Page 8 of The Beast of Moscow

By the time Feliks had yanked closed the heavy oak doors leading into his office, Vaslav had already rounded the desk.

“I didn’t know you were coming, Vas.”

The nickname was enough to get the asshole killed right there on the spot—he could count the number of people on one hand that he allowed to shorten his name as if they were friendly. Feliks most certainly was not one of them.

“Oh, didn’t you?” he asked back. “Apparently, Nico’s been cleaning up after you for a while. I think you saw me coming for a long time, no?”

The words hissed through clenched teeth, but he knew they still made an impact.

Spinning around to face Vaslav, Feliks face drained of color when the taller, older man came to rest against the front of his desk. Hooking one ankle over the other, Vaslav tightened his grip on the edge of the desk’s glossy top, squeezing it for all it was worth to hide the sudden shakiness in his hands.

The pain was sharper than ever. Light spots and black dots danced in his vision. The doctors liked to use a scale—a simple one to ten with the lower end being the least amount of pain and ten topping out at the very worst. Daily, while the migraines were just fading in and out, he maintained a steady seven on the scale.

Enough to still need meds. A Demerol could put a decent dent in his pain scale when caught at the right time, but by seven, it was enough to make him sick to his stomach.

Enough to make him so angry.

Right then, it was a pure ten.

And Vas could barely breathe.

It was the worst possible time for his migraine to come in fast and heavy. He blamed it on the past week—with Nico out of the country on a personal trip with his whore of the month, that left Vaslav and Igor to handle the city and any business within it on their own. Five, or two, years ago that might not have been such a problem.

Now, with the migraines becoming more frequent and severe, aided by his constant stress and high blood pressure, he could barely make it to the end of the week without finding himself huddled over a toilet, puking his guts out from the pain, and roaring for someone to find him anything to make it better.

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.