Page 45 of The Lies Between Lovers

“To him in Dubna.”

Igor nodded once. “Or to your home to be a buffer between you and the politsiya as there’s still a bit of activity there. Not that they’ve connected you to his attack—you’ve been gone for days, hmm?”

“But somehow you have,” she returned. “Made a connection to what happened to him, and how it relates to me ... I mean.”

His brow jumped high. “Did your papa never teach you when it was wise for a woman to stop asking questions?”

“Part of the problem was that I never really cared about it. The other part of it was that he loved me too much to force the bad habit out of me.”

Igor palmed the side of his tattooed throat, and his bald head gleamed more than usual from the bright lights overhead as he surveyed the space around them. “I’ve said what I can, da?”

“Well, is Mr. Anatoly alive at least?”

Igor’s stare shifted away from hers, but he at least gave her something worth knowing in the process. It wasn’t good. “Barely—they found him on your walkway.”

“Respectfully,” she replied when he met her gaze again, “Vas can wait. I would like to see Mr. Anatoly. He has no family left, and if he isn’t doing well ... he’s always looked after me since I moved into Noble Row. I’d like to see him first. Be with him if he needs someone.”

Her own problems—and everyone else’s—could wait.

*

They arrived too late.

Well, almost.

Mr. Anatoly was already brain dead—the very first thing the head nurse of the trauma ward explained when Igor and Vera managed to convince the woman that she was the man’s only last living relative—his daughter, actually. Which wasn’t entirely a lie; considering she hadn’t seen one guest visit Mr. Anatoly since his wife passed on, and he never mentioned any, Vera honestly thought she was the closest thing he had to family. She believed he did have some estranged distant cousins in the Ukraine, but that would take a while to reach them. If she was even able to find their information inside Mr. Anatoly’s villa.

The doctor had held off on shutting off the life-saving machines keeping Mr. Anatoly’s heart and lungs working but only until the following morning. Just enough time to give the hospital the chance to find relatives who might like to say goodbye. Otherwise, there would be no recovery, and he wouldn’t even be moved to palliative care as without any brain activity, his body would only slowly waste away.

Believing that she was his daughter, the medsestra brought paperwork for Vera to sign off on that evening to turn off the machines if she wanted. Except she didn’t feel like that was a line she should cross, and opted to let the doctor call it in the morning like he originally planned. She understood what it meant to be brain dead, and miracles just didn’t work that way.

Vera stayed at Mr. Anatoly’s bedside throughout the rest of the night only stepping away when a nurse came to the illuminated doorway, or if she needed to use the bathroom. All the while, she did her very best to ignore the white bandages that covered most of Mr. Anatoly’s head and the right side of his face. Only a small dot of blood could be seen seeping through the many layers, over his temple.

A single bullet to the head. At a close enough range that the round barrel left behind a perfect burn, according to one of the nurses. It was almost tragic how Vera was able to put more about the situation together by having a conversation with a nurse at the hospital than with Igor who drove her the two hours from the airport to the hospital.

That killed Vera.

Every question she had ...

Every fear that it had been for her ...

That’s what kept her by his bedside, talking and talking until she was so sleepy that she could barely hold her eyes open any longer. She talked despite the fact that Mr. Anatoly never moved under the crisp, white hospital blankets tucked around his frail frame. His eyes remained taped shut, not once flickering. Only his neck up was exposed, and his arm and hand on the right side that she kept tucked in with her own to keep warm.

He kept getting colder.

Or she thought so.

Vera even started to forget what she was even talking about, and she was sure that some of it probably didn’t make much sense. But talking felt better.

At least then she wasn’t thinking.

It was only when a new nurse—probably from a shift change—came in the early hours of the morning while light was still barely cresting over the horizon in the windows to remove the IV that Vera left the room for the first time. In the quiet hallway she found Vaslav sitting on a plastic waiting chair that looked about as uncomfortable as it likely felt to the man sleeping in it.

All it took was the shuffle of her feet when she came to a sudden stop at noticing him there to send his icy gaze flying open. Instantly, his stare landed on her as he let out a huffed breath that sounded a lot like a muffled yawn.

“When did you get here?” she asked.

Vera didn’t even know when, or if, Igor had left. After she’d been shown to Mr. Anatoly’s private room, she hadn’t really thought much about the man who accompanied her, and he didn’t make himself a nuisance once they’d arrived.