Page 59 of The Breath Before Forever

Over distant screams, blaring vehicle alarms, the woosh of spraying water, and the crackle of wood, Vera heard something else.

Vaslav.

He called for her.

She just couldn’t answer him back.

Vera was barely able to breathe, but she remembered taking one more breath before everything went black.

16.

Vaslav’s shoes crunched along the ashy debris that remained on the walkway. Debris that would soon be cleaned away. The remnants of his wife’s old villa was a ghost of what it used to be. Two weeks after the bomb, and the bones of what had once been the rear bottom half of Vera’s villa was all that was left standing in the backdrop of darkness.

They let it burn for hours, or so he was told. What bit had caught fire, anyway. It left the rubble to smolder and smoke for days, even in the cold. He couldn’t help but picture the way the yellow walls of the villa had looked greeting him, and how Vera’s front door was now just a gaping hole in the darkness.

Her home.

Their child.

Gone.

Vaslav was intimately acquainted with the way life could change in a split second, but that didn’t make the rollercoaster trip through hell any easier to deal with. If anything, he thought knowing so well how these things tended to play out made him angrier and more anxious than ever.

Violent, too.

Most of the front of the villa, including the steps, walls, and rooms had been taken out by the bomb someone had planted in Igor’s car. The night before the blast, everyone presumed. It wasn’t like there were very many people whom Vaslav could ask for answers.

Hannah, medically induced into a coma to help her recover while recurrent swelling in her brain continued to lead her through dangerous medical events—well, she certainly had nothing to say. Igor, burned and medicated, likely the closest to the blast, had more bandages than skin at the moment. He also wasn’t in the mood to talk.

And Vera ...

“I can confirm the blast was triggered by the unlocking system.” The politsiya constable just a few steps ahead of Vaslav pulled his standard uniform, fur cap from his head and swatted his thigh to dust off the stray snowflakes. “Some wires and a box were found still attached to a part of the fuse panel. It didn’t take long to match what part of the car that belonged to, and so—”

“Once the unlock button was pressed on the fob, boom.”

“Da.”

All that money he paid to the officials to get a record of the investigative side of things, and that was what the constable called him from his wife’s hospital bedside to tell him? A theory he had already figured out on his own because of his basic understanding of where and how the three people on the property had been found?

Vera, in the far downstairs bathroom.

Hannah, where she had been blown back to the far end of the entry hall. Only Igor had been outside. As the bomb had been pretty obviously connected to the mob, given it was placed on Igor’s unwatched vehicle—a stupid move for such a smart man—the musor and any other detective or cop looking for information already knew they would have to come up with it on their own.

Nobody talked.

Nobody knew a thing.

As to be expected.

“A waste of my fucking time,” Vaslav muttered in Russian, turning to head back for the street where his black Hummer waited with the lights on at all four points of the vehicle. He’d left it running with the lights on because he couldn’t care less if the neighbors were watching.

Let the whole city watch.

The beast was back on the warpath.

“Mr. Pashkov,” the constable called at Vaslav’s retreating back, “don’t you have something for me?”

“The money was enough.”