Page 3 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

“Are you trying to break into their house?” Vera asked him.

Kiril popped his tongue off the roof of his mouth before replying, “Plausible deniability. I was checking stuff out while things got a little boring.”

“Kiril!”

“And I already aced your other neighbor’s locks, so,” he added lower. “But he’s dead, and there’s not much else to see in there.”

Good God.

“Kiril, you can’t break into people’s places just because you’re bored. Download a streaming service or something on your phone, okay? Just—”

“I thought you didn’t have any plans today?”

His question, likely only meant to divert her from shouting at him while the rest of the street listened in on the action, brought Vera back to the bigger issue at hand. One she expected Kiril to help with whether he liked it or not.

“Did he take my father?” she demanded.

Kiril’s dark, thick eyebrows shot up, making his boyish features all the more innocent when he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Vera grabbed onto the railing of her steps, and leaned over the edge, pointing at Kiril. “Don’t play games with me. I’ll call a cab, go to Vaslav and ask him myself, and you can follow behind for all I give a damn.”

“That’s not very nice.”

He sounded genuinely upset.

Or at the very least, hurt.

Vera wished she had time for his feelings. Maybe she was spending too much time with Vaslav Pashkov.

Kiril added, “I like driving with you. You don’t tell me I talk too much.”

That softened Vera’s anger.

Not by much.

“Did he take my father or not?” she asked.

Kiril sucked air through his grimacing mouth, and the long pause between his non-verbal response, and the words that finally came out of his mouth didn’t make the situation any better. “I don’t really know.”

“Kiril!”

“Well!” His hands shot up, one still holding the lock picking tool, in peace. “Really, I don’t!”

“What do you know, then?”

Because clearly, he knew something.

Kiril shrugged, and dropped his hands back down to his sides. “Just that if you call a cab, it’s gonna take like two hours to get you to Dubna. I can make it there in half that as long as we beat the noon rush.”

Well ...

She gestured between him and the coupe parked on the side of the street. “Let’s go. Move, you’re the one with the keys.”

*

Vera wasn’t even able to enjoy the view like she usually would as Kiril drove up the long, winding driveway leading straight to the looming home on the top of the hill. The panic that had been steadily growing inside now simmered under her surface as Kiril parked.

Despite what her mother said, Vera did believe what she said about Vaslav. He told her that he wouldn’t hurt her father as long as she had agreed to be married to him by the winter, and she expected him to follow through on that. Even if her agreement to his proposal didn’t exactly come with her own set of terms.