Things like that took time.
“Fine, Vaslav,” Vera muttered heavily, defeat coloring up her tone. “Do whatever you want—I guess, call me when it’s done? Whatever the hell it is you’re doing day after day without me.”
Nothing good, he wanted to tell her but he didn’t. Nothing half as amazing as what I could be doing at home with you, he could have said, and it would have been the truth.
He also wished for that to be true, but just because he wanted his wife home with him didn’t mean he could allow his feelings to cloud his judgement about what happened in the first place. There was a reason why he sent Vera to New York, and he didn’t intend on bringing her back before he made sure that reason never happened again.
It wasn’t his fault that she couldn’t see this situation from his perspective. Vaslav was to blame for a lot of things, but not that one.
“Could you at least say hi to Hannah for me?” she asked, referencing the only reason he was able to keep her on the phone call for more than a cursory hi and bye. As had happened for their last three conversations after she answered, asked him if he was calling to let her know she could come home, and after he refused, she would simply hang up.
“Otherwise,” Vera continued, “just fuck off.”
Her cold dismissal came with the click of her phone, and then soon after, a dial tone. Interestingly enough, that was the same moment his elevator reached the intended floor he had selected at the beginning of his call. Just as Vera had first picked up the call.
He was left listening to the emptiness on the other end of the line, still hearing Vera’s final fuck you eating its way through his tired brain, and staring at his warped reflection in the widening door panels of the elevator. He stood there long enough after the doors had slid entirely open that they started to close again.
Vera’s anger was justified, too.
He had to keep reminding himself that.
Vaslav needed the closing doors as a wakeup call to remind him what he was there to do. Stepping into the dimly lit corridor, Vaslav followed the signs and arrows to the long-term ICU ward where Hannah Malone had been kept from the moment Bogdan Nikitin agreed to take her file onto his team’s caseload. As his patient, he made the final calls on everything from the state of her fetus, medications and therapies, and even transportation.
Say, flying the comatose woman back to her mother in Italy where Marlena could get Hannah a new doctor that would do whatever her mother wanted.
Something the young woman’s mother had recently tried to use to her benefit, not that it worked. Marlena could cry foul all she wanted; it wouldn’t do any good. Unless she came to Moscow to sit in Bogdan’s office for a review of her daughter’s coma and the prognosis, nobody planned to entertain anything from her.
Or so said Vaslav’s current payroll.
Money really was the only talking point when it came to a situation like this. He had more than enough to make sure he sat at the very head of the table, having his voice heard first. Nobody else but the people he paid needed to know that he was speaking, however.
This wasn’t his first trip on the ride of manipulating someone’s future without them being aware he was doing it. Although, in the past, he’d never done it with the intention to keep someone else alive. That bit was new. He typically went for the opposite route.
There were some pros to keeping one’s friends close. Like Bogdan. Not that Vaslav needed many more friends. Anymore, really. As it was, the friends he had seemed to take a lot of his energy. Something he didn’t have much of, frankly; just getting up every day took most of it.
“Mr. Pashkov, did you forget your visitor badge again?” the familiar woman behind the nurse’s station asked. She offered him a kind, patient smile even as he scowled at her on his way by the desk. “You know what happens when the security asks you for it, that’s all I’m saying.”
Her voice—Alyona, was her name—carried behind him even though she barely raised her voice. One didn’t need to be loud in the ICU ward to be heard. It was something he made an effort to keep in the back of his mind whenever he came for a visit. He didn’t need anyone overhearing his conversations with Bogdan, but as this was the only place that the man would really entertain a visit from Vaslav, well ...
He had no choice.
It worked out.
Hannah needed someone to stop by and say hello.
“Yeah, yeah,” Vaslav told the head nurse with a wave over his shoulder when she called his name one more time. He didn’t bother with their attempts at conversation. Any of the nurses, really. Bogdan requested it; Vaslav had no issue making himself appear unapproachable when needed.
The nurse didn’t have the opportunity to say anything else before Vaslav headed through the automatic sliding glass doors that opened to room 202. As soon as he crossed the threshold of the temperature-controlled room filled with screens monitoring every inch of Hannah’s prone, sheet-covered body on the reclined hospital bed, the doors slid shut with a hiss behind him.
The first time he’d been there—he almost didn’t walk through those doors. In fact, he stared at the numbers over the doors for entirely too long overthinking whether or not the young woman on the other side would care or want him there.
Bogdan had shown up and made the choice for Vaslav that day when he hadn’t been willing to explain why the thought of going inside the room bothered him.
Surprisingly, Bogdan wasn’t the man waiting for him on the one of two chairs that sat side by side in the farthest left corner of Hannah’s room.
“Finally decided to show up, did you?” Vaslav asked.
A sigh passed Igor’s scarred lips, and while he’d looked Vaslav’s way when he first arrived, now the man only stared at the unmoving woman on the bed. “Bogdan got a page. He’ll be around in a—”
“Yeah, yeah. Back to you.”
Igor’s dark eyes followed Vaslav across the room until he had joined the man in the empty chair next to his. “What about me?”
“I said it. You’re here. Many moons later, mind you, but—”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Igor even had the audacity to smile. Except it was more like a wincing sneer. Vaslav didn’t bother to smile back, and instead, put his focus on shedding his heavy tweed coat. Next to him, his companion—the only one conscious and talking—remained silent and had gone back to staring in the general vicinity of the bed.
One couldn’t tell when Igor had a coat on, buttoned up to the neck, but a good sixty percent of his chest, back, and legs had been burned in the bomb made of screws of shrapnel and some type of petrol for fuel. Igor had only taken a few flying pieces of metal to his face and neck. All injuries that had healed rather quickly.
The burns, on the other hand ...
The fact the man was even up and walking around spoke to a miracle. He should still be deep within the walls of a burn unit, but a nurse on his twenty-four-hour call at home—or rather, his current safehouse—allowed the man more privacy.
“Are you going back for another surgery?” Vaslav asked.
The eight-hour skin-grafting procedure Igor had done the month before had only been partially successful. As far as Vaslav knew. Igor didn’t like to get detailed about his current struggles, and Vaslav wasn’t the type to prod.