Page 41 of The Beast of Moscow

He did want to know. In fact, Vaslav even gave Igor explicit directions as to doing exactly that because he’d not missed how Vera said she had been having a bad day. Not that it mattered much, now.

He swayed where he stood at the front of his desk, barely able to see through the double vision that had accompanied him since he returned from the outside. He thought he could get ahead of the worst of the migraine by downing what remained of the vodka in the last bottle he had in the den—that didn’t work.

If anything, the liquor had settled too heavily in his stomach, mixed with the tea in his otherwise empty stomach, and the churning came back with a vengeance. Between the pain splitting his skull, the fuzzy, wavy vision making every step he took feel like the ground was coming out from under his feet, and the burning clench deep in his gut ...

Vas could barely breathe.

Let alone think.

He couldn’t even remember how he came to stand at the front of his desk. Was it to get up out of the chair because he was scared that he wouldn’t be able to later? Or had he not even been sitting behind his desk in the first place?

“Jesus Christ,” Vaslav hissed.

He squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he gripped the edge of the desk, trembling from the very tips of his fingers all the way down to his toes in his shoes.

Hell.

He was already in hell.

Vaslav hadn’t even gotten undressed from his day clothes yet; didn’t have the energy or give a damn to do it either when he knew by the morning, after his first night with practically no sleep, the clothes wouldn’t matter anyway. Not unless he could find the motivation to strip and get under the spray of the shower.

As hot as it would go.

God, that sounded good. Anything would be better than what he was currently doing, really.

The chance for some relief sent Vaslav moving away from his desk. A mistake he regretted the second he took that first, wobbly step. There was something to be said about a man his size crumpling to the floor. It wasn’t graceful; he barely had time to consider that he had been upright a moment ago before he was suddenly sprawled across the cold, hardwood floors.

On his back, Vaslav groaned while he blinked up at the ceiling overhead and tried to figure out what just happened.

He’d heard the crash of items around him, likely from his hand sweeping his desk. Something shattered on the floor along with his own body—he hoped it wasn’t the crystal bowl that Irina had gifted him to hold the hard candies she once liked. Or even the priceless lamp with a mushroom-shaped shade made of stained glass, that had belonged to his great-grandmother and had been in this very room since the house had first been wired for electricity.

It was too late now.

Vaslav groaned out what air remained in his chest. The smack to the floor had taken the rest from him, and if those deep pulses of sharp agony in the base of his skull weren’t so familiar, he might have thought he hit his head, too.

But that was just the migraine.

The knocking on the den’s door had yet to cease. Mira must have heard him fall, but Vaslav couldn’t respond to her calls when he was too busy trying to focus on the steady pulls of his short breaths into his lungs. It never felt like he could get enough.

Not quite.

“Mr. Pashkov! Can you hear me—are you okay?”

Somewhere outside, close to the windows of the den, Marrow howled. It was loud enough to make Vaslav think the sound rattled his bones. He hated that sound, if only because it reminded him of the pain inside his head. Every high-pitch howl licked his already bleeding brain with salt to cover the wounds.

“Get that fucking dog in the house!” he roared.

It was the only way Marrow would quit.

When he could lay his one hundred and thirty-five pounds of muscle in front of his master’s door where he could growl at the slightest of movements within breathing distance of his massive paws. That’s when Marrow would stop.

The howling continued.

So did Vaslav’s rage.

He liked to think the pain was what made him mean—it could rip away his sense in an instant, and leave him a vicious, violent mess. But the vodka and pills didn’t help when they only numbed his emotions and nerves but left his mind confused and robotic. Dull, and slow. Sometimes, he couldn’t even hear his own yelling.

Vaslav managed to make it back to his feet, but his still-swimming vision didn’t allow him the focus he needed as he stumbled through the ruins from his desk. Glass crunched under his every step while he pressed his fisted hand into the side of his temple because the pressure there felt like his head was about to explode.