Page 7 of The Beast of Moscow

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.