Page 57 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

She had not forgotten about Kiril, though. By the time she woke up, late in the morning because Vaslav didn’t fall asleep until well after three, Kiril was already gone, and the makeshift bed he’d made out of blankets and pillows on a couch in the sitting room had all but disappeared. If he was supposed to be with her all the time, like Vaslav had implied, then what was important enough to take him away?

“Did something come up, or—”

“You’re awfully nosy today,” Igor interjected, making his reflection in the rearview mirror known again so she was able to see the way he’d lifted his brow high. “Any reason for that?”

“Curiosity. Maybe I’m bored.”

“Didn’t you hear? It killed the cat,” he deadpanned.

Vera smirked to herself, and shook her head as she turned back to the rural landscape passing by their fast-moving SUV. Igor had no issue with returning his focus to the long road ahead when his passenger no longer wanted to talk. Or so he thought.

She just wanted to enjoy the view.

One of her favorite parts of Russia was when autumn arrived. Even if it never lasted for very long.

Every bright yellow, burnt orange, and fire-red leaf that changed and fell was a different piece of a massive, beautiful canvas that made up the countryside. Roads that had certainly seen better days connected small rural communities. One couldn’t really appreciate the entirety of Russia as it slipped into the fall if they never went further than the city limits, but it was hard to look away from the miles and miles of the season’s colors in full, fall glory.

It certainly made the nearly two hour drive back to the city a lot more bearable. Especially when she was trying to distract herself from the real question she wanted to ask Igor.

The longer the silence stretched on, only breaking when Igor hit a pothole that provoked a curse, the worse Vera felt. Like she was sitting on bees. Unable to keep the question in any longer, she blurted, “When did you know something was wrong with Vaslav?”

A dangerous question, she knew.

It had become painfully clear to Vera that Vaslav’s worst, and one of his most prominent, symptoms of CTE was his ever growing paranoia. It was why he couldn’t stand to have people even talk about him when he wasn’t in the same room without obsessing over it at times. She’d tried not to count the hours she noticed that he spent peering through the heavy curtains on every window over the last week. There was a gun in every single room. Not that she had pointed out the discoveries to Vaslav, and it wasn’t like guns made Vera nervous. Quite the opposite, her grandfather had been a gun trafficker; her father later took over the family business. They had a special love for weapons, and their prominence in her life had left her almost numb to the sight of a weapon.

Except when every gun she found was carefully hidden. As if they had been put in their respective spots because Vaslav needed to know where each and every one was, but no one else would. She couldn’t imagine that with the amount of time Igor spent inside the house, or even Mira, that they’d never stumbled upon one of the many weapons he kept hidden.

She didn’t know how to admit to Igor that she worried more about Vaslav’s easy access to the guns than she did the fact they were there in the first place. That, coupled with his almost constant paranoia, could lead to a very bad situation.

“I only ask because—” She couldn’t quite get the words out when Igor remained tense and quiet in the driver’s seat, their vehicle still cutting down the miles of rural road at a speed she rarely tried to think about. Not if she valued her life.

“I know why you ask,” he eventually muttered.

“Do you?”

At least, she always put on a seat belt. The belt engaged to keep her tight against the seat when Igor pulled off the road without warning. She didn’t know if he hadn’t liked her tone, or he felt the conversation was better held when he wasn’t driving, but the tires slid over gravel for longer than she was comfortable before the SUV finally came to a stop.

Igor’s gaze slammed into hers in the rearview mirror as he put the vehicle into park. “Vera—”

“I get it ... okay? The entire point of you is that you make sure he knows when someone is talking or ... asking things,” Vera rushed to say, her voice strained because she couldn’t stop the sudden swell of emotions lodging in her throat. “But I worry about him when I’m not sitting across the room giving him something else to focus on except what’s outside of his goddamn windows!”

Igor turned fast in his seat and scrubbed at his forehead. Eventually, he unbuckled his seat and turned to get a better view of where Vera sat in the row behind him in the middle.

“Do you know,” he started to say, stopping to pull in two deep breaths before starting over entirely. “Do you know, Vera, what would happen to me today if I returned you home safe and sound, and didn’t immediately call him to confirm what he already knows? And I will tell you how he already knows it, too, yeah?” he asked, grinning although it felt cold. His mirth faded as fast as it appeared. “Because I guarantee he has kept meticulous track of every trip to and from your home that I have made over the past months. Do you know what would happen to me?”

Vera swallowed back the nerves flapping like the wings of a butterfly in her throat to say, “No, I don’t.”

“Consider yourself lucky, then. Because I certainly fucking do.”

“Igor—”

He gripped the headrest of the driver’s seat, giving him better leverage for when he pointed a finger at her, quieting her from saying one more thing. “Here’s another thing you don’t know, but goddammit, somebody’s got to fill you in, sweetheart. Vaslav draws an invisible line in front of every person unlucky enough to give a shit about him to a degree that they’ve found themselves attached to him in one way or another. That line? It’s where he decides if you live or die. It’s your betrayal, whatever you do, you don’t even need to have done it yet. He knows what that line is, and you won’t until you cross it. It’s different for everybody, and it’s apparent to me that he’s given you a lot more grace than everyone else, but don’t for one second think it makes you safe because you lie in bed next to him, Vera.”

Right.

“Because you can’t tame a beast,” Vera whispered.

Igor dragged in another heavy breath and released it through flaring nostrils. “I knew something was wrong when he asked me the same questions he had already asked me before, about me and him. The first time we met; why he liked me. Those were things I knew he knew,” the man said, falling back into the seat and slumping further down. “But every so often, he’d ask me the same questions again like he didn’t know. I tracked down his doctor, then, the one he’d started seeing a while back. I paid the man to get back on the phone with Vas, but it’s taken almost a year for them to have a face-to-face conversation.”