Page 48 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

His life would be a million times better the day he put her into the ground, but that would all come in due time.

“Oh, God,” Natalia eventually said, sounding all too cheery when she asked, “What did you do now that you need to sit down at dinner with the Prosecutor General of Russia?”

“Right, my uncle,” he reminded her.

The man would go to great lengths to keep Vaslav from spreading that little known information to the rest of the public.

“A bastard. Papasha never acknowledged him and—”

“Mat, I know the fucking story. I promise I don’t give a shit to hear it again, either. Do me a favor and make a call. What do you want? Enough money to drown in it?” Or she could drown her liver; he wasn’t picky on what she bought with any money he gave her. Vodka included.

Vaslav didn’t particularly care to mingle in public with anyone, let alone a relative who had already previously agreed to keep his distance as long as he did the same. However, Vaslav was in need of someone within the higher ranks of the officials to pull the speculation away from him for recent bodies showing up in the canal. Less talk in the city meant less talk in the country; he didn’t need his brigadiers getting too close to his business that they could see if something was wrong. Especially because everything was wrong.

With him, anyway.

The bodies were a problem he had not forgotten about. He’d simply put it off for as long as he possibly could.

“So, I’m waiting, we’ll get back to the money,” Natalia said, suddenly wide awake and willing to chat like they did it every single day. Nobody could call her a terrible actress. “What did you do?”

“Who said I did anything?” he asked.

“You don’t have to say a thing,” Natalia returned, cackling as if her entire day had just been made. “It’s you, Vaslav. It’s always something with you.”

Bitch.

“Vas?” he heard Vera call from the bathroom. “Are you coming?”

He didn’t know if his mother heard the woman in the background, and frankly, he didn’t wait long enough to find out.

“Get me a dinner with the bastard, Mat,” Vaslav demanded, his tone offering no room for discussion, and then he hung up the phone. He barely missed a beat with Vera, already turning back to head for the sound of the shower and her responding giggles when he called back to her, “Give me ten minutes inside of you, and I will be.”

Again.

10.

“I thought you were grabbing your shoes from the den?”

Vera didn’t startle at the sudden appearance of Vaslav behind her despite the fact she hadn’t even heard his approach. Showing him the flats that dangled from her fingers, a pair Kiril had included in a bag he packed of her belongings, she said, “I did.”

He seemed to notice the section of pictures in matte black frames that had caught her attention in the main hall. Vera never had the chance to properly browse the walls upon walls of images that spanned at least a century. There were more faces that she didn’t recognize than ones she did. Until she came upon the ones of Irina.

Guessing by the similarly dressed people in the background, and the grand hall with sweeping silks hanging from the ceiling between large chandeliers, Vera believed it was an event of some sort.

She eyed Vaslav as he leaned a bit closer, needing to come over her shoulder as he squinted at the small four by six inch framed images of his dead wife. Tall and thin, Irina wore a gown that accentuated her elegance with a bodice covered in multi-sized white pearls that contoured to her body from her hips up. Those pearls continued down the sleeves where they stopped at her wrists. The entire skirt of the dress, made of silk and sheer chiffon, billowed in wind Vera couldn’t feel.

She smiled brightly.

Radiating from the frame.

The other images featured a handful of women that Vera didn’t recognize and didn’t intend to ask about. Only two of the pictures featured Vaslav scowling at the camera in a black tuxedo.

“I’m not fond of getting my picture taken,” he said. “She wrangled me in for a few that day; it isn’t every day you shake the hand of the Russian President.”

“Are there anymore—”

“No, those are what survived.”

Vera blinked. “Survived what?”