Page 26 of The Lies Between Lovers

He saw it in her eyes when it clicked; when Vera knew who his wife had been, and how she was connected to Irina in her own way. He didn’t blame her for not being able to put the picture together before now—the first name was a common one in Russia, and Vera had been dealing with an exceedingly difficult situation around the same time his wife was killed. Not to mention, he hadn’t once visited the house of ballet while she was alive to keep a distance between his business with the mafiya and his wife’s first love.

Not that it mattered.

“Irina Abramova,” Vera said as she took a seat in one of the chairs he’d pulled away from the table to make room to work. “Feliks’ sister.”

“I don’t like to think of them as related, if I’m being honest.”

“Oh, my God.” She wouldn’t meet his stare, then, rocking forward on the chair as the heels of her palm met her forehead. “I didn’t even realize—”

“Why I hated him so much—why he can’t even look me in the face?”

Vera’s head snapped up, and he was stunned to see more tears had escaped from her eyes. “She died the night I had my accident.”

Vaslav nodded once. “She was killed on the same night you fell on the stage and broke your ankle, yes.”

“I heard she was coming to see the show because it was the last one we were having in Moscow and—”

“She was,” he interjected. “Feliks gave her a time to leave the house. He’d sent a car, or so I was told. The car never came, and she never made it off the steps.”

The same steps that still led up to the house. The very ones he’d spent an entire night scrubbing with bleach to remove the stains that actually took a year to fade. He almost took a sledgehammer to the goddamn things just to get that image out of his head, but he realized that was burned there forever.

So many memories of Irina were lost to the recesses of his damaged brain—filed away where he couldn’t reach them anymore. But that one?

Oh, that one was as fresh as it had ever been.

Horror stared back from Vera.

Vas was unmoved.

None of this was new to him.

Reality was not his friend.

No one was.

Vera’s stare darted from him to the potted shrub on the table. “I can’t remember if I ever learned why or how she died, I think I was—”

“Probably in and out of physical rehab around then,” he interrupted, not unkindly. It wasn’t Vera’s fault that she didn’t have the details surrounding his wife’s murder, and he had no plans to offer them now. “The papers were careful about covering it, as well. The rest of the media, too.”

Vera’s chin trembled, but she still lifted it so they could see one another when she said, “Were they careful because of her connections to ... well, you know what I mean, right?”

He did.

“Partly,” he replied. “And partly because I had already made several threats after speculation was published that hit a little too close to home. Her father had her killed; he’d already dishonored her with a bullet to the face that insured the people who loved her wouldn’t get to say goodbye to the person they had known. The rest of the world didn’t need to sensationalize something that had only been meant to punish me. She’d suffered enough; she wouldn’t be disrespected after her death, too.”

So much for not sharing, he told himself.

“Well, not while I was alive, anyway,” Vaslav added after a moment. Although, every day after that had felt like his own slow death that he couldn’t escape.

Yet, here he was.

Still living.

Or something of the sort.

Vera let out another hard exhale, but otherwise, remained seated in the chair absorbing what she had learned. He didn’t fault her for needing the time.

Reaching for the pot, he yanked the heavy plant off the table and asked, “Have you thought of a good place for it to go yet?”