Page 91 of The Beast of Moscow

He didn’t fault her for what she did next.

“Po’shyol ‘na hui—Fuck you.”

Vera didn’t yell the words, but it stung all the same. Her anger hissed like wind; the same way her slender figure did cutting past him before she left him behind in the bedroom without even a glare.

He’d have gone after her. Explained, even, that he’d lied about the state of his migraine, his stress was high, and he was sure that all of it would seem like excuses to her. The fact he was nasty, seemingly unapologetically so, was just a by-product of his awful method of coping.

Not all of it was good.

Instead of following her, he scratched at his beard and looked at the time on his phone; it had crawled beyond half past three.

Of course.

His gaze lifted to the doorway when a bedroom door slammed loudly down the hall.

Business first, he thought.

Everything else had to wait.

26.

Vera’s eyes fluttered open to darkness, and the slam of a door. Having yanked open the window in the bedroom before she finally fell asleep on the four-poster bed with cloud-like white blankets and pillows, her naked body felt the nice chill from the breeze coming in, but it also brought something else.

A sound ...

The low rumble of an engine.

She barely registered the time blinking on the digital clock beside the bed, the only light offered in the room. The red five-oh-five just didn’t make sense to her overly exhausted brain as she pushed up from the bed to follow the sound coming in from the window.

She padded in bare feet across the cool hardwood floor to find that she had been right. It was the sound of a vehicle’s engine that was carrying up to her spot—from a black two-door sedan that had parked in the side street along the fence that protected the apartment’s backyard garden and paths from strangers.

Vera moved to close the window, but the shout of Italian made her pause. She couldn’t understand or even see the two men talking in the alley below, so she pulled the window down to at least shut out the noise in the otherwise sleeping city.

Maybe she could get back to sleep.

If her bladder hadn’t made itself known.

It took her way too long to find the rumpled t-shirt she’d used to sleep in the night before and since the bedroom at the end of the hall didn’t have a private bathroom like the master, she was forced to open her door and head for the stairs. The only other bathroom was downstairs, full-size like the master, but she’d noticed it wasn’t as lived in as the other.

The apartment was as quiet as it had been, and only dim pot lights along the ceiling helped her manage her way down the stairs. She was halfway down when she heard Vas.

“Mr. Messina, yes?”

“Call me Mario.”

All at once, Vera stopped in the stairwell, every muscle in her body freezing. She sat on the ledge of a step as the two men with two distinct accents—one Russian, and one Italian—continued their conversation.

“You made me wait so long for a time and place that I was starting to think we were going to have a late brunch,” the man Vaslav had called Mario said, his tone remaining cheerful.

“Too early for you, comrade?”

“Honestly?”

“I prefer it,” Vaslav deadpanned.

“Not even God gets me out of bed before eight.”

A dark, familiar chuckle echoed up the stairs. She knew it was Vaslav because the sound connected to her brain instantly and left her in a pile of shivers. Even her breath rattled. It was disconcerting how a man could be so mean, without even caring, and still manage to turn her on when they weren’t even looking at one another face to face.