Page 57 of The Beast of Moscow

“Pity—broken and sad.”

Vera winced at the cold and flat way he delivered those words. They weren’t necessarily untrue, and she should be unsettled at how intimately he seemed to know her history, but mostly, she chose to stay silent. It wasn’t easy.

Vaslav sighed. “Was that cruel? I can’t ever tell.”

“A little.”

“Mmm, that’s just your raw nerve, kisska. People tend to irritate those when you least expect it.”

Vera blinked again.

More tears fell.

“Is it that it hurts—physically, your ankle, I mean, yeah—or something else?” he asked.

She didn’t need him to clarify. “The last thing I felt when I danced professionally was shame. It was the only thing I felt; I couldn’t tell you from what. From all of it, maybe. The failure, the publicity, my injury; knowing after—”

“And now that’s all you feel when you dance.”

Vera tore her wet gaze away from the porthole to find he was staring right at her again. Now that she knew he was, it was as if the heart in her chest could feel the weight of his gaze, and it started thumping harder.

“But I wish it wasn’t,” she whispered.

“See,” Vas murmured, gravelly and bored, “still broken and sad.”

She wished she could be as unaffected as him.

“Nobody said you had to point it out.”

“You’ll never fix it if everyone lets you pretend it’s not even there to begin with,” he returned.

Or was he just the only one who had seen it?

17.

Have you landed?!

The text was accompanied by ten different emojis ranging from heart eyes to wide smiling faces and even a bottle of popped champagne. Hannah’s excitement at being so close to Vera, the closest they had been since her friend left Moscow, was palpable in the messages.

Vera kept peeking down at the phone in her hand—that message from Hannah waiting on her screen—but she still couldn’t reply.

Not yet.

Eventually, the screen went blank.

Vera could have been doing a lot of things except standing at the rear of the three-story apartment, watching the man in the sunroom through the panes of glass shout into his phone. Hell, on the other side of the apartment was a great view of the Eiffel Tower. She didn’t even have to go out on the stone veranda to enjoy it because every room at the front had more than enough windows to allow the guests the particular pleasure.

Instead, her feet were cemented to the floor, and she couldn’t look away from Vaslav. Not that she could hear what he was yelling—he’d shut the door to the sunroom, and she remained far enough back in the hallway that she could see him, but she didn’t believe he could see her.

It left her with only the muffle of his voice.

Enough to know it was raised. The contempt and anger twisting his expression with every word gave it away, too.

How fast things changed ...

The thought almost taunted her.

Vera tried to shrug it off, and the warnings that had found their way to her in various forms since her first meeting with Vaslav. That was harder to do when she couldn’t look away from the proverbial train wreck happening in front of her.