Vaslav only smirked at the confused glance the Frenchman sent his way at the order.
“You can’t be serious. We drove for twenty minutes! My driver was waiting—”
“Don’t take it personally, Frenchman,” Vaslav replied as the guy was yanked out of the limo without grace or fanfare. At least, he was smart enough not to fight back. Igor was not known for his patience, but he had one hell of a punch. Igor climbed into the seat Pierre had vacated, and reached over to grab hold of the door, ready to swing it closed. He waited before doing so, just long enough for his boss to tell the flustered, scowling man outside, “This is simply how I like to handle my business. Take any complaints straight to hell—or better yet, take them back to that prick paying you in Italy. See how he likes it.”
Igor slammed the door shut, and the limo left Pierre standing in a cloud of hot dust on the dirt road along the canal. It took far too long for the air conditioning inside to catch up with the mugginess they’d allowed in for Vaslav’s liking, so he rolled the sleeves of his dress shirt up to his elbows and unbuttoned the third button just below his throat to give him some room to breathe.
Mid-July in Russia was peak travel time for tourists because it was also the hottest period of the year, and currently, the heatwave crawling through Moscow left Vaslav in a worse mood than normal.
“When’s Nico—”
“Ask him,” Vaslav uttered behind his clenched teeth while he pressed his fingertips into his eye sockets, willing the pressure there to release.
“I will,” his head of security was fast to say, his Russian smooth and calm, already hearing that sharp edge in his boss’s words that were ready to cut on the next syllable. “We can put off the rest of the day, if you want, yes? It’s Thursday; take an early, long weekend, Vas.”
Migraines were his enemy. Constant since childhood and worse into adulthood, caused from years of abuse, followed by fighting to survive within the prison gangs that had dominated his early life, and head injuries according to the doctors that offered him nothing more than pills for pain. It was like knives behind his eyeballs stabbing straight down through to the base of his skull.
They came without warning and sometimes lingered for days. Other times, they spread out, lasting only for a dozen or so minutes before disappearing altogether ... only to come right back again and again throughout the day. The migraines were an unspoken burden he carried, and any of his men who were lucky enough to sit in his presence—ever—could tell the state of his pain, and the danger of his mood, simply by the tone of his voice.
It was the pain that made him vicious.
The pain turned him mean.
“No, I have one more thing to handle before I do anything else today.”
“I’m sure it can wait until Nico gets back from his trip,” Igor started to say. “Let him handle that stupid fuck in the city. He’s done it before.”
Vaslav ignored his man’s comment. Sure, he was only trying to help, and while Vaslav considered no one a friend because life had taught him those didn’t exist, Igor and Nico were the closest things he had to it. If he felt anything akin to camaraderie or loyalty to another human, besides perhaps his still-living mother, it was his right- and left-hand men.
His spies.
But right then, he just wanted Igor to shut the fuck up. Otherwise, Vaslav would have to make him do it and neither of them wanted that.
Strangely, he could stand to listen to others speak when a migraine started to creep up on him. Barely. It was the sound of his own voice, however, that felt like knives to his eardrums.
“I said, I have one more goddamn thing to do,” he uttered low, the gravely hiss of his words promising his companion wouldn’t say another thing unless he wanted to bleed for it, too, “and I intend on doing it. This time, he owes me money.”
Or so he had recently learned through stumbling upon paperwork that Nico would have otherwise preferred to keep hidden from his boss regarding Vaslav’s former brother-in-law and the company he owned known as The Swan House. The infamous house of ballet in Krasnye had a two-hundred-year-old legacy attached to the deed, and names on its dossier of dancers that graced the world’s stages had been associated with everyone and anyone with any sort of power and control.
Royalty. Political. Criminal.
A lot of money moved through those doors.
And the second Feliks Abramov had his eight-pointed stars tattooed on his shoulders, a portion of every dollar his beloved Swan House made, legally or otherwise, was no longer his. That was the deal he made with the devil who sat in the seat before Vaslav, and he didn’t care for the details as to why.
Igor didn’t glance away from the windows during the stretch of silence between the two men, but Vaslav still saw the way his gaze widened a bit at the news of an unknown debt between the organization and the remaining piece of Vaslav’s past. Across from the irritated boss, Igor’s reply was lower than a whisper.
“He was your family once, boss.”
“Not anymore,” Vaslav deadpanned.
His last murder assured that. Despite the attention and mess it had caused him, a half of a decade ago, to deliver his former father-in-law’s decapitated head in a white box topped with a bright red ribbon to Feliks was the least of his regrets.
If anything, he thought it made his position in the city very clear.
They didn’t call him The Beast of Moscow for nothing.
2.
In the Stars.
It had been an appropriate name for the ballet retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but the title also made a rising ballerina believe it was a show with a role meant for her. The story of the star-crossed lovers destined for a tragic end took a year from the start of rehearsals to production night. Vera took to the stage as Juliet on the night of her twentieth birthday. Six years later, staring into the torn flyer stuck to a light pole outside the front entrance to the main lobby of The Swan House with her image in full costume, makeup, hair, and pointe shoes promoting the event still managed to give her the same butterflies in her belly.
Only now, it didn’t feel all that great. It didn’t even matter that the years had taken its toll on the flyer, leaving the colors almost entirely faded, she could still see the image and how it once looked, too.
It was forever imprinted in her mind.
She couldn’t remember when she had first fallen in love with ballet. As far as she was concerned, she’d always loved it. Maybe from the second she was born, like Juliet destined to die with her lover, Vera Avdonin had been meant for pointe shoes and satin ribbons. Either way, the day her father had taken Vera to her first class, she never imagined doing anything different.
“Your name is gonna be in stars someday,” Demyan would tell her competition after competition when she was barely ten and other girls on her team teased her relentlessly over the slightest mistakes.
Even inventing them sometimes.
She hadn’t known it back then, but their bullying came from a place of jealousy and driven by the adults around them who constantly made them feel like they were never going to be enough. The mean girls from the past didn’t actually leave when Vera managed to land a spot as a ballerina for the coveted Swan House at only sixteen—she simply became more confident.