Page 29 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

“Give me that folder,” he demanded.

Even his voice shook.

Vera held the papers, and the legal sized folder that the messy stack had been scattered over. “I wasn’t looking for it.” She pointed at the desk and ignored the way her hand trembled. “It was right there. Out in the open.”

“In my den. My locked den,” he said, a desperation clinging to the edges of his words. “Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Vera,” he said, stepping closer and using one hand to brace himself on the edge of the desk as he leaned over to attempt a swipe at the papers. She only needed to lean a couple of inches sideways in the chair to be far enough out of his reach. That earned her a cuss, and his fist slamming down on the desk. The force of his hand smacking down sent pens and other papers jumping on the desk. “Goddammit, stop acting like a child! Give me my papers or I’ll come around this desk and make you.”

“No.”

If he could yell, so could she.

Vaslav’s spine turned ramrod straight, and his gaze burned. “What did you just say to me?”

She didn’t refuse him because she planned to keep his papers; he was perfectly capable of taking them from her, too, if he meant to. Or wanted to. Yet, neither of them moved.

And for a moment, she couldn’t look at him. It took more courage than she even knew she had, but Vera dragged her eyes away from his. Staring at him was easier ... there was something magical about the way she found peace looking into his face. It terrified her, but that didn’t make the phenomenon any less true. Maybe that was why it had been so easy for her to trust every word he said as long as he looked at her while he did it.

She couldn’t fake content. That, at least, was real; the way it felt when she studied the plains of a stranger's face who didn’t seem unfamiliar at all. Like she’d known him for her whole life. Even if she had not.

Home.

“At f-first,” she struggled to say through the sudden chatter of her teeth, and her only show of nerves, “I didn’t even know what I was looking at. Maybe that’s why I kept flipping the brain imagery scans over. Just trying to figure out why there was so many and—”

“That is enough.”

His every word snapped. Like the crunch of his teeth between each word was a slap landing against her face. Maybe the real slap would have felt better.

Why did he keep lying?

Why did he feel like he had to with her?

Vera wouldn’t be quiet. As she flipped the pages back to the one that started her spiral of horrified understanding, she lifted it for him to see, thrusting it forward. Even though she couldn’t see the words printed on the beige, thin paper, she couldn’t forget them, either. When he refused to look at the paper, she turned it over and read it out loud anyway.

“Mr. Pashkov,” Vera read, “A simplified version of my unofficial assumed diagnosis and prognosis follows. As agreed, your records have been destroyed, and no one had seen or accessed your file except for me. Regards—”

“I know what the goddamn man wrote,” Vaslav interrupted before she could even finish the cover letter from the doctor who had even included his office’s address in the city. At the same hospital where Vera had spent a handful of days not too long ago. Vaslav was even less kind when he spat, “He made me suffer through an entire conversation when he delivered the reports to me by hand. He’s finally given up calling my fucking house every other damned day.”

“When was that?” she asked.

His glare shot invisible knives her way. “Stop pretending like you had any business picking those papers up and looking through them in the first place.”

“You left them out in the open, Vas.”

“Behind a locked door, hence the mess. Mira hasn’t been able to even get in my rooms for days. I left the suites upstairs unlocked for meals, but she knows better than to go beyond the gathering room. You, on the other hand, know nothing.”

Vera’s chin snapped up subtly, just enough for her to let him know she wouldn’t cower at his insults or his mood. “Would you have told me?”

“I only just found out myself.”

The cover letter from the doctor had been signed at least two months ago. Some of the dates on the reports, especially the imaging of Vaslav’s brain in everything from grayscale to three-dimensional color, had gone back over a year. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe what he said to be true; when she considered the dates of the MRIs and other medical testing documents, however, Vera didn’t think that Vaslav was telling her the whole story.

“What did you think it was?” she asked.

“How much did you read?” he shot back.