The Beast of Moscow Page 3

  He’d tried everything.

  Even his own mother, who had lived in the same estate in Dubna—since before his initial incarceration at just thirteen years old for beating her rapist to death in the street—decided in the last year that she couldn’t stay within the same walls as Vaslav anymore. He was too much; his pain was no longer his own when he allowed it to bleed into every person around him.

  He didn’t blame her.

  He didn’t even blame himself, now.

  Vaslav was simply trying to get from one day to the next, but he wasn’t entirely sure of the reason why. Who wanted to live like this—why wasn’t he already dead? A better man would have pulled the trigger by now. He was sure of it.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  He was a coward.

  “Are you okay?” Feliks asked.

  Vaslav’s jaws clicked from how hard he clenched his molars to swallow back the pain before he uttered, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  That time, his words came out hoarse. He’d taken punches to the head that felt better than the exploding fireworks of agony that rippled through his brain like the aftershocks of a wave.

  He didn’t meet the man’s eyes. Couldn’t reach for the gun to shoot the bastard like he had initially come there to do. Vaslav was only able to suck cool air through his tight teeth and then talk. The damn migraines had been fading in and out for a good day, but he knew what it meant because every time they came back in again, they were longer. Soon, he would get no break between the flashes of pain, and it would all melt together for a migraine that would last ...

  His longest had been nine days.

  Of unending pain.

  Igor was right.

  He needed to take that early weekend and hide away behind the stone walls of his estate with the shades drawn tight on every window and a bottle of good vodka close. At least then when he started to puke, he couldn’t blame it just on the migraines.

  “Where is my fucking money?” Vaslav demanded.

  He did meet Feliks’ stare, then, only to find the younger man’s cheek twitched with the lie he was about to spew. No surprise.

  “You already know I don’t have it or you wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  Hell.

  Maybe the man wasn’t a total fucking moron.

  “This place has been—”

  “It’s not been the same since the accident,” Feliks rushed to say.

  Excuses, Vaslav knew.

  Still, he let the man talk because it gave him a second to steady himself again. Maybe he could push down the pain long enough to get this over with.

  “We couldn’t sell a fucking ticket—every vendor in Europe canceled for the tour. There was too many problems, they said. Rumors. It practically ruined us.”

  Licking at his dry lips, Vaslav then asked, “Do you really think it matters now?”

  He knew of the incident the man spoke of—an injured ballerina, a favorite of the company and public. Vaguely, the details stuck out in his mind but little else because that time in his life had been a particularly hard one. Those years followed the death of his wife and almost everything surrounding finding her murdered on the front steps of his estate, a shotgun blast through her face to ensure there would be no open viewing of her body before they buried her, well ... he’d lived his days in a bit of haze.

  Until one day, it all cleared.

  And everybody paid.

  Everybody.

  And none of that changed what Vaslav intended to happen here today.

  “Vas, you’ve gone white,” he heard Feliks say. “You don’t look okay.”

  When had the room swayed like that? Why was it so goddamn bright? One of his hands went numb, but the bigger issue was that he couldn’t tell which.

  Well, the ringing in his ears had finally started. Of that, he was sure. The second he let go of the desk, both his knees buckled. He was barely able to keep his formidable frame from crumpling to a heap on the floor.

  A floor that was spinning beneath him.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  It was more than just the pain.

  “Get Igor,” Vaslav ordered, unable to watch Feliks’ retreat from the room, but he thought he heard the footsteps receding. It was a toss-up whether the man even heard him call out, “He should be at the front.”

  By now.

  Fortunately for Feliks, the rest of Vaslav’s plan would have to wait.

  4.

  “Vas, are you even listening to me?”

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” he heard himself snarl.

  Had he pushed Igor off? He must have because from somewhere behind him, his steps stumbling one after another to propel him toward a set of large doors, his head of security shouted, “You can’t barely stand—I’m calling one! Kill me later for it.”

  “Otva’li,” Vaslav barked, but he thought it came out a little too garbled. The curse didn’t have his sharp impact coming out of his mouth like it usually did.

  Or maybe that was just the rest of the sounds around him that felt like they were all swirling together. He didn’t recognize the hall he entered, but he was sure a different voice had added something into the conversation he left behind.

  Something that sounded a lot like, “He can’t go far. Call for help. I know he hates me, but goddammit, she’d never forgive me.”

  Vaslav wasn’t sure what part of this he disliked the most—that he couldn’t remember where he was or the reason for why he was there. In fact, when he reached into his memories, he found a bank of still images, faces and moments that he understood and recognized without any uncertainty, but he couldn’t remember where he had woken up that morning.

  Still stumbling down the unfamiliar corridor, the argument continued to ensue behind them. He wasn’t seriously listening to whatever the men had to say—it wasn’t anything different from what he’d already heard.

  People will know.

  Something is wrong.

  He makes the calls.

  Vaslav tried to focus on the short bursts of his breaths as his wild gaze scanned the large portrait paintings of ballerinas. It was getting too bright again.

  He didn’t know where that light spilled in from. All the same, he couldn’t bear it. The pain was back.

  Vaslav shrunk into the first set of shadows he could find, and squeezed his eyes shut when his back hit a wall.

  “Vas!” he heard someone call.

  But he couldn’t speak again.

  Not when the stabbing bursts from the scattered migraine pain began to flutter, and he could barely hold himself up.

  Footsteps raced by mere feet from his presence, beyond the sliver of light offered by a small doorway that he probably could have reached for if only his arms would do what he wanted them to.

  “Vas—boss!”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Vaslav!”

  *

  Beep.

  Beep.

  BEEP.

  Every one of those strange digital beeps accompanied a rocking motion that made Vaslav acutely aware of the fact his back was flat against something hard.

  “Is the blinking a good sign?”

  The question didn’t get answered in the way the person likely wanted considering as soon as Vaslav had some sense of consciousness, he was fighting.

  Ripping at the mask on his face, gasping in a burning lungful of air, he didn’t recognize the faces of the men dressed in blue and white hovering over him. Roaring his anger and confusion out with flailing arms that sent everyone inching back.

  But not for long.

  Why was he laying down?

  “Sir—”

  “Sir, if you don’t stop we’ll have to tranq you!”

  He might have laughed at that threat, but he was too busy shouting unintelligible curses. Tranq him? He’d have their hearts cut out and the blood in the chambers boiled for tea. Hadn’t Igor just asked him a question?

  Wasn’t he in a dark room?

  “Vas, come on.”

  “Give it, then,” came the order.

  “Twenty milligrams of—”

  Good God.

  Did they have him strapped down to a gurney?

  His struggle increased at the same time a paramedic plunged a needle full of something straight into Vaslav’s neck.

  The beeping and rocking came back as his gaze settled on the glass window on the rear door of the vehicle. He couldn’t see the faces of the three men anymore—not the two working on him or the one trying to stay out of their way, tucked into the rear corner.

  He just saw the glass.

  That’s what the window made him remember.

  What he saw first.

  The glass.

  When he had stumbled into the doorway with shadows, then down the dark hallway that he thought would save him from further pain in his confusion, he hadn’t realized it had only been something of an alternative exit. It led him to a gallery, but he’d ignored the carpeted benches and tight stairwell that led downward for the wall of glass windows waiting in front of him.

  He found something there. That’s why he remembered the windows.

  What was it?

  *

  “You can’t be serious!”

  Vaslav didn’t even bother to dignify Igor’s indignant outburst with a reply as he worked on buttoning up his silk shirt before reaching for his phone that someone had left on the portable stand next to the hospital bed.

  “Tell him that he’s crazy!”

  “Well,” the doctor started.

  Vaslav passed the man standing in the hospital room doorway a look, but otherwise, didn’t pay him any more mind. The last eighteen hours had not been easy for the doctor on a twenty-four-hour shift, never mind the ward’s nurses. Vaslav was
not at all a model patient and made every test and interaction far more difficult than it needed to be for everyone involved.

  Without even trying, really.

  Some might call it a talent.

  “Well, what?” Igor barked at the man. “You just spent fifteen minutes explaining what might have caused his delirious episode, including that it could have been a mini stroke your tests didn’t find, and now you’re just going to allow him to walk out of here?”

  “He is choosing to discharge himself, actually,” the doctor replied calmly, “and considering the trouble he has already put this entire ward through since his arrival—including your demands for total secrecy while he was a patient, Mr. Ivanov—I am not left with very many options.”

  While the hallway outside of Vaslav’s private room appeared quiet and empty, he seriously doubted that it was. Igor might have managed to keep anyone important from finding out about his sudden admittance to the hospital, but that did nothing for the people who found him inside.

  He was a well-known figure in Moscow.

  His name came with warnings.

  As private as the doctor and nurses assigned to him had promised they would be, he trusted no one. Absolutely none of them. And he refused to remain within these walls for any longer than he had to.

  They could not force him to say, so he was going. It was as simple as that.

  “Listen,” the doctor told Igor while Vaslav made his way around the suite to pick up his remaining belongings that had been scattered throughout the space over the last night and day. “Medically, he’s clear. There are no more neurological symptoms, his pain is back down to a manageable scale, and there isn’t any immediate intervention he needs or that we could justifiably do. Yes, we could run more tests, but—”

  “So can my other doctors,” Vaslav murmured.

  The man in the white lab coat sighed. “Exactly. I’m sorry; less stress, let him relax. There isn’t much else I can do here.”

  “B’lyad.”

  Igor’s cuss flew over the doctor’s head as the man turned on his heel and left without a word. There wasn’t anything else that needed to be said, honestly. Vaslav probably wouldn’t even waste the time it would take to sign the discharge papers at the front desk.

  “You were right, the week was too much,” he said to his head of security. Igor’s behavior came from his worry, and Vaslav understood that but in the end ... he made the final call. Every call. Especially on this. “I should have just taken an early weekend when I woke up already wanting to puke.”

  Igor sighed, scrubbing a tattooed hand over his bald head before he said, “I called Nico. He’s coming back from his trip early.”

  That didn’t make Vaslav any happier. Not that he thought Igor suspected it would. Nico left the country with unfinished business between him and his boss, and that was already a problem. His sovietnik still had things to answer for regarding Feliks and The Swan House. At least, the hours spent at the hospital weren’t entirely wasted.

  He had time to think.

  To remember.

  The incident that found him here wasn’t enough to divert his plans entirely. It only put them off for a short while.

  “Good,” he said to a quiet Igor. “Make sure the first person he comes to see when he steps off that plane is me, yes?”

  Igor nodded. “You won’t even give them one more night, Vas? Just to check or—”

  “There’s nothing to find.”

  And even if there was, Vaslav couldn’t say he wanted to know.

  Clearly seeing he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Vaslav, certainly not when it came to convincing him that the hospital was where he needed to be, Igor headed for the door. “I’ll call the driver and get the car ready. For the record, nobody knows you’re here; nobody will.”

  Vaslav didn’t look away from the rings he slid back into place on his fingers, or the watch he affixed to his thick wrist as he muttered, “Perfect—I’d hate to have to kill both my spies for being totally fucking incompetent.”

  “Boss—”

  “There was a woman.”

  Igor froze in the doorway, shooting a look over his shoulder at Vaslav who was lost to his thoughts again. He’d been doing that a lot since his consciousness came back, and the confusion finally cleared. This place gave him too much time to think, and he hated that just as much as he despised the idea that someone might think something was wrong with him.

  “Pardon?” Igor asked.

  Vaslav considered not repeating his question—it meant admitting maybe his memory wasn’t entirely back like he’d claimed when the doctor had done a simple neurological test before agreeing to his discharge demand.

  That didn’t change what he knew.

  Or what Igor might know, for that matter.

  “She was dancing below the gallery,” Vaslav said, choosing each word carefully. The same way he chose what he would not say. That he remembered placing his hands along the ledge where the glass wall was so that he could watch the woman dance in her tights and sneakers. Or how when she finished, coming out of a fouetté, she’d been crying.

  All at once, the music that had been playing on her phone silenced and left the dark studio down below heavy. Even through the glass, though she hadn’t known then that he was watching her, Vaslav had felt it.

  Her heaviness—the sadness—it permeated.

  He didn’t know what had made her look up and see him there, but when she did, he’d collapsed again. Apparently, the small stairwell he’d noticed when he made his way into the gallery room led downstairs to the studio.

  He’d heard every one of her racing steps up to find him, and how loud she had screamed for help.

  While the unknown woman touched his face, still tear-streaked from her own private breakdown, she’d asked him for his name. She’d not been concerned by the grisly scar that her fingertips grazed as she maintained their eye contact. Even when she yelled for help a third and fourth time, her blue eyes had never once looked away from his own.

  Vaslav hadn’t given her his name. All he remembered asking back was, “Why were you crying?”

  That was how Igor and Feliks managed to find where he’d wandered off to down the corridor. Because the woman had been there to help.

  Vaslav never got an answer about her tears; he also didn’t get her name.

  But he remembered her.

  “The woman in the gallery,” Vaslav said, turning to face Igor fully in the hospital room. “The one that found me—who is she?”

  “A ballerina for the company, I suspect.”

  “Yes, but which one?”

  Igor’s gaze narrowed a bit. “Do you want me to find out?”

  Even he could hear the way the man’s sarcasm bled into the question—just enough to say he thought Vaslav’s current focus, considering he probably shouldn’t even be getting discharged, was skewed. Didn’t he have better things to worry about than an unknown woman who danced ballet in sneakers and only felt like a fragment in his memories?

  Sure, he did.

  And still, Vaslav couldn’t stop himself when he said, “Find her for me. I want to know who she is.”

  He could figure out why later.

  5.

  Vera swore under her breath as she almost knocked over the potted orchid waiting at the front doorstep of her Noble Row villa. It was the peek of a familiar script on the card that had been hung from the stem held up by a stick that made her smile, though.

  Bending down, and leaving her door still cracked for her four-bedroom villa that she had bought shortly after her broken ankle was cleared, it was the first thing in her life that she dropped any real money on and then spent hours with an interior decorator making it exactly the place she wanted to call home. It felt like hers.

  She recognized the script font her father always had the florist use whenever he called in to send her something special. Flipping the card over, a small note from Demyan was printed alongside the flower shop’s logo.

  Your mother said you sounded sad the other night. I hope this makes you smile. Love you, Vera. Call me if you want. - Papa

  Of course.

  Demyan always added that little if you want on his messages, even when he called and left one for her voicemail because he’d learned long ago that Vera didn’t like it when people pushed. She had been capable of making the right choices for herself from the time she was young; none she ever made steered her wrong.