Page 41 of The Lies Between Lovers

“Remembered what?” Igor asked behind the wheel.

“Why I liked you.”

“Da?”

Vaslav nodded as his hands threaded through the thick coat of a dog he hadn’t expected to be waiting for him when he walked out the front doors of his home. Marrow, as black as coal, had never looked better; he even let Mira brush him out the evening before when Vaslav asked who had cleaned him of the usual twigs and sprigs the massive retriever always found in the forest.

For once, he wasn’t as aggressive as he typically was and without any obvious reason, shoved himself into the SUV ahead of Vaslav when Igor had opened the rear door for his boss. Marrow had then promptly settled all seventy kilos of his weight across the seat and Vaslav’s lap after his dirty paws made prints all over his master’s pants.

Since when had he become a lapdog?

A new day brought a whole different reality with it, and he couldn’t say he particularly trusted it, either.

“You never asked for anything back, my friend,” Vaslav said.

Before Igor could properly respond, a beep interrupted the conversation. Igor ended it altogether when he fished the device out of the cup holder and took his attention away from the road just long enough to see whatever it was he needed to see. The phone was discarded just as fast as he’d picked it up, then Igor glanced at the road, and back at Vaslav in the rear view mirror.

“New problem, yeah?”

Vas didn’t like this already. “So—chto dal’she? What the fuck now?”

“Looks like somebody got a flight this morning and managed to head out of Italy earlier than expected. Seems like the flight was chartered,” Igor tacked on. The worst was yet to come, though. “By someone in the states.”

Vera was the only person Igor needed to be tracking in Italy.

“I told you he was too goddamn young.”

“That information didn’t even come from him.”

“He should know she’s—”

“He did know,” Igor interjected calmly. “He managed to track her to the airport before he made the call to me. I had to do the rest.”

“How long?”

Igor sighed. “A couple of hours. I’ve been waiting for confirmation. And about the chartered jet—the payment came from the states, but the flight is coming into Moscow tonight.”

That was a costly trip. He knew because he’d paid for one recently. An easy two or three hundred thousand dollars.

“Her father, possibly?” Vaslav mused. “He’d have to be a mighty stupid man not to keep tabs on her, wouldn’t he?”

“Vas—”

The hand that he’d been using to pet the dog still heavy on his lap cut through the air, making the animal grumble with a growl. His shaggy black coat trembled with the rumbling sound.

“You wanted to go on the drive,” he told the dog.

Marrow soon quieted.

“He’s the only gift I really regret giving you,” Igor said.

“Why?”

It was the first time Vaslav ever really took notice of how interesting Igor’s gifts actually were.

“The dog might not have listened to a damn thing anyone said, but he never went too far away from me,” Vas added when Igor took longer than he liked to answer. “Nobody said he had to be nice, did they?”

It took him a quick internet search to realize his dog wasn’t even supposed to exist. Extinct for decades, the dog was too aggressive due to inbreeding during development of the breed. Meant to be a life-saving animal, it didn’t end up that way.