldn’t need to.

  Right?

  “Ah, fuck,” Kiril muttered when he’d shut the engine off and shot a look toward the wide stone stairs leading up to the woman waiting at the front door. “She’s gonna mother me to death again. Tell her I’m not allowed to come inside, Igor said or some shit, okay?”

  Vera scowled at the kid in the front seat, but he pretended like he didn’t notice where she sat right next to him. “Stop it, the very least you could do is let her care. What, she makes sure you’re fed while you’re around and not wearing jeans with the knees blown out of them.”

  She knew because he told her as much.

  The kid really did talk a lot. Just not about things that Vera sometimes wanted him to, for that matter.

  “Hey, I like my jeans with the holes in the knees, okay?”

  “Tell her that, then.”

  Kiril’s responding facial expression didn’t exactly agree. Neither did the quick shake of his head. He eyed the empty driveway, saying, “I need to call Igor. He’s supposed to be here all day.”

  “That’s a more valid excuse to stay in the car, for the record,” Vera pointed out before making her exit from the passenger side. She didn’t wait for his response before shutting the door on whatever Kiril was about to say, either.

  She eyed the line of terracotta pots full of the same shrub she had left at home in varying degrees of growth and greenery. When did Vaslav plan to plant those?

  Mira was already smiling in her kind way when Vera reached the steps and took the first few two at a time.

  “I saw Kiril when he was opening the gate and already called Mr. Pashkov up from the back for you, Miss—”

  “Could you just call me Vera?” she asked, hating to interrupt Mira but knowing it also needed to be said.

  Mira pursed her lips, and keeping her hands neatly folded at her front, bobbed a bit on the spot in response. “Informally, I suppose I can.”

  Vera raised a brow.

  “And I will,” Mira quickly added. Then, she leaned sideways to look beyond Vera the higher she came on the stairs. “Is Kiril coming in?”

  “Maybe later. He’s got other things to handle right now.”

  And that was the most she would lie for the kid, too.

  Mira nodded, but the way her mouth pinched in a tight smile said she wasn’t entirely happy about it. Vera almost wondered ... did she want to be a mother—was that why she mothered Kiril whenever the young man was within breathing distance of her?

  “Anyway,” Mira said, “Mr. Pashkov said he would be up from the lake soon. I don’t know what he’s been doing all night down at the guesthouse, but it’s better
than him pacing the halls here.”

  Vera’s brow furrowed as she came to stand beside Mira on the top of the steps. She’d left the front door open a few inches, but there was no sign of the black retriever that had been using the steps as a makeshift bed the last time she stood there.

  “Is he not sleeping well?” she asked the older woman.

  That question had Mira glancing away. “Better for you to ask him that. He said he’d meet you in the dining room, lunch is nearly ready. Are you hungry?”

  Her stomach must have heard the prodding. It grumbled accordingly, and the empty ache the rumble left behind was enough to make Vera nauseous.

  “I could eat,” she replied.

  “Good. I made too much Olivier salad. He wanted something with chicken today.”

  Mira gestured Vera to the front door, and made small talk as the two headed inside. She didn’t ask Vera to remove her boots at the entrance rug, but rather, brushed off the bit of dirt as expected and ushered her across the space to the small vestibule leading into the large dining room. It wasn’t a space she’d spent much time in other than to cross through to reach the kitchen, but she knew it well enough to spot the difference the second she stepped inside the dimly lit space.

  Decorated in dark red wood, she could feel the ambiance of the space and how it might welcome guests for a dinner or party. Despite the large chandelier, featuring dangling crystals on each long, spiraling arm, there wasn’t much light except for the scattered wall sconces on either side of the long table. At least twenty feet in length with a glossy black top that didn’t show a speck of dust, ten chairs sat on either side with more ornate captain chairs heading both ends.

  It wasn’t the table she found interesting.

  Rather, the birch box sitting at the closest end to the dining room’s entrance. She walked right up to it, actually, where it had been facing her positioned at the captain’s chair.

  “I was told that was for you,” Mira said as she headed past Vera to continue to the connected kitchen beyond another vestibule separating the rooms at the far end. “You’re welcome to open it before Vaslav gets in, yes?”

  Vera didn’t reply.

  She couldn’t look away from the birch box.