Page 2 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

That’s how she was sure Vaslav knew Demyan had arrived without her delivering the news. Who else could make her father disappear from practically thin air? She couldn’t even consider something else might be going on because Demyan wouldn’t put his wife through any suffering, certainly not the fear that he was missing.

Claire had continued her nonsensical, panic-induced rambling. Verbally running through the last couple of days since Demyan’s jet left the states and even, what his plan had been before. Only one thing really concerned Vera enough to interrupt her mother.

“It’s not like I could call Roman to help. He’ll lose it, Vera. Maybe Koldan could—”

“No,” Vera jumped in fast. Even her loose-cannon, wild-to-his-core younger brother, by six years, would be better than her uncle, Koldan. The New Jersey bratva boss was loyal to a fault to Demyan Avdonin, but Vera seriously doubted a man like Vaslav would appreciate someone else he might consider a problem coming to his territory on her father’s behalf. Blood, on the other hand, he might understand.

“Let’s not call anyone right now,” Vera added after a moment.

Too long of one, though.

In the next breath, her mother replied, “You better tell me why you think that’s the right choice, and be quick about it, Vera. My patience is running seriously thin.”

The disappointment bled into Claire’s words, and Vera didn’t mind that her mother didn’t try to hide it.

“I know as much as you,” Vera replied honestly, “but if you give me a few hours, I could probably explain a lot more.”

A disgruntled squeak crackled through the speakers.

“Well, it’s going to take me—”

“Vera, you or your father have five hours—five, that’s it—to get him on the phone with me, or the next jet I get chartered will be for me,” Claire said, every word clipped and fiery into the phone. “And whoever else I choose to bring along. I am not above making a scene. Do you understand? Pass the message along to ... whoever.”

Right.

Whoever needed to hear it. Vera understood perfectly well.

“He won’t hurt my father.”

Vaslav agreed.

“Why can’t you say that like you believe it?” her mother asked.

*

Vera hadn’t even been awake long enough to brush her teeth when she finally called Claire, so by the time she was presentable enough to leave her house, without even grabbing as much as a black coffee to fill the grumbling void in her stomach, the time had crawled past nine. Locking her villa, she spun around in the cable knit, grey sweater dress to find an empty street.

Well, not entirely.

The black, sporty coupe with windows tinted opaque all the way around except the front windshield sat where Kiril had parked it the day before. Along the side of the road at the very end of her driveway. He assured her the vehicle would still be there in the morning. His special way of letting her know that even if she didn’t see him, the kid wasn’t too far away. Her new babysitter, hilarious considering she was almost positive he wasn’t even of legal adult age, didn’t mess around about his job.

Keeping an eye on her, that was.

Whoever provided him with the new wheels, likely Igor or Vaslav, was the newest bonus he pointed to when Vera asked where he planned to sleep considering he still refused to enter her villa. Unless he was leaning into a window. The little puke enjoyed that too much.

He was still just a kid, though.

One that shouldn’t be sleeping in a car.

Vera took two steps down the front steps of her villa after locking up, thinking Kiril might be sleeping in the two-door car he had sworn to her would be glittering with chrome by the end of the month, but froze when she heard a low shit hissed from her right.

Fast enough to make the world around her spin, she glanced to her right, seeing nothing and no one, and then left into the quiet front property of Mr. Anatoly’s villa. Someone had thought to water the bushes lining the fence as she could still see the water droplets on the leaves, and the hose her neighbor had once used with the long attachment to reach his hanging plants hadn’t been hung up with patience considering the extra loops of hose that remained on the ground.

“I don’t think I gave them too much water, right?”

That earlier curse made a lot more sense when Vera looked to her right once more and this time, actually paid attention. While her villa and the one that belonged to Mr. Anatoly were twins in architectural design, the one to her right differed in one aspect on the outside. The front stoop greeted guests from the side and featured a closed alcove that was only visible to its neighbors and not people walking by on the street.

There stood a sheepish Kiril in the hidden alcove of her neighbors’ villa. A young couple who visited their villa occasionally throughout the year when they took time away from their country home and business; he was a dentist in an area that made travel into the city difficult, so he had a large clientele. More interesting was the sharp pick-like tool that Kiril didn’t even bother to hide dangling from his left hand.