Page 19 of The Lies Between Lovers

The fact was, he’d not had a migraine since the morning he left Paris and he wasn’t wasting one more second when he’d truly earned that nicotine today.

“I went back to the church, and guess who wasn’t there?” Igor asked, rolling the two of them back to his original question without him needing to repeat it. Smart man.

“I snagged a drive from an old friend,” he replied in a shrug. “Which I assume you figured out.”

“Not easily, boss.”

Vaslav rolled the end of the cigar between his teeth, saying, “I had to pay Feliks a visit.”

Igor turned to stone in the drive while Vaslav continued to smoke his cigar, leaving trailing plumes of gray lifting toward a blackening canvas. At least, they had the stars. Wide skies full of endless possibilities everywhere one looked.

“You’re doing it again,” Igor said quietly.

“I’m sorry?”

“This,” the man clarified firmly. “Making decisions and doing things without explaining what or why. Leaving me to figure it out by putting together a puzzle without all the pieces. Feliks is the thorn in your side that you won’t remove—goddammit, Vas, how many times are you going to threaten to kill the man before you finally do it?”

“Who said I went there to threaten him?”

“Did you threaten him?” Igor returned just as fast.

“I did, but I didn’t go there to do it.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

It wasn’t like Igor to shout.

He knew better.

That wasn’t even what bothered Vaslav the most.

“You sound just like Feliks; too fucking dense to string together my sentences in a way you understand. What, do I need to paint you an entire picture for you to see it?”

Igor sneered, biting back whatever reply he knew better than to say, as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to give me a fucking stroke, Vas, yeah?”

“That won’t help with your picture problem, comrade.”

“Feliks showed up with Vera; she fell, and you took it personally—I get the fucking picture!”

This time, it was Vaslav’s turn to stiffen.

“I let the first one slide,” he told Igor, his voice dipping dangerously low.

Vaslav didn’t even need to specify what he meant; Igor knew.

“My apologies,” Igor muttered, dropping his hand to his side and staring Vas straight in the eyes. “But I tend to get worked up when the man I have indebted my life to protecting—who is also ill and refuses to admit he is—takes off for over half a day and shows back up without a word. I didn’t mean to yell.”

“Mira called you, then?”

Igor nodded. “She noticed the car that dropped you off at the gate.”

“Kiril—”

“He’s one of the best spies I have in the brotherhood watching the captains and their business,” Igor interjected before Vaslav could get another word out about the young man he’d hitched a ride with that day. “I know he’s barely sixteen, but he’s born and raised in their streets, he’s a rat they don’t even look for anymore. I can’t get close enough to any vory in this organization to trust them. They don’t trust me when everything they know about me is you. I am working with what I have to make sure everybody stays in line.”

“I was only going to say that he is a little young,” Vaslav said. “And he talks too much.”

He barely even had to pay the young man any mind. Kiril was simply one of a handful of people that Vaslav knew Igor kept close at hand for various reasons, which meant he could trust the boy to follow a simple direction.