A whole cycle.
It wouldn’t end.
Hannah stayed quiet during Vera’s rant.
“Sorry,” she muttered to her friend after. “It’s a little close to home.”
Hannah raised a brow in question. “What, your mom and dad are—”
“No, but someone else has a not-so-great relationship with his mother, and things have happened because of that lately.”
A lame explanation, but Vera wouldn’t offer more on the topic.
Hannah’s crinkled nose and puckered brow spoke of her confusion. “Do you mean your husband?”
Vera sighed. “It just seems to be a theme, okay? Shitty parents who don’t love themselves or their kids who make grown people that don’t know or can’t manage or even understand a lot of what they feel. I’m just saying, I’ve noticed it.”
“Right,” Hannah returned.
Not like she believed it.
Vera waved a hand, and started to pull the messenger bag from her shoulder. She had yet to even kick off her boots or remove her coat, and they hadn’t even left the entry of the villa.”
“I also have practically no money without the accounts and credit cards she gives me access to,” Hannah added while Vera hung her bag and coat on a hook in the hallway. She turned to face Hannah who had chosen the floor to study. “Everything I did have, Viktor took. I didn’t even get a high school diploma out of The Swan House. She pulled the right ropes, Vera—if she cuts them, I drown.”
“Money is the last thing you need to worry about. I’ve got three cards in my wallet, and you could take any of them for six months before Vaslav would notice it probably wasn’t me spending the money.”
That was a lie.
Her husband was too obsessive with tracking their financials, even if she had an all-access pass to the wealth that was now under her name. Nonetheless, she seriously doubted Vaslav would say shit to her handling her friend’s affairs for a while. A few hundred thousand, likely less, to help Hannah get on her feet and have a healthy, loved baby was nothing. A drop in the bucket to the billions upon billions of bloodstained money that belonged to her.
Or so the paperwork said.
No matter.
Vaslav wouldn’t care. He had so much money, and had become accustomed to that wealth in such a way that he barely thought about it. He wouldn’t run out. Their proverbial bank account was a bottomless pit.
He would notice the spending, however—and Vera could deal with that. Nonetheless ... he wouldn’t care. Hell, he’d paid his mother to keep her under control for years.
Hannah scratched at the base of her neck, saying, “I don’t want to take your money.”
“It’s not taking my money. I’m giving it.”
That ended that. Vera didn’t bother to explain how, eventually, a certain business in the city that meant a great deal to both her and Hannah would also belong to her. She had plans for The Swan House, selfishly selfless and beautiful dreams that she didn’t even dare speak about yet. Those same plans and dreams would someday benefit Hannah, too.
Official notices from estate barristers had come through on papers with all the legal letterheads attached at the top—her own lawyer, compliments of a legal team she hadn’t even realized Vaslav kept on the payroll, stepped in to handle the middleman details.
Vera never saw a cop.
Didn’t speak to a musor.
In fact, if she didn’t occasionally see the marked and unmarked vehicles—although, still obvious by their blacked-out windows and attached lights—she wouldn’t know police even existed in her world. Never mind captains and detectives piecing together an already cold crime scene.
Feliks’ body still had not been found.
Vaslav had been right—it was all a waiting game.
“I’m finally learning how to drive the Hummer, by the way, but I called the car service for a driver this week. Maybe next, I’ll try the trip myself.”
Unlikely.
Vera was a big fan of wishful thinking.
“And?” Hannah asked.
“I’m trying to change the subject so you’ll stop looking so sad for a minute. Don’t let what other people think or feel about your pregnancy ruin the way you smiled when I told you all the tests were positive.”
Hannah let out a little laugh.
Weak as it was ...
Vera shrugged one shoulder, smiling a bit herself. “I know you were scared, and you didn’t even want to tell anybody right away, but a part of you was happy, too. That’s what your baby deserves. For their mother to just be happy.”
Hannah’s shoulders lifted and dropped with the weight of her next breath. “Yeah, I’m trying.”
“Did you tell Igor yet?”
The expression darkening Hannah’s face told Vera the answer. She had not.
“Not for lack of trying,” Hannah explained. “He hasn’t called me in a week, and that last time we spoke ... I get the impression he’s busy, but it’s not like he told me with what. So, I left a few messages. He’s supposed to come around tonight.”
Shit.
Guilt gnawed harder on Vera’s soul.
“I really should have called first, huh?”
Hannah shrugged, helpless but smiling.
A little.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“I can stay out of sight, keep my headphones in, yadda yadda,” Vera replied. “Unless you want me to go, I can call the car—”
“No, I want you to stay. Did you at least give Vaslav more heads up than me?” Hannah asked.
That was where things got tricky.
“I did,” Vera replied.
Carefully.
Hannah hadn’t missed it.
“Why did you say it like that?”
It was that moment when Vera decided it was time to share her own secret. Reaching into the messenger bag she had hung earlier on the wall, she produced the remaining unopened pregnancy test that had been left over.
Hannah squinted at the test. “I think it’s too late for another one of—”
“It’s for me,” Vera interrupted. “I came here to take it.”
All at once, Hannah’s jaw fell open.
Flies could have made a home.
Vera chewed on her bottom lip, eyeing the pink and white box with the strangest anxiety growing in her chest from deep inside her heart. “Vaslav found the tests,” she explained, “and made me take one. Not long after you left, actually. We had a fight, I had put the test in my pocket—”
“Was it positive?” Hannah asked.
“Did you miss the part where he made me take a test?”
“I figured he must have thought they were yours,” Hannah replied. “I mean, if I was a guy and I thought my wife was pregnant with my kid but was hiding it, I would want to know, too.”
How simple.
Would every man overreact as much as Vaslav had? Vera didn’t quite think so, but it was a distinction she couldn’t make for Hannah without explaining the why for said reaction, too. So, she did neither.
“He did think they were mine. We don’t want kids, Hannah.”
She didn’t explain why. That was too deep.
Vera got it, though.
She understood.
Vaslav, so hated by his own mother, who also hated her, came from a long line of the same history cycling again and again. He didn’t want to be a father if he thought there was a chance he would be a bad one, but he had too much pride to say as much. Even so, he had a right to make that choice.