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

  Not that her glare from the bed stopped him from adding, “You’ll be peeing every time now, no?”

  “Oh, I hate you.”

  She didn’t even say it like she meant it. Vaslav’s quiet laughter urged her own out before Vera grabbed one of the pillows behind her head and tossed it his way. Not with any malice, and he caught it easily, stuffing it in behind his back for the moment. He could use the cushion—the wooden rocking chair had not been a kind place to sleep, but this was the only hospital with a private room available that he was able to get Vera into yesterday after he arrived. The room was too small for a cot bed, not that he would have used one, anyway.

  She’d quieted after her exclamation, and the shift of her gaze brought both of their attentions back to the newspaper on the rolling table.

  “Did you have him kil—”

  “Vera,” Vaslav interjected before she could ask him something he wouldn’t answer, “I only asked if that would solve a problem you had, not that I was open to discussing the headline or news.”

  Sitting up on the bed, she’d pulled her legs into a crossed position with the stark white hospital blankets pooling around her waist while she fiddled with her hands in her lap. He knew the silence felt heavier because of her—it radiated off her, every wary, dark question she had in her mind that he wouldn’t allow her to ask.

  “Your friend’s ex-husband won’t be showing up anywhere, anymore,” he told her. “And let it lie with that, yeah?”

  Vera sighed, and turned her head to the side a bit where she could at least have him in her line of vision. “I hope you know Kiril is annoying. A little heads up about him would have been nice before he just inserted himself into my space.”

  That almost earned her a smile.

  “Why?”

  “I already have a little brother; I didn’t need another.”

  Vaslav did grin at that. “He can’t be that bad.”

  “He woke me up yesterday—when I was sick, by the way—by climbing up on the awnings of my bedroom window where he knocked on the glass until I got up and opened it for him,” she replied.

  Well ...

  “I’d probably kill him if he did that to me,” Vas admitted.

  It wasn’t a lie.

  “I also slept past my alarm, so I wasn’t really mad,” she added after a second.

  “Oh?”

  “More annoyed.”

  “Be annoyed,” he returned. “As long as the kid does his job.”

  And he had.

  Clearly.

  The silence that followed the exchange left Vaslav wrapped in unease. He could tell by the way she continued fidgeting with her fingers and avoiding his gaze that there was still something else on her mind.

  “Maybe I’m just surprised you’re here,” she said quietly.

  Could the woman read his mind?

  “Why wouldn’t I be? Who else is looking after you?” he asked.

  “I can look after myself, thanks. I’m a grown wom—”

  “Vera.”

  The gruff, low grumble of her name came out like a warning, and he meant it too. The way she quieted, and a heat crawled up her cheeks told him that she hadn’t missed it.

  Good.

  He also understood why she felt the way she did. It wasn’t like he’d allowed her to leave his home feeling particularly happy. The last morning she spent with him had been terrible for more reasons than just the migraine that unfortunately pulled him out of what might have been a good dream.

  After all, he’d been sleeping naked next to her. What else would he have been dreaming about?

  “I can’t remember,” he said, then. “Did I say something terrible?”

  Probably.

  He usually did at the very worst of it.

  “Mean,” Vera returned. “Some mean things, maybe.”

  “It makes me furious in a way I don’t think I can explain. I get to feel normal for just long enough to almost forget I even felt any pain in the first place.” Numbed out from Vicodin and too many glasses of vodka; too comfortable in the length of time between one scattered migraine and the next. Vaslav leaned forward on the rocking chair, clasping his hands between his widened knees over his black slacks. “And when it comes back like that ... it’ll happen again. I can’t promise it won’t. The ... saying terrible things, yes, but you should know it’s not your fault that I say them. Ever. I don’t say them or mean them because there’s something wrong with you. I do it because there’s something wrong with me, Vera. Not just the migraines ... with me.”

  For a long while, she said nothing. All he heard was the soft swallow of her throat while her profile stared down at her suddenly still hands.

  It was the best—and most honest—apology he could offer without saying sorry. Sorry meant very little to him when it usually just meant someone was also asking for the person who had been hurt in the first place to forget what they just did.

  “Or you didn’t want me to see you that way again,” she muttered.

  Vaslav hesitated only briefly before replying, “It can be both.”

  A scoff echoed from the bed. “Of course.”

  “I like that line, kisska. It feels like mine now.”

  “Hmm.”

  He let her fall back into that quiet place, but Vera didn’t stay there long before she glanced his way again.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You paid Feliks to fire me.”

  He didn’t expect to hear the thickness in her words—emotion coating her tone like a weight of burdens had just been placed into her hands. She truly was too precious for him. A human with a soul that wasn’t rotted like his, and with a heart too willing to serve and please. She tended to get her feelings hurt more often than not, and he wasn’t exactly the type to soften the blow. Yet, he almost wished he could.

  For her, at least.

  “You were quitting anyway,” Vaslav replied.

  She just blinked at him, unmoved by his frank response.

  “Really, Vas?”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Really, what?”

  “It doesn’t matter that I was quitting. You didn’t need to give Feliks seven trillion reasons to prove how useless I was to him.”

  “Don’t you mean how valuable?” he asked quietly.

  Vera’s gaze narrowed.

  He only shrugged.

  “It’s a matter of perspective. We’ll both see it how we want to.” Leaning back in the chair to pull out a blind and check the window once more, he said, “I know you have history with him—you don’t need to tell me about it. You’re worth nothing to that man at the end of the day, Vera, and I have an intimate history with what happens to the people Feliks doesn’t care about. The bigger problem is that everyone else—including him—thinks I can’t remember a lot of what happened back then, but the truth is ...” He dropped the blind as he trailed off, resettling into the chair with his hands folded behind his head as he stared at her on the bed. “The truth is, I can’t forget. Not in my mind, maybe, but me. In my muscles, that feeling has never left. Especially when he’s nearby. I can taste the hatred, and the way it sours on the back of my tongue when I hear him talk.”

  Behind his head, his hands had curled into tight fists. That’s what Feliks Abramov did to Vaslav just by existing. He made every inch of the man want to destroy everything in front of him until there was nothing left but a bloody, broken Feliks begging on his knees.

  Vaslav shrugged, then, smirking a little. “I won’t apologize for not wanting him anywhere near you, and making sure that he had every incentive to play by my rules in that regard.”

  Vera didn’t drop his gaze; he was sure he found a challenge there, but she didn’t verbalize it. Not that they would have been able to get into all of it.

  In the next second, the private room’s door shoved all the way open. Every dim light brightened as Igor hit the switches on the wall on his way by. Kiril followed the barrel-chested man carrying a bouquet of daisies in one hand and roses
in the other. The younger of the two carried three floating balloons of various shapes all proclaiming a desire for Vera to Get Well Soon.

  “She’s awake,” Igor proclaimed with a wide smile.

  “Kinda scared me doing that,” Kiril added behind the man as he tied off the balloons to the tap on the sink.

  Maybe it was the bright colors from the flowers and balloons, or perhaps it was just the surprise guests walking into her room with easy smiles, but Vera’s mood brightened. She put on the same sweet smile that always drew Vaslav in and reached for the flowers Igor was already handing over.

  “I love white ones,” she told him, sniffing the roses first.

  Igor shot his boss a look. “I’ll remember that, then. How do you feel?”

  “Tired.”

  “I bet—” Kiril snuck fast around Igor, taking center stage. “—and I didn’t break the awning, by the way. I went and checked.”

  Vera’s laughter rolled through the room. It wasn’t lost on him how easily she could talk to the two. Or rather, how easy it was for all of them to carry a conversation. He was always the quiet one, anyway, stuck in a corner somewhere watching people interact rather than interacting himself.

  The longer he remained quiet and separate from the conversation, the more Vaslav felt the need to step out of the room altogether. Without a word, he stood from the chair and picked up the tweed blazer hanging off the arm of the rocking chair.

  “I’ll go find a vase for those,” he told Vera, nodding at her flowers now resting on their side on the table. “Before they get too dry, yes?”

  “You’re coming back, right?”

  His steps around the bed hesitated, and Vas swore he felt every pair of eyes in the room turn on him. Her blatant question might have caused him pause, but his answer was easy. “Of course, I’m coming back.”

  *

  The vending machine clinked with the coins Vaslav dropped into the slot while he pined over the options behind the glass. Not that there was very much to get excited about, but he needed something to keep him going—the coffee offered by the hospital did nothing to keep his eyes open.

  Eventually, he settled on the bar of dark chocolate at the very top that didn’t look like very many had been sold. Dark chocolate was an acquired taste, and one he preferred over the too-sweet milkiness of the rest. Keying in the appropriate code for the treat, the machine whirled and pushed out the bar to the edge where it fell for Vaslav to reach in and pull it out of the slot.

  Stepping backward from the vending machine, he ripped open the corner of the wrapper on the chocolate bar and turned away as he raised it up for a bite. Unfortunately, the chocolate didn’t make it to his mouth before he had to use it to speak first.

  “How long have you been standing there?” Vaslav asked.

  His sharp tone didn’t even make the quiet doctor flinch. “Not long. Good to see you’re avoiding sugar. That’s a nice choice.”

  “Only in chocolate. What do you want, Bogdan?”

  “You know I prefer Doctor—”

  “I don’t care what you prefer when you sneak up on me like a little rat,” Vaslav interrupted coolly.

  Bogdan Nikitin didn’t look at all different from the last time Vaslav stood toe to toe with the man. Only then, that had been in an office in an upstairs wing of the hospital dedicated to the many specialists and surgeons with teams that came with the privilege of offices and communal spaces.

  “Imagine my surprise to hear you’ve been in my hospital twice in the last week,” Bogdan said. “I thought someone was telling me lies.”

  “Here I am.”

  “Hmm.” The doctor pressed his lips into a thin line and unfolded his crossed arms to hold a large envelope down at his side. His white lab coat with his hospital tags clipped to the breast pocket looked like it could use a good ironing, but Vaslav figured a busy neurologist with a full patient load ... well, ironing wasn’t a priority.

  “Lucky me to catch you this time, then,” Bogdan said, “seeing as how you can’t seem to pick up a phone when my office calls or call back when you’re left a half of a dozen messages.”

  “Let’s not forget the appointments I refused to attend,” Vaslav added.

  The real reason he hated this goddamn hospital was staring at him right in the face.

  The doctor offered a tight smile. “Yes, or that.”

  “What do you want?”

  Vaslav didn’t even need to ask the man that question, frankly. He only did so because a part of him was mildly curious why the doctor would put in so much effort to track Vaslav down with only a third-party’s information to say that he had been around.

  “Here.” Bogdan thrust the envelope, at least a centimeter or two thick, into Vaslav’s waiting hand. He nodded at it. “Everything we would have gone over had you actually shown up to my offices after the results and reports were finished is in there. And now that you have it, it’s off my hands.”

  Vaslav stared down at the envelope suddenly aware of the weight in his hand and how it seemed to pull his arm down farther. The good doctor, a man Vaslav had paid good money to tell him what was happening inside his brain, looked like he was about to turn around.

  Except he noticed Vaslav’s quiet stillness.

  “Has it gotten worse?” the man asked him.

  It was only because the corridor was quiet and empty that he chose to answer honestly. “The seizures, not the migraines.”

  That was the same, at least.

  “Or the memory and recall issues,” Vaslav added lower.

  Bogdan nodded. “About what I suspected, yeah?”

  He didn’t reply.

  What would be the point?

  A tall, slender man with thinning gray hair that looked more like tufts of cotton stuck to his head, Bogdan cleared his throat, seeming nervous as he opened his mouth and closed it more than once.

  “Spit it out,” Vaslav uttered.

  “There is medication that can help with the seizures—if we can pinpoint where it’s stemming from,” the doctor explained.

  “Will it actually help?”

  “You’ll have to give it time.”

  He scoffed. Right, like everything else and nothing that worked.

  “Is it what you thought it was?” Vaslav asked, glancing down at the envelope he held that might very well be his death sentence if he cared to know it. “The diagnosis?”

  “I got the impression you didn’t want to know.”

  Despite the truth to the doctor’s claim, that didn’t mean he still felt the same way. Especially not when he considered the woman he’d left behind with Igor and Kiril. If he tried hard enough, he could still hear Vera’s lingering laughter that had chased him out of the hospital room. He still had to find her a vase for the flowers, too.

  “Well,” Vaslav muttered, his jaw tight with tension he couldn’t even grind away, “I might like to know now.”

  23.

  Vera’s evening took a turn for the better when her private physician strolled into her room just before the end of visiting hours. Igor and Kiril said a quick goodbye and a promise to be back if she was still stuck in the hospital tomorrow, and that was when Vera turned on her doctor expectantly.

  “You can get me back home tonight, can’t you? Surely I can take whatever at home.”

  “Likely not,” her doctor replied with a smile.

  The man sidestepped the ones leaving, his plainclothes telling her that the information from the first hospital must have been sent through to his office.

  “I had a peek at your file—the doctor on call here is a friend from social circles,” he told her, shrugging. “I wanted to check in. Ivanka didn’t think the infection was that bad.”

  Vera cringed at the mention of the nurse practitioner who also took calls from Wyatt’s patients as a go-between to ease the schedule. “I didn’t want her to think I was panicking. And it wasn’t that—”

  “Vera, you had a fever of one-oh-three,” the doctor returned. “
Even if the pain was manageable, the fever is dangerous. I know we’ve gone over this before.”

  The raise of his brow had her sighing where she sat cross-legged on the bed. Pain became a part of the game that was her life, in a way. If there wasn’t some suffering in the dedication of her craft, then there was no love, either. Being the best meant learning how to work beyond her limits, and then more again. It meant days of aches and pains and still dancing ten hours a day.

  But everybody had the point of no return, and the hardest thing for Vera to learn—and clearly, she was still trying—had been when to say enough was enough before she did more damage.

  “I was getting antibiotics,” she said, and then pointed at the IV pole with the tube leading into the back of her hand. “I’m on them now. And if you talk to your friend, the one on call, maybe I could go home—”

  “I think letting you get a good seventy-two-hour dose through IV is going to make sure the infection is entirely clear, actually. While they watch that fever.”

  “It’s been low grade all day. The nurse told me.”

  “And?”

  His challenging tone and wide grin had Vera laughing. He often reminded her of her grandfather, Anton. A big bull of a man with a head full of black salt and pepper hair, and a friendly smile if he liked you. With a chest and arms that seemed to bulge out of the light blue silk dress shirt he’d stuffed himself into—but for all that muscle and looming size, he was a teddy bear.

  Doctor Wyatt Hudson had been Vera’s general practitioner since she first came to Russia. Because she was still in the process of learning to speak and write in russkiy yaz’ik her father had her set up with Wyatt Hudson who came recommended by a family friend. Apparently, he’d moved to Russia with the wife he’d met in America and opened his practice shortly thereafter.

  “Other than that,” the man said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his opened, black trench coat, “I had Ivanka put you in for an appointment in a couple of weeks. She should have messaged you with the time. I want to follow up, and we had other things to discuss that were left over from your last appointment. How’s the pain going in to fall season by the way?”

  “We’re not doing a whole check-up now, are we?” she joked.