The Beast of Moscow
THE BEAST OF MOSCOW
A SAGA: PART ONE
BETHANY-KRIS
For every woman who loves a beast.
CONTENTS
THE BEAST OF MOSCOW
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright
1.
“Putain—mighty scar, that.”
Vaslav only arched a brow at the comment from the Frenchman sitting across from him in the black SUV. He much preferred to drive himself, and often used to when he spent most of his year in Moscow, but business always called for a driver. Not to mention, the privacy afforded by the blacked-out windows of the Mercedes limo.
“A knife?” the man asked. “Looks like a knife scar to me.”
A sigh answered that question.
He could have had this quick meeting without the conversation but considering his driver had not yet found a suitable place to park, Monsieur Pierre Aubert proved himself to be one of those people. The type that needed to fill the silence with anything just because.
Vaslav hated those kinds of people.
At the same time, he peered out the darkly tinted windows, the SUV pulled off the road and rocked roughly as the limo slipped down a dirt path that ended at the edge of the Moscow Canal. He rarely came this close to Dubna during the week if he was doing business. Otherwise, he preferred to hide away behind the walls of his private estate as much as his duty would allow.
“Are we—”
“A razor blade, no?” Vaslav said, drawing the attention of the Frenchman to him instead of the way the limo parked alongside the canal. Already midday, one couldn’t tell considering how dimly lit the rear of the limo remained. Just the way he liked it. “My bunkmate in detention thought I’d look better with a wider smile.”
At that, Vaslav grinned.
He knew what it did to his face, and so did Pierre considering the color drained from the man’s cheeks instantly. Stretching out the grisly scar on the right side of his mouth with a smile showed that despite the injury happening when he was sixteen in a juvenile colony meant to house him until he moved into an adult prison at eighteen—well, here he was thirty years later, and it was still as puckered, red, and angry as it had ever been. Jagged straight through his thick, neatly trimmed beard.
The fix had been shoddy. Two subsequent fights ripped the scar open again. Thankfully, he’d been able to fight off a later attempt by the leader of a rival gang to match up the uninjured side after a disagreement over territory lines in the prison yard.
Not that it mattered. Six months after the yard incident, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday, he’d been freed.
Sort of.
If a man wanted to call his kind of life freedom.
At least, the scar didn’t hurt anymore. One of the only things that no longer caused Vaslav pain. Everything else was still up in the air.
“What do you think, comrade? I was told it gives me a little ... something. Da?”
The Frenchman was quick to clear his throat and put on a friendly smile. If only it didn’t twitch at the edges. “I-I’m sorry—pardon me, Mr. Pashkov. I don’t mean to offend.”
Vaslav let out a hard breath and gestured with one heavily tattooed hand, the inked rings on his fingers and upturned spider on his hand covered decades’ worth of scars from fights, hard labor, and life. All the man across from him likely saw was the tattooed hand of a criminal, adorned with gold and glittering diamonds, cutting fast between them to signal his remaining, fleeting patience. “Curiosity killed more than just a cat—where is the coke?”
Right to the point.
He was all talked out, now.
Pierre slumped back into his seat, not bothering to hide his displeasure in the form of a scowl while he patted the pockets of his navy-blue suit blazer. As he pulled out a small, black balloon tied at the end, the man muttered, “Dix mille à cet tête de noeud—Christ. Here.”
Arching one thick, dark brow high, Vaslav took the balloon of what should be pure, prime cocaine smuggled straight from the mountains of Italy where the production and trafficking of the drug were at an all-time high thanks to a mafia-like cartel based out of Palermo.
Not that he intended to visit—he only wanted a new supplier.
“Ten thousand, yeah, that’s what you said?”
Pierre’s gaze widened, lifting to meet the man’s across from him, and he didn’t hide the fear Vaslav found staring back. Maybe he couldn’t. “I didn’t realize you speak—”
“Do you know the kinds of people I have sat down with over the decades? All kinds,” he told his counterpart, his expression never flickering from his calm, cold demeanor. “You pick up on the little things. Don’t look too far into it.”
God knew Vaslav had absorbed too much.
“What was the bet?” Vaslav asked.
Rolling his eyes as Vaslav produced a small, gold pocketknife from his pocket, the Frenchman admitted, “That you couldn’t be as bad as they said; even a beast can laugh.”
Well, he earned a chuff, at least.
For that.
Piercing the balloon with the tip of the small blade, Vaslav dropped Pierre’s gaze but only to see the perfectly milled, white powder that came out on the blade. As fast as the cocaine was there, it disappeared on his tongue when he lifted the knife and licked the substance away.
Instantly, his tongue went numb. He rolled it around his gums to get the same effect in seconds. It was pure, but he figured ...
“Someone went through the trouble of making sure it was extra fine for me,” he noted.
“Well—”
“Tell Mario we will begin a conversation about importing his product for my distribution. I will want it coming in as close to Moscow as possible, hmm? No fucking around—he’s to make the call to me before the end of the month. He should have heard by now, I’m all about the details, yes?”
Pierre dragged in a heavy breath and took the balloon back when Vaslav offered it between the leather seats. The cocaine disappeared into his pocket once more, only a bit of spilled powder remained on the carpeted floor. “They say you don’t like working with Italians.”
Vaslav’s lips pursed into a fleeting grimace. “What good Russian does?”
“Oui,” Pierre replied quickly, “I’m happy to make a split being the go-between. Everybody likes peace.”
That time, Vaslav chuckled. The prick almost earned himself the laugh he’d bet he could win. Fortunately for the Frenchman, because when Vaslav laughed ... horrible things almost always followed.
“No, everybody likes money,” Vaslav eventually said, shrugging under the lightweight of his red silk dress shirt. “Peace is sometimes the necessary evil we resort to in order to get what we want.”
Pierre didn’t have a chance to respond before the passenger door on the left side of the limo was wrenched open without warning. Midday light spilled into the rear of the vehicle, illuminating a sliver of yellow color across the black carpet and the leather shoes of both men.
It seemed his counterpart hadn’t heard the front passenger side door open or close, never mind the figure of a man rounding the vehicle.
“What in the hell—”
“Get out,” Igor uttered
, his shadow blocking the light as he came to stand in the open door. Despite being shorter than Vaslav by only two inches, the leader of the obshchak side of his bratva’s organization was still an impressive sight standing at his full six-foot-six height. With shoulders as wide as a barrel, he easily filled the space leaning inside the vehicle, and one couldn’t miss Igor when he came strolling down the street. Pierre stilled, clearly unsure what he should do. “Out, I said. The meeting is over. You can walk back.”
Vaslav only smirked at the confused glance the Frenchman sent his way at the order.
“You can’t be serious. We drove for twenty minutes! My driver was waiting—”
“Don’t take it personally, Frenchman,” Vaslav replied as the guy was yanked out of the limo without grace or fanfare. At least, he was smart enough not to fight back. Igor was not known for his patience, but he had one hell of a punch. Igor climbed into the seat Pierre had vacated, and reached over to grab hold of the door, ready to swing it closed. He waited before doing so, just long enough for his boss to tell the flustered, scowling man outside, “This is simply how I like to handle my business. Take any complaints straight to hell—or better yet, take them back to that prick paying you in Italy. See how he likes it.”
Igor slammed the door shut, and the limo left Pierre standing in a cloud of hot dust on the dirt road along the canal. It took far too long for the air conditioning inside to catch up with the mugginess they’d allowed in for Vaslav’s liking, so he rolled the sleeves of his dress shirt up to his elbows and unbuttoned the third button just below his throat to give him some room to breathe.
Mid-July in Russia was peak travel time for tourists because it was also the hottest period of the year, and currently, the heatwave crawling through Moscow left Vaslav in a worse mood than normal.
“When’s Nico—”
“Ask him,” Vaslav uttered behind his clenched teeth while he pressed his fingertips into his eye sockets, willing the pressure there to release.
“I will,” his head of security was fast to say, his Russian smooth and calm, already hearing that sharp edge in his boss’s words that were ready to cut on the next syllable. “We can put off the rest of the day, if you want, yes? It’s Thursday; take an early, long weekend, Vas.”
Migraines were his enemy. Constant since childhood and worse into adulthood, caused from years of abuse, followed by fighting to survive within the prison gangs that had dominated his early life, and head injuries according to the doctors that offered him nothing more than pills for pain. It was like knives behind his eyeballs stabbing straight down through to the base of his skull.
They came without warning and sometimes lingered for days. Other times, they spread out, lasting only for a dozen or so minutes before disappearing altogether ... only to come right back again and again throughout the day. The migraines were an unspoken burden he carried, and any of his men who were lucky enough to sit in his presence—ever—could tell the state of his pain, and the danger of his mood, simply by the tone of his voice.
It was the pain that made him vicious.
The pain turned him mean.
“No, I have one more thing to handle before I do anything else today.”
“I’m sure it can wait until Nico gets back from his trip,” Igor started to say. “Let him handle that stupid fuck in the city. He’s done it before.”
Vaslav ignored his man’s comment. Sure, he was only trying to help, and while Vaslav considered no one a friend because life had taught him those didn’t exist, Igor and Nico were the closest things he had to it. If he felt anything akin to camaraderie or loyalty to another human, besides perhaps his still-living mother, it was his right- and left-hand men.
His spies.
But right then, he just wanted Igor to shut the fuck up. Otherwise, Vaslav would have to make him do it and neither of them wanted that.
Strangely, he could stand to listen to others speak when a migraine started to creep up on him. Barely. It was the sound of his own voice, however, that felt like knives to his eardrums.
“I said, I have one more goddamn thing to do,” he uttered low, the gravely hiss of his words promising his companion wouldn’t say another thing unless he wanted to bleed for it, too, “and I intend on doing it. This time, he owes me money.”
Or so he had recently learned through stumbling upon paperwork that Nico would have otherwise preferred to keep hidden from his boss regarding Vaslav’s former brother-in-law and the company he owned known as The Swan House. The infamous house of ballet in Krasnye had a two-hundred-year-old legacy attached to the deed, and names on its dossier of dancers that graced the world’s stages had been associated with everyone and anyone with any sort of power and control.
Royalty. Political. Criminal.
A lot of money moved through those doors.
And the second Feliks Abramov had his eight-pointed stars tattooed on his shoulders, a portion of every dollar his beloved Swan House made, legally or otherwise, was no longer his. That was the deal he made with the devil who sat in the seat before Vaslav, and he didn’t care for the details as to why.
Igor didn’t glance away from the windows during the stretch of silence between the two men, but Vaslav still saw the way his gaze widened a bit at the news of an unknown debt between the organization and the remaining piece of Vaslav’s past. Across from the irritated boss, Igor’s reply was lower than a whisper.
“He was your family once, boss.”
“Not anymore,” Vaslav deadpanned.
His last murder assured that. Despite the attention and mess it had caused him, a half of a decade ago, to deliver his former father-in-law’s decapitated head in a white box topped with a bright red ribbon to Feliks was the least of his regrets.
If anything, he thought it made his position in the city very clear.
They didn’t call him The Beast of Moscow for nothing.
2.
In the Stars.
It had been an appropriate name for the ballet retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but the title also made a rising ballerina believe it was a show with a role meant for her. The story of the star-crossed lovers destined for a tragic end took a year from the start of rehearsals to production night. Vera took to the stage as Juliet on the night of her twentieth birthday. Six years later, staring into the torn flyer stuck to a light pole outside the front entrance to the main lobby of The Swan House with her image in full costume, makeup, hair, and pointe shoes promoting the event still managed to give her the same butterflies in her belly.
Only now, it didn’t feel all that great. It didn’t even matter that the years had taken its toll on the flyer, leaving the colors almost entirely faded, she could still see the image and how it once looked, too.
It was forever imprinted in her mind.
She couldn’t remember when she had first fallen in love with ballet. As far as she was concerned, she’d always loved it. Maybe from the second she was born, like Juliet destined to die with her lover, Vera Avdonin had been meant for pointe shoes and satin ribbons. Either way, the day her father had taken Vera to her first class, she never imagined doing anything different.
“Your name is gonna be in stars someday,” Demyan would tell her competition after competition when she was barely ten and other girls on her team teased her relentlessly over the slightest mistakes.
Even inventing them sometimes.
She hadn’t known it back then, but their bullying came from a place of jealousy and driven by the adults around them who constantly made them feel like they were never going to be enough. The mean girls from the past didn’t actually leave when Vera managed to land a spot as a ballerina for the coveted Swan House at only sixteen—she simply became more confident.
Convincing her father to let her leave the States for a city like Moscow had been the harder part. Compromise came in the form of private security, a man known for his penchant to protect dangerous men, until she was eighteen.
And only because she threatened t
o run away, otherwise.
Vera had only been a little dramatic.
The thing is, she would have done it.
Vera was determined to be the ballerina in the middle of the stage, the most beautiful, all spotlights on her, and an entire crowd at the edge of their seats, waiting with bated breath for her next step; so much so that for most of her life, she’d lived and breathed the art, sacrificed education, and having a childhood just to be the very best she could be en pointe. Every day, all day.
Until she was that ballerina.
She’d loved ballet that much.
Don’t you still?
Vera didn’t have an opportunity to ponder the question she asked herself.
“You’re late!”
The first shout came in Russian, ripping her gaze away from the flyer she must have walked by a thousand or more times but had only noticed it remained that day.
She didn’t even have time to ask why today?
Hanging out of the large, black marble doors adorned with golden swans for handles, Klara—one of the company’s ballerinas that agreed to help Vera make dance classes available to underprivileged children for free three nights a week at The Swan House.
If anything, it gave Vera something to do.
Or maybe just a reason to stay.
After all, she hadn’t danced on stage in years.
In English, Klara said, “I figured when you didn’t pick up my call that something was up. I’ve got the kids doing their warmup stretches, but I have to get to my own—”
“No worries, thank you,” Vera interjected, forcing herself to smile and hoping the younger ballerina didn’t notice what had her lingering out on the sidewalk of the grand Swan House instead of being inside teaching her ballet class.
The flyer.
Her fading star ...
Klara looked like she was considering heading back inside The Swan House but hesitated for a moment. No doubt, the practice she spoke of was all the way at the rear of the old stone cathedral and monastery. Once owned by the Russian orthodox church, no one really seemed to know how it became the property of a private family that converted it into a house of ballet complete with several studios and an entire theater that seated up to three-thousand people.