Especially if it meant Vaslav could finally use it as a reason to get rid of the bastard. The last remaining Abramov tied to the dynasty that had built the empire Vaslav now ran—Feliks had known he was next on the man’s list to die the second he’d opened a present in this very room to find his father’s head waiting inside.
He’d always been a piss poor brigadier. Never should have made it past the brodyagi of his father’s bratva because he was practically worthless as a criminal when he’d been born to nothing but a silver spoon and pampered for most of his life. Too spoiled and unwilling to make a bloody mess out of his hands, but goddamn, he’d wanted those stars on his shoulders all the same.
Mussor—literal garbage—he wasn’t seen as anything more to the men across Russia and the factions of their brotherhood that extended beyond the country. Who would touch that? Not if a vor had any respect for the code, anyhow. It wasn’t as if the brotherhood would miss the man or look for vengeance.
Vaslav had done well to keep this much of a distance between the two while he waited for the attention to boil over after his last move on Feliks’ father. That was the entire reason he hadn’t known there was so much money missing from this side of his business.
Feliks had been a dead man walking for a long time. The clock had finally stopped counting down, and now someone else would have to answer for the fact that it had gone on this long. Vaslav intended on handling that issue soon, too.
“Nyet!” Feliks spun on the shrieking girl with a furious punch of his pointed finger right in her face. It stopped her on the spot, his trembling digit only inches from her turned up nose. Shorter than the man by a few inches, she didn’t appear at all scared of him.
It almost made Vaslav chuckle.
Who would be scared of Feliks? A bitch’s bark was always worse than its bite.
“That is enough,” Feliks hissed at the girl.
She opened her mouth, likely to argue back with the man, but Vaslav simply didn’t have the patience to sit there and wait for someone to notice him any longer. As it was, he had already been there too long, and Igor would be returning with the car and driver at any moment. The second he did, Vaslav needed to leave, a call would be made, and the cleaner should come—that was his orders.
Then, this would all be over. He would never hear the name Abramov even whispered in his presence again.
Igor couldn’t do his job if his boss didn’t first do his, so Vaslav chose to interrupt the two.
Clapping slowly from where he sat behind Feliks’ ornate, gaudy desk carved from a single piece of wood and painted a glossy black, Vaslav smirked as two pairs of eyes turned on him. Even a scowl could make his scarred face look like quite a sight waiting in the shadows of a room, so he only grinned more when the girl sucked in a gasp and stumbled a step back.
“Love the show, but where’s my dinner?” he asked them.
“Der’mo,” Feliks cursed under his breath.
Vaslav’s clapping came to a sudden stop when he said, “Yes, comrade, you’re certainly in a lot of shit at the moment, aren’t you?”
“Feliks, what’s wrong, should I cal—”
He didn’t offer the ballerina a chance to say anything further before he had shoved her out of the room, ignoring her protests and questions at the same time. Vaslav at least allowed the man to get the female out of firing range before he stood from the squeaky office chair that smelled like old leather and cheap cologne.
That smell had his migraine from earlier flaring all over again, but other than the squint of his eyes and hard set of his mouth—which didn’t leave his expression all that different from his norm—one wouldn’t know Vaslav was suddenly in blinding pain.
Literally.
For a few seconds, it took his vision away.
By the time Feliks had yanked closed the heavy oak doors leading into his office, Vaslav had already rounded the desk.
“I didn’t know you were coming, Vas.”
The nickname was enough to get the asshole killed right there on the spot—he could count the number of people on one hand that he allowed to shorten his name as if they were friendly. Feliks most certainly was not one of them.
“Oh, didn’t you?” he asked back. “Apparently, Nico’s been cleaning up after you for a while. I think you saw me coming for a long time, no?”
The words hissed through clenched teeth, but he knew they still made an impact.
Spinning around to face Vaslav, Feliks face drained of color when the taller, older man came to rest against the front of his desk. Hooking one ankle over the other, Vaslav tightened his grip on the edge of the desk’s glossy top, squeezing it for all it was worth to hide the sudden shakiness in his hands.
The pain was sharper than ever. Light spots and black dots danced in his vision. The doctors liked to use a scale—a simple one to ten with the lower end being the least amount of pain and ten topping out at the very worst. Daily, while the migraines were just fading in and out, he maintained a steady seven on the scale.
Enough to still need meds. A Demerol could put a decent dent in his pain scale when caught at the right time, but by seven, it was enough to make him sick to his stomach.
Enough to make him so angry.
Right then, it was a pure ten.
And Vas could barely breathe.
It was the worst possible time for his migraine to come in fast and heavy. He blamed it on the past week—with Nico out of the country on a personal trip with his whore of the month, that left Vaslav and Igor to handle the city and any business within it on their own. Five, or two, years ago that might not have been such a problem.
Now, with the migraines becoming more frequent and severe, aided by his constant stress and high blood pressure, he could barely make it to the end of the week without finding himself huddled over a toilet, puking his guts out from the pain, and roaring for someone to find him anything to make it better.
He’d tried everything.
Even his own mother, who had lived in the same estate in Dubna—since before his initial incarceration at just thirteen years old for beating her rapist to death in the street—decided in the last year that she couldn’t stay within the same walls as Vaslav anymore. He was too much; his pain was no longer his own when he allowed it to bleed into every person around him.
He didn’t blame her.
He didn’t even blame himself, now.
Vaslav was simply trying to get from one day to the next, but he wasn’t entirely sure of the reason why. Who wanted to live like this—why wasn’t he already dead? A better man would have pulled the trigger by now. He was sure of it.
Maybe that was the problem.
He was a coward.
“Are you okay?” Feliks asked.
Vaslav’s jaws clicked from how hard he clenched his molars to swallow back the pain before he uttered, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
That time, his words came out hoarse. He’d taken punches to the head that felt better than the exploding fireworks of agony that rippled through his brain like the aftershocks of a wave.
He didn’t meet the man’s eyes. Couldn’t reach for the gun to shoot the bastard like he had initially come there to do. Vaslav was only able to suck cool air through his tight teeth and then talk. The damn migraines had been fading in and out for a good day, but he knew what it meant because every time they came back in again, they were longer. Soon, he would get no break between the flashes of pain, and it would all melt together for a migraine that would last ...