Page 21 of The Beast of Moscow

“Still won’t tell me who makes these teas?” Natalia asked while her teacup was filled with boiling water from the fine China teapot where his favorite coconut and berry tea had been steeping for a minimum of ten minutes.

Just the way he liked it.

There was something about the smell of the coconut mixed with berries that calmed him in a way few other things did. Not that he would ever admit as much.

Whether the question was for him, he opted not to answer. Mira was there to save the day, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before she made herself scarce.

“A man in Ontario makes the bags and sends them once a month,” Mira explained. “You know I only steep the tea for Mr. Pashkov, Miss Natalia.”

“Yes, but maybe I would like to have some—”

“NiagraTeas,” Vaslav said in a grunt while the axe slicing through a massive chunk of wood at the same time. As the blocks fell to the ground, he sent his axe flying into the stump where it remained stuck as he turned to face his mother. “I’m sure the company would be happy to make you some tea, Mat.”

Natalia, with her legs crossed under the skirt of her flower-printed summer dress, was already lifting the teacup to her pursed lips for a taste. She still liked her button-up cardigans, too, and matching them with the color of her outfit. She paused, tapping the pointed toe of her stiletto heels against nothing but air, just long enough to say, “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Vaslav seriously considered heading for the house at that comment—no doubt, his mother was just getting started with her snide comments and thinly veiled displeasure. When he was young, he blamed her lack of empathy and cruel ways on her drinking and upbringing. The only man worse than both combined, after all, was her own father.

A man whose name they no longer spoke.

“What do you want?” he outright asked.

Natalia let out a little sigh and sipped from her tea. Mira quickly finished her business, not speaking to mother or son, including pouring Vaslav’s cup, before making her way to the house without another look back.

“What makes you think I want anything?” Natalia asked back, raising one perfectly manicured eyebrow as if to defy her son’s accusation.

One wouldn’t guess by looking at Natalia Pashkova that she had turned sixty-three that year. Oh, he’d been told the bash was epic—there were even fireworks over Moscow. The beloved socialite that had never quite let go of the party. He’d never met someone quite as vain as her, and even when he was only five, and she, twenty-two, he could remember her staring at her mostly naked body in the mirror and blaming him for the tiny white stripes that were barely visible on her thighs.

“You’re the only one I kept, you know?” she would tell him a few years later after he’d discovered through the older boys in the neighborhood who’d teased him about it why so many men came and went with her. “Papasha was dead then, he didn’t have a say anymore. I shouldn’t have kept you, either. Look what you did to me.”

One of many fond memories.

“I haven’t even been around since the beginning of June,” his mother lamented.

“Mmm,” Vaslav grunted back. “Because your allowance showed up right on time, and with a little bit extra, no?”

There was a split second between the delivery of his words and how his mother’s face twitched ever-so-slightly. The Botox did wonders, or so he was told. She didn’t look a day over forty, and he had more gray peppered into his dark temples than she did.

Nonetheless, he’d seen her flinch.

The almost-scowl.

Yet, in seconds she was smiling in that whatever-you-like-dear way of hers that had his fucking skin crawling.

“Vas,” she practically cooed.

Natalia even waved her coffin-shaped blood-red nails his way.

“Mat.”

“Why so formal?”

Good God, she tested every ounce of his patience. The second he sighed, giving her the reaction—any reaction; that was the problem—she wanted, Natalia pounced.

In her own special way.

“Just say it—Mother, the reason I’ve sent you more money, and will keep doing so, is to keep you far away from me. Agree?” Natalia shrugged, laughing under her breath as she stood from the sofa, her gaze still locked on him. What bothered him the most about his mother were her eyes. They matched his. Icy blue, practically dead, and entirely genetic. They were more alike than either of them would admit. Setting her teacup to the matching rattan table, she said, “I mean, then we wouldn’t have to go through all these theatrics.”

“You don’t want to be here anyway.”