Page 56 of The Lies Between Lovers

“Mmm, maybe. Being who I am with the life I’ve lived ...” Vaslav trailed off with a growing smile that he let fade away as his eyes rolled back. His life was not a piece of art that would attract crowds when it was finished and he was gone, but it was his all the same. “I was lucky to ever see the outside of confinement, frankly. I never expected to get all the rest.”

“I heard you killed a man at thirteen.”

“Stop hearing things,” he returned just as fast. “Ask me. Da, that’s what the records appear to say.”

“And nothing else?”

“What?”

“Isn’t there a motive?” Vera asked.

His hard exhale rattled, but his words came out flat and unconcerned. “I killed a neighbor—the grandfather of the man who still lives across the road today. He’s the only neighbor in the area that doesn’t even stare when he drives by. Credit where it’s due. The man—the one I killed, he was a client of my mother. Beat and raped her in what is now my den when she was too drunk to perform like he preferred.”

Horror spilled over Vera’s face. “Oh, my God that’s—”

“Or that was the story she told me when I found her.” Vaslav shrugged. “Oh, he might have raped her, but she was blackmailing any and every man in Moscow that wore a suit and had ties or affiliations that would get her into the parties and clubs. If they would fuck her, she already sealed the deal.”

His tight smile didn’t seem to really comfort Vera.

“She wasn’t a good mother,” he settled on saying, not wanting to villainize the woman more with slurs or how she made her money because his mother could do it without his help. Truly. “And I thought I was being a good son that night. I was barely a young man that had already lived a life most adults had not. A teenage, prostitute mother. Barely any influence or guidance that didn’t come from the end of a belt or the sharp side of a vodka glass when it breaks on your face.”

Her gaze snapped to his scar.

Vas shook his head. “The little one she made gave me character. What that mess turned into came from the rest—but they grew me up in there, I came out a whole different man. And you know the only thing that saved me going in was the crowd I knew before going in. I shot past six feet almost overnight, already looked like a man, and had a mother that could cry on cue. Just a troubled suka with too many older friends—it wasn’t hard for them to make me a monster when they put the prick’s face in the papers alongside my mother’s lies.”

“Why would she do that?”

His disjointed storytelling didn’t seem to catch Vera off-guard, and he appreciated her quickness. He wasn’t always good with details from moment to moment. When it was there, though ...

“Throwing away the key on me meant gaining access to a family inheritance that would have been mine otherwise. Not even that much. Snegurochka—that’s what her father called her, playful like.”

“The Snow Maiden.” Vera knew the character from fairy tales.

Vas chuckled darkly. “The ice bitch would have been better suited.”

“I’m sorry that life has not treated you well.”

“Life is only part of the problem. I’m always going to be a stone’s throw away from the madhouse or another twenty years in a prison cell either way. I never wanted to be here—I didn’t ask to be this man—but I wasn’t given a choice in the end. One day a woman came into my life and taught me that I wasn’t the beast everyone else said I was. Her father killed her to prove to me that’s who I would always be, and he was right in the end. I showed everyone the monster I could be.”

Vaslav swallowed the lump forming in his throat—he hated feeling things. Anything, really. Hadn’t he done that bullshit enough? “And here I am after all that sacrifice. What am I—who am I? Lonely in a big house on a tall hill, still losing it all. Hiding so no one can see the truth. And for what?”

Vera’s hands pulled away from his face, but even the sympathy in her eyes didn’t kill him as much as the emptiness of his days did almost constantly. “Vas—”

“For what? To die alone where no one will miss me at all,” he finished quietly. “There is no motive, Vera. I have none. I just don’t want to die alone.”

16.

“Stop it,” Vera whispered although Vaslav’s palms didn’t slow in the torturous stroke of her thighs. He started a few inches above her knees and rubbed up under her shorts until she was sensitive to every slight graze of his fingertips and thinking about where they might go. “Stop that,” she added when he chuckled, and she had to stop shaving the small bit she had missed on his upper lip on his almost straight cupid’s bow. “Or else you’re going to make me cut you.”

“Come on,” he seemed to goad her, his tempting mouth grinning with a cocky twist she hadn’t expected. “Just finish it.”

There was something to be said for his clean-shaven face, but she was more than partial to the beard as well. Like this, though, one could really see the man staring back at them. As unforgiving, overwhelming, or indifferent as he might be—it was him. Every line of his squared, strong jaw. Without the thicker growth of facial hair around his scar and mouth, one was able to see the micro expressions he was able to hide.

When he tipped his head back, Vera’s gaze was drawn back to his.

“Your hands are still steady,” he told her.

“Good thing,” she quipped. “The rest of me can’t say the same.”