Page 65 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

Natalia’s head whipped his way, her gaze widening into fake surprise as she replied, “I feel the same about you, Vas.”

Dumb bitch.

She was always so quick to push whatever button of his showed itself. As if it was big, red, and blinking, she couldn’t help but slam her entire face into it if it meant Vaslav would bite on the chain she threw at him.

“Mat, you’re walking on thin ice. You lost what little fondness I had for you the day you put me in the juvenile colony at thirteen. I only kept you alive after I got out of prison because I needed to access the family estate you were pissing away.”

“You bastard,” Natalia hissed. “You stole that from me.”

“Half of it was mine, that’s why you really kept me. You needed a child, a boy, for the money and the investment accounts to kick in for you after you spent your own. What were you going to do with the mansion and land in Dubna? You let it rot for decades. I only took what was mine.”

What she took away from him in the first place.

“And after I had the good grace to provide you with a decent stipend and an apartment you couldn’t scoff at,” Vaslav continued, “you had the nerve to get me locked up in a madhouse, and then you kept me there for two fucking years.”

Slowly, he turned to stare at her, this time pulling his glasses high to sit them on the crown of his head.

“They were going to kill you for what you did. You decapitated a man and delivered his head publicly to his son. In the middle of the day!”

“The bombing really got them worked up, Mat, let’s be honest.”

Vaslav had needed to make choices that day, and not all of them were rational if one didn’t live inside his head. Some secrets, he intended to take to his grave.

“Right,” she barked out in a sardonic laugh. “You flattened a doctor’s office with him inside. I did you a favor. They would have executed you in the streets, and danced, you moron.” Natalia’s gaze burned, and every word she spat between her thin, tight lips felt like knives slicing into his eardrums. “Instead, I paid doctors and lawyers and everyone else you needed to say you were crazy, and they did it! Because of me!”

The sound of feet shuffling as the parishioners stood for what would be the final hymn, according to a stoic Igor still behind him, muffled his mother’s shout. Barely.

Vaslav chuckled, scratching through his coarse facial hair with fingers he’d rather use to wrap around Natalia’s throat. “You forgot the part where you did all of that with money you funded and pilfered from my accounts. Or when you paid the institution more of my money, again, to keep me locked away for longer. You were having the time of your life, Mat.”

On his dime, and while he went insane, heartbroken, and entirely alone, and she wanted praise for that? Gratitude?

What really was insanity?

If not for Igor, and rest his soul, Nico, the brotherhood would have crumbled. They kept every brigadier in line and stayed loyal to a man they could only talk to through smuggled letters written on stolen paper. Ink, however, could be made from various things.

Fun times.

“Five minutes,” Igor prodded with a bit more sternness.

Right, back to the matter at hand.

He didn’t even mention to his mother that the call she made to her illegitimate brother hadn’t exactly ended with the promise of a dinner. Natalia had no clue why Vaslav actually wanted to attend the funeral, but the Antonovich family name was just important enough for her to agree to put on a black dress and grief veil for a day. Her vanity, and an ever-present need to social climb despite her mid-sixties fast approaching, encouraged her to quickly agree to whatever he proposed.

On the other hand, the parking lot was the perfect no-man’s land for a well-known criminal, and said criminal's politically influential uncle to meet with justifiable reasoning if they had both attended the same event.

Or rather, if it appeared like they did.

Appearance was everything, after all.

“Why is it that every time the two of us are in a room together,” Natalia started with the cock of one perfectly manicured eyebrow, and a wag of a finger between their respective seats, “we end up doing this? We could just ... not be near one another, no?”

Vaslav smirked and nodded. “I agree.”

Starting now.

“What are you doing?” Natalia asked, her voice pitching high. “Where are you going?”

Vaslav stood, adjusting his blazer in the front as he did so. “I have things to do, and your usefulness ran out about five minutes ago, so none of those things include you. But back to what matters.”