Page 41 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

“So, I’ll keep my villa. I do like the city.”

He cleared his throat. “And you have the plants.”

“They do need water,” she admitted with a small smile. “But for the most part—”

“You want to be here.”

He said it with a gesture at the chaos that had been left to sit for days. She wondered if that was because Mira didn’t dare step into the room to fix it, or if Vaslav was just punishing himself by continuing to come back and stare at it all. What other reason would he have to let it sit and rot?

“Does that happen often?” she asked him.

Vaslav sighed as he scrubbed a hand down his mouth and unshaven jaw, but he nodded with a distant gaze locked and loaded on the mess. “It can.”

“What does that mean?”

“Depends on the week.”

“And what, the weather?” Vera asked sarcastically.

She couldn’t help it.

His explanation wasn’t great.

Vaslav shrugged one shoulder, muttering, “Sometimes, yeah, the fucking weather, too.”

Her regret hit like a ton of bricks. She didn’t mean to sound like she blamed him for something he might not have a lot of say over.

“Is it just hard to control, or—”

“I don’t always know I’ve done it, kisska.”

She blinked at his honesty.

Words altogether failed.

Vaslav looked to her, then, and his cold eyes didn’t seem as dark with the clear blue nailing in on her. “You might not always want to be here, Vera.”

She hadn’t needed him to repeat himself.

“I heard you perfectly fine the first time, Vas,” she returned softly.

He scoffed. “Right.”

“I did.”

His jaw jumped against, chewing on nothing but his grinding teeth. Vera glanced down at her hands in her lap where she’d folded them. They gave her something else to focus on for a moment. At least long enough for the questions racing in her mind to quiet long enough for the ones that were loud enough to take center stage.

She didn’t look up at him when she asked, “You’re not dying, are you?”

“Not unless I do it myself. Which even that is easier said than done. Otherwise, I’m just slowly going mad and losing every part of me while I do it, krasivyy. Every day is something different. I put things in the same spot just so it’s one less thing and ...” He dragged in a shaky breath, needing the extra air to say, “Someday I’m going to wake up, and I won’t know anything about myself anymore. I’ll have forgotten everything, and I won’t even recognize the face staring back in the mirror.”

But wasn’t that just as heartbreaking?

She no longer found herself wondering why he shut himself away from the rest of the world. How suffocating must his fear of someone knowing be if he wasn’t even really living?

Vera glanced up from her hands when the sight of his shoes came to a stop in front of her on the angled chair. He’d walked over from the doorway without even making a sound.

“Even you,” he said, then, so softly she strained to hear. The way he delivered that news without inflection made her heart squeeze painfully, but like everything else, she knew it was just Vaslav’s way. It didn’t matter if the truth hurt; he would still say it. “Someday, I’ll forget you, too.”