Page 60 of The Breath Before Forever

“You promised information!”

Tit for tat.

The cop jumped at the chance.

“I lied,” he returned dryly as his shoes crunched on the clean snow of the sidewalk.

The thing was, Vaslav also had little to nothing that he was able to tell. He didn’t have the first clue who planted the bomb, why, or how he could deal with it. Not that he should. The retirement was still in place, a living, breathing Igor meant the Russian bratva still had a head at the top of the organization to answer to, and it wasn’t Vaslav.

Not anymore.

It couldn’t be if he intended to keep his hands clean, and remain an observer of that criminal underworld from a safe distance. Except it could never be safe.

Wasn’t this proof?

“Vaslav Pashkov!” the officer shouted at him.

He barked out a laugh.

The man thought using his full first name would make a difference, but it did nothing in the end. Vaslav didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder as he crossed the street to where his idling Hummer waited. The constable hadn’t even moved from his spot where the steps to Vera’s villa had once been by the time Vaslav sat behind the driver’s wheel.

Glaring, the man across the street waved his fur cap furiously at the vehicle.

Vaslav rolled down the tinted windows to make sure the constable had an unobstructed view of him, and then he stuck up a middle finger back.

“Nice,” came the mutter from the backseat of the Hummer.

Vaslav ignored Kiril.

“Stupid prick,” he uttered under his breath while he yanked the vehicle out of park.

Not about the teenager who had become his new, and unfortunate, companion over the last couple of weeks. Circumstances brought the two together, and Vaslav hadn’t been given much of a choice when he found Kiril sleeping in his car in the hospital parking lot three nights after the bomb. In the middle of fucking winter.

Mira wouldn’t have forgiven him had he left the teenager to fend for himself even though Vaslav knew Kiril was perfectly capable, and had done so for a long time.

Neither would Vera.

That’s who Vaslav really cared about.

“He’s definitely considering having you arrested,” Kiril said as Vaslav let his tires squeal on the wet, cold asphalt as he did a U-turn in the middle of the street.

“On what? Fuck him. I’ll burn his house to the ground if I see his fucking face again.”

The whole lot of them.

Every musor in this city.

And every vor, too.

No one was safe.

Vaslav would figure out how this happened on his own seeing as how everybody else was clearly useless. A shame, really. Nobody seemed to like the way he did things.

Too bad for them.

They all had their chance.

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