Page 49 of The Beast of Moscow

“I’m not here asking other people, Miss Avdonin. I’m here to ask you.”

Was it crazy?

Could she see Hannah if her friend had time for a short flight? Hannah never missed a chance to visit Paris, even if she could only stay for a night.

And him, she thought.

She would have time with Vas.

Maybe then, she could stop calling him a stranger.

“Would you be coming, too?” Vera asked.

“Another man will probably accompany Vaslav on his business trip to Paris; we’re running a bit short on hands here in Moscow for people who can handle a certain subset of my boss’s business.”

“Oh, now it’s a business trip?”

Igor only sighed.

Vera laughed back, walking down the sidewalk away from Igor without warning. “Tell him I’ll go—I’m sure you can let me know when and where to be, right?”

“Vera!”

She glanced back over her shoulder to find Igor had turned to watch her head down the street. “What?”

“I’ll knock next time, but I won’t ever wait by the door for you to answer.”

She stopped walking. “Why?”

“Because I already know he’d kill me if he thought I stepped foot inside.”

15.

“Vera.”

“Alexi,” she replied, opening her front door a bit wider when she realized who had been ringing her doorbell. “Hi.”

The familiar man standing on her front stoop smiled wide. “Been a while, yeah?”

“That’s an understatement,” she replied easily.

“What’s a handful of years between friends, huh?”

“I remember you telling me once—I think it was my seventeenth birthday after I went to a party—that you weren’t assigned to me to be my friend, actually.”

“Because your father wouldn’t have hesitated to put a bullet in my head if he thought you believed we were anything but what we were, Vera.”

She considered that.

For mere seconds.

“Fair enough,” Vera replied. Shifting from foot to foot, she peered over his shoulder to see if anything or anyone waited on the street behind him, but she didn’t see anything. “No car?”

“I thought a walk would be nice today.”

The sun was out and high in a cloudless sky, but that didn’t mean she trusted Alexi—a man who had once been tasked as her personal bodyguard hired by her father until she turned eighteen—to be honest about his sudden presence on her doorstep when they hadn’t spoken in, quite literally, years.

“What do you want?” she asked.