Page 7 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

Dryly, Vera muttered, “You tell me.”

Vaslav chuckled at that. “Stop it, kisska. I made a promise, didn’t I? You agreed, he wasn’t hurt. Simple.”

Vera smacked her tongue off her top front teeth. “It was more like a deal, let’s be honest.”

“I don’t see the difference.”

“Of course, you don’t.”

Vera reached for the birch box with the hinged cover displaying a carefully wood-burned crown interwoven with roses. “I haven’t seen this since I was sixteen.”

“If it’s yours, why didn’t you bring it?”

“It wasn’t the right time,” she said.

Vaslav couldn’t say he believed her, though.

She had just unlatched the brass hook on the front when he told her, “I don’t appreciate uninvited visitors, and I tend to make that clear to anyone who needs the lesson more often than not, so we don’t have a repeat of the mistake in the future. I’m not particularly choosy about who it is, or how it’s done, Vera.”

Her hands clasped the sides of the box, and she glanced sideways up at him. “He is okay, right?”

He didn’t mind that she needed to ask again.

“Perfectly fine. The first day was the worst.”

Not that he planned to explain why. Her father, on the other hand ... Well, frankly, Vaslav didn’t give one good goddamn what Demyan told his daughter about his arrival and treatment. If he was determined to stick around for a visit, then he would play by the rules Vaslav put in place for the time being. Including his current whereabouts.

“My mother doesn’t think—”

“Ah, the wife,” Vaslav interjected in a rumble of laughter. “Is she what sent you all the way here today?”

“You could pretend like you care.”

“I do, actually. About you.”

Vera blinked. “This is a strange way of showing it.”

So be it.

Vaslav gestured at the box. “Go on, then.”

She flipped open the lid fast without fanfare or even hesitation. It took all of the suspense that had kept him curious about the contents of the birch box and stomped it into the ground when the lid thunked loudly against the table. Instead of admiring the items resting in crushed, navy-blue velvet, she glowered at him.

“They were my mother’s,” she said.

Vaslav reached for the larger of the two items in the box. A veil made of mostly lace that had been packaged and preserved inside a smaller, cardboard box with a plastic window for viewing. He didn’t pull it out of the velvet it had been nestled into, but he studied as much of the lace’s design as he could before setting it back into place.

Vera picked up the smaller box, wrapped in black leather with a hinged cover, than set aside the box preserving the veil. He guessed the contents of the box in her palm by the size alone, but she took more time to open the ring box than she had with the initial lid.

Vaslav let her.

He didn’t have the same emotional attachments to things like wedding rings and other mementos. Especially when they were tied to other people. Nonetheless, when she had asked to pick her own engagement ring, he never considered it was because she already had one.

“She never got to wear the veil, but it was her grandmother’s,” Vera explained quietly. “The ring ... My father told me once that she sketched it out while he was clearing out the room they planned to use for my nursery. He had it made shortly after by the jeweler who made his mother’s ring.”

“She wore it, then? The ring?”