The Beast of Moscow Page 2

  Vera thought someone knew; they simply didn’t want everyone else to know, too.

  Klara eyed Vera as she climbed the few marble steps up to the doors, waiting until she was at the top before asking, “Ty v poryadke—are you okay?”

  “Da,” she tried to assure her. “I was just up late talking to my ma back in New York and woke up way too late.”

  She didn’t mention that she’d gotten drunk after she hung up with her stepmother, Claire. Or that a part of her desperately wanted to leave Russia and her shattered dreams behind she simply couldn’t seem to pull the trigger on doing so.

  “And you’re late,” Vera told Klara. “Madame Lidia is going to give you hell. Go.”

  The eighteen-year-old didn’t need to be told again, but she waited at the front doors just long enough to hold the heavy oak open until Vera slipped inside.

  “And thanks again for the kids!” she called to the girl’s retreating back.

  Klara only waved a hand high before taking the grand staircase that curved along the west wall of the massive entrance to The Swan House. Black marble greeted guests that were lucky enough to come inside. Floors, pillars, and even the stairs. The outside had been painted the color where it could be, and the stone wall surrounding the massive property included black wrought iron grating across the top. The rich tapestries and heavy silk and satin curtains that fell to the floor in luxurious piles around every window and entrance was all nostalgic for Vera.

  She remembered the first time she saw it, The Swan House with its towering golden spires and massive stature looming amongst the backdrop of the city, and the way her heart had raced as she stepped inside. It was hard not to be amazed and in awe of this place, and what it had promised to her.

  It became home.

  Still was.

  That’s why she had yet to leave.

  Partly, anyway.

  Vera crossed the mostly quiet entrance, the only sound coming from the squeaks of her runners against the marble floor, murmurs from somewhere upstairs and young laughter traveling beyond the hallway beneath the massive staircase. She headed into the hallway with her small canvas duffle bag emblazoned with the logo of the ballet company tossed over her shoulder. At least in the warmer months, she didn’t have to waste time bundling up, so all she really had to do was change shoes and toss off her light windbreaker. She already had on her staple black leotard and tights. Even the compress wrap that kept her left ankle steady while she danced only took a few seconds to put on.

  If the kids had only started their stretches, then she had a few minutes to work with before someone started to complain about her tardiness. Not that she thought anyone would. Vera might not have danced professionally for The Swan House since that last showing of In the Stars, but the city still knew her name and loved her all the same.

  That was the last thing Vera wanted to think about, so she forced those thoughts to the back of her mind as she entered the lower gallery of the newest studio built inside what had once been one of many storage sections for the company in the massive building. It never served her well to walk into a room full of kids who seemingly adored her with a heavy heart—she swore those kids could see it every single time.

  They deserved better than that.

  The parents—and guardians—of the class of students that she could see already lined up along the barres against the wall of mirrors through the gallery windows stopped their conversation as she breezed straight through with a wave. Their greetings chased her into the changing room connected to the gallery, but no one followed her inside.

  Pink and black and gold duffel bags lined the benches inside the changing room, and Vera dropped hers with the kids’. It took her no time at all to change out her outdoor shoes and into her sneakers after she’d wrapped her ankle. The warmer months were easier because the cold always brought an ache to the old break.

  Vera had just stood up and fixed the waistband of her tights when one of the girls from her class made herself known in the changing room by clearing her throat. Eleven-year-old Nelli shrugged and scuffed the toe of her shoe against the floor when she realized Vera had noticed her standing there.

  “No tights?” she asked in Russian although most of the kids and people who came in and out of The Swan House were fluent in English, too. Otherwise, they tended to pick up on it considering many of the ballerinas that studied here came from all over the world, and English was often the common denominator for many.

  “Or shoes,” Nelli muttered.

  “That’s okay. I’ll leave an extra set in here and you can change fast. No problem.”

  At that statement, the blue-eyed, dark-haired girl who had reminded her of herself the first time she laid eyes on her beamed up at Vera. “I tried to remind Mik but—”

  “Mikhail has a lot going on, right? Is he taking summer classes again?”

  Nelli shrugged but nodded. “I miss him.”

  “I bet.”

  The girl’s older brother had taken custody of the girl after an unfortunate accident killed their parents two years earlier. The boy was only twenty. He barely made enough money to scrape by but didn’t give up—between his college classes and his sister, Vera bet time was thin. She didn’t hold it against him when Nelli showed up missing something.

  Anything could be fixed.

  What was most important was that he got her there in the first damn place. Three days a week for three hours, Nelli and the other kids waiting for Vera in that studio were safe and warm and every single one of them were loved.

  By her, anyway.

  “All right,” she told the girl, “I’ll be out in a second. Your clothes will be waiting right here.”

  “You’re the best, Vera.”

  Those words, tossed over the girl’s shoulder as she raced down the changing room’s corridor, managed to make Vera smile. Even though it didn’t last long.

  Vera hadn’t needed to remain tied to The Swan House after her final act on their stage left her with a shattered ankle, and a future without professional or competitive dance. In fact, her recovery—if only mentally—might have been easier had she put a decent bit of distance between herself and the company.

  But even back then, she’d cared too much about the family she felt like she had made and the rest of the people within these walls. They must have cared a lot about her, too, considering the number of kids and dancers that made it a point to visit Vera every day of her recovery from the devastating injury. Each time, they asked when she was coming back.

  Not if she would.

  It wasn’t like she had needed the money; Vera came to Russia with a trust fund that already made her life far beyond comfortable. The Swan House had been beneficial to her bank account, too, once she debuted on their stage—and Feliks, that prick, well he certainly hadn’t offered to pay her a dime after everything had happened.

  It wasn’t about the money because there wasn’t any.

  Vera just couldn’t leave this place.

  Even though it ruined her.

  She couldn’t say goodbye.

  A part of her wished she could understand the heavy sadness that left her with—a constant weight inside her chest that she couldn’t explain—but what good would understanding any of it do for her?

  All these years later, Vera was still here.

  She figured ... it must be where she wanted to be. If not, she certainly hoped it was where she should be.

  *

  “Let’s wrap it up, call that a day,” Vera told the class of thirty kids. Only a handful were boys with the larger majority being girls. Instantly, the second she told the group that the class was over, a chorus of voices chased her to the stereo where she turned it off and disconnected it from the Bluetooth on her phone.

  “Aww, can we try that again?” asked Sonya, the oldest of the group at twelve. The scholarships offered by The Swan House looked fondly upon the kids who trained in their free program if the talent and effort was there. Spots were extremely limit
ed, though, but Sonya was one of those kids she knew the instructors were watching. “That last set of steps—can I run through it again?”

  “You did it perfectly,” she told the girl.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Vera, will you dance for us before we go?” piqued Nelli, her voice rising above the other kids who all wanted to be heard as parents started to come to the doorway of the studio, waving them back to leave.

  The moment the girl voiced the idea, every other kid who didn’t want to finish up with the class decided to add their agreement with Nelli’s choice.

  “I don’t know,” Vera said.

  “Please?”

  “I only have my sneakers.”

  “So?”

  Nelli even put her hands on her hips when she added for the other kids, “You let me practice in sneakers.”

  “Once,” she returned fast, laughing.

  “Please, Vera?”

  How could she say no to that?

  She danced so infrequently—steady practice only led to pain, and likely, further reinjuring her ankle. Even teaching, she wore sneakers because she didn’t have the support she needed in pointe shoes. Not even satin slippers with a grip on the bottom would do the job.

  Vera tried everything, but the reality was that she danced for love, now. Only occasionally, never with much seriousness involved, and always because she wanted to.

  Nothing else was possible.

  “Is she going to dance?” Vera heard a parent ask from somewhere behind her shoulder.

  “I think so,” another kid called back.

  Vera only sighed.

  Especially when the kids asked again, “Please, Vera?”

  Honestly—who would say no?

  3.

  The last thing a man in Moscow wanted to find in his office at dinner time hours was Vaslav Pashkov. A man like him should be anywhere else at this time of day—wining and dining a woman, maybe, or handling business to rake in another few hundred million to pad his many bank accounts.

  A person certainly wouldn’t want to find the Russian crime boss already sitting behind their desk the second they walked into the room, but that was exactly what greeted Feliks in his office at The Swan House. Except the man was too busy arguing with the female close at his back to notice the bigger threat waiting for him.

  The woman—if she was even that, because Vaslav thought she couldn’t be older than eighteen—was erratic, and her waving arms only added to the venom in her Russian that she spewed at the man.

  “You promised me—you said it was mine!”

  Her black leggings and backless leotard gave away that she was a dancer, but the fact she still had her pointe shoes on made Vaslav think she was probably higher in the company. Especially if she had a direct line to Feliks who did nothing more for the ballet house than handle money and sign paperwork.

  He certainly wasn’t instructing the ballerinas, and when the company had been at its prime doing a show a week before traveling the world for another year showing the same ballet outside of Russia, Feliks had done nothing more than soak up adoration and praise while raking in millions in the meantime.

  He was the face for the public—handsome, still young at only thirty-five, and connected to all the right people in all the wrong ways.

  A mouthpiece, really.

  Feliks had little to no power otherwise.

  Oh, Vaslav was sure the suka believed he had a higher purpose where The Swan House was concerned, even agreeing to become a part of his father’s criminal empire just to get his name on the deed.

  But what good had it done?

  According to the paperwork Vaslav found, that Nico told him it didn’t matter to the grander scheme, The Swan House had been bleeding money for nearly six years. The prestige it once held had slowly been dimming for years. Yes, they still produced world class ballerinas, but a lot of good it did when they were only making money headhunting them for other companies.

  The personal loan Vaslav’s right-hand man offered to Feliks to save his precious house of ballet might not have technically been his money, but since he owned the soul of all vory within the confines of this godforsaken country ... anything they were owed was his.

  Technicalities be damned.

  Especially if it meant Vaslav could finally use it as a reason to get rid of the bastard. The last remaining Abramov tied to the dynasty that had built the empire Vaslav now ran—Feliks had known he was next on the man’s list to die the second he’d opened a present in this very room to find his father’s head waiting inside.

  He’d always been a piss poor brigadier. Never should have made it past the brodyagi of his father’s bratva because he was practically worthless as a criminal when he’d been born to nothing but a silver spoon and pampered for most of his life. Too spoiled and unwilling to make a bloody mess out of his hands, but goddamn, he’d wanted those stars on his shoulders all the same.

  Mussor—literal garbage—he wasn’t seen as anything more to the men across Russia and the factions of their brotherhood that extended beyond the country. Who would touch that? Not if a vor had any respect for the code, anyhow. It wasn’t as if the brotherhood would miss the man or look for vengeance.

  Vaslav had done well to keep this much of a distance between the two while he waited for the attention to boil over after his last move on Feliks’ father. That was the entire reason he hadn’t known there was so much money missing from this side of his business.

  Feliks had been a dead man walking for a long time. The clock had finally stopped counting down, and now someone else would have to answer for the fact that it had gone on this long. Vaslav intended on handling that issue soon, too.

  “Nyet!” Feliks spun on the shrieking girl with a furious punch of his pointed finger right in her face. It stopped her on the spot, his trembling digit only inches from her turned up nose. Shorter than the man by a few inches, she didn’t appear at all scared of him.

  It almost made Vaslav chuckle.

  Who would be scared of Feliks? A bitch’s bark was always worse than its bite.

  “That is enough,” Feliks hissed at the girl.

  She opened her mouth, likely to argue back with the man, but Vaslav simply didn’t have the patience to sit there and wait for someone to notice him any longer. As it was, he had already been there too long, and Igor would be returning with the car and driver at any moment. The second he did, Vaslav needed to leave, a call would be made, and the cleaner should come—that was his orders.

  Then, this would all be over. He would never hear the name Abramov even whispered in his presence again.

  Igor couldn’t do his job if his boss didn’t first do his, so Vaslav chose to interrupt the two.

  Clapping slowly from where he sat behind Feliks’ ornate, gaudy desk carved from a single piece of wood and painted a glossy black, Vaslav smirked as two pairs of eyes turned on him. Even a scowl could make his scarred face look like quite a sight waiting in the shadows of a room, so he only grinned more when the girl sucked in a gasp and stumbled a step back.

  “Love the show, but where’s my dinner?” he asked them.

  “Der’mo,” Feliks cursed under his breath.

  Vaslav’s clapping came to a sudden stop when he said, “Yes, comrade, you’re certainly in a lot of shit at the moment, aren’t you?”

  “Feliks, what’s wrong, should I cal—”

  He didn’t offer the ballerina a chance to say anything further before he had shoved her out of the room, ignoring her protests and questions at the same time. Vaslav at least allowed the man to get the female out of firing range before he stood from the squeaky office chair that smelled like old leather and cheap cologne.

  That smell had his migraine from earlier flaring all over again, but other than the squint of his eyes and hard set of his mouth—which didn’t leave his expression all that different from his norm—one wouldn’t know Vaslav was suddenly in blinding pain.

  Literally.

  For a
few seconds, it took his vision away.

  By the time Feliks had yanked closed the heavy oak doors leading into his office, Vaslav had already rounded the desk.

  “I didn’t know you were coming, Vas.”

  The nickname was enough to get the asshole killed right there on the spot—he could count the number of people on one hand that he allowed to shorten his name as if they were friendly. Feliks most certainly was not one of them.

  “Oh, didn’t you?” he asked back. “Apparently, Nico’s been cleaning up after you for a while. I think you saw me coming for a long time, no?”

  The words hissed through clenched teeth, but he knew they still made an impact.

  Spinning around to face Vaslav, Feliks face drained of color when the taller, older man came to rest against the front of his desk. Hooking one ankle over the other, Vaslav tightened his grip on the edge of the desk’s glossy top, squeezing it for all it was worth to hide the sudden shakiness in his hands.

  The pain was sharper than ever. Light spots and black dots danced in his vision. The doctors liked to use a scale—a simple one to ten with the lower end being the least amount of pain and ten topping out at the very worst. Daily, while the migraines were just fading in and out, he maintained a steady seven on the scale.

  Enough to still need meds. A Demerol could put a decent dent in his pain scale when caught at the right time, but by seven, it was enough to make him sick to his stomach.

  Enough to make him so angry.

  Right then, it was a pure ten.

  And Vas could barely breathe.

  It was the worst possible time for his migraine to come in fast and heavy. He blamed it on the past week—with Nico out of the country on a personal trip with his whore of the month, that left Vaslav and Igor to handle the city and any business within it on their own. Five, or two, years ago that might not have been such a problem.

  Now, with the migraines becoming more frequent and severe, aided by his constant stress and high blood pressure, he could barely make it to the end of the week without finding himself huddled over a toilet, puking his guts out from the pain, and roaring for someone to find him anything to make it better.