He was still just a kid, though.
One that shouldn’t be sleeping in a car.
Vera took two steps down the front steps of her villa after locking up, thinking Kiril might be sleeping in the two-door car he had sworn to her would be glittering with chrome by the end of the month, but froze when she heard a low shit hissed from her right.
Fast enough to make the world around her spin, she glanced to her right, seeing nothing and no one, and then left into the quiet front property of Mr. Anatoly’s villa. Someone had thought to water the bushes lining the fence as she could still see the water droplets on the leaves, and the hose her neighbor had once used with the long attachment to reach his hanging plants hadn’t been hung up with patience considering the extra loops of hose that remained on the ground.
“I don’t think I gave them too much water, right?”
That earlier curse made a lot more sense when Vera looked to her right once more and this time, actually paid attention. While her villa and the one that belonged to Mr. Anatoly were twins in architectural design, the one to her right differed in one aspect on the outside. The front stoop greeted guests from the side and featured a closed alcove that was only visible to its neighbors and not people walking by on the street.
There stood a sheepish Kiril in the hidden alcove of her neighbors’ villa. A young couple who visited their villa occasionally throughout the year when they took time away from their country home and business; he was a dentist in an area that made travel into the city difficult, so he had a large clientele. More interesting was the sharp pick-like tool that Kiril didn’t even bother to hide dangling from his left hand.
“Are you trying to break into their house?” Vera asked him.
Kiril popped his tongue off the roof of his mouth before replying, “Plausible deniability. I was checking stuff out while things got a little boring.”
“Kiril!”
“And I already aced your other neighbor’s locks, so,” he added lower. “But he’s dead, and there’s not much else to see in there.”
Good God.
“Kiril, you can’t break into people’s places just because you’re bored. Download a streaming service or something on your phone, okay? Just—”
“I thought you didn’t have any plans today?”
His question, likely only meant to divert her from shouting at him while the rest of the street listened in on the action, brought Vera back to the bigger issue at hand. One she expected Kiril to help with whether he liked it or not.
“Did he take my father?” she demanded.
Kiril’s dark, thick eyebrows shot up, making his boyish features all the more innocent when he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Vera grabbed onto the railing of her steps, and leaned over the edge, pointing at Kiril. “Don’t play games with me. I’ll call a cab, go to Vaslav and ask him myself, and you can follow behind for all I give a damn.”
“That’s not very nice.”
He sounded genuinely upset.
Or at the very least, hurt.
Vera wished she had time for his feelings. Maybe she was spending too much time with Vaslav Pashkov.
Kiril added, “I like driving with you. You don’t tell me I talk too much.”
That softened Vera’s anger.
Not by much.
“Did he take my father or not?” she asked.
Kiril sucked air through his grimacing mouth, and the long pause between his non-verbal response, and the words that finally came out of his mouth didn’t make the situation any better. “I don’t really know.”
“Kiril!”
“Well!” His hands shot up, one still holding the lock picking tool, in peace. “Really, I don’t!”
“What do you know, then?”
Because clearly, he knew something.
Kiril shrugged, and dropped his hands back down to his sides. “Just that if you call a cab, it’s gonna take like two hours to get you to Dubna. I can make it there in half that as long as we beat the noon rush.”
Well ...
She gestured between him and the coupe parked on the side of the street. “Let’s go. Move, you’re the one with the keys.”
*
Vera wasn’t even able to enjoy the view like she usually would as Kiril drove up the long, winding driveway leading straight to the looming home on the top of the hill. The panic that had been steadily growing inside now simmered under her surface as Kiril parked.
Despite what her mother said, Vera did believe what she said about Vaslav. He told her that he wouldn’t hurt her father as long as she had agreed to be married to him by the winter, and she expected him to follow through on that. Even if her agreement to his proposal didn’t exactly come with her own set of terms.
It shouldn’t need to.
Right?
“Ah, fuck,” Kiril muttered when he’d shut the engine off and shot a look toward the wide stone stairs leading up to the woman waiting at the front door. “She’s gonna mother me to death again. Tell her I’m not allowed to come inside, Igor said or some shit, okay?”
Vera scowled at the kid in the front seat, but he pretended like he didn’t notice where she sat right next to him. “Stop it, the very least you could do is let her care. What, she makes sure you’re fed while you’re around and not wearing jeans with the knees blown out of them.”
She knew because he told her as much.
The kid really did talk a lot. Just not about things that Vera sometimes wanted him to, for that matter.
“Hey, I like my jeans with the holes in the knees, okay?”
“Tell her that, then.”
Kiril’s responding facial expression didn’t exactly agree. Neither did the quick shake of his head. He eyed the empty driveway, saying, “I need to call Igor. He’s supposed to be here all day.”
“That’s a more valid excuse to stay in the car, for the record,” Vera pointed out before making her exit from the passenger side. She didn’t wait for his response before shutting the door on whatever Kiril was about to say, either.
She eyed the line of terracotta pots full of the same shrub she had left at home in varying degrees of growth and greenery. When did Vaslav plan to plant those?
Mira was already smiling in her kind way when Vera reached the steps and took the first few two at a time.
“I saw Kiril when he was opening the gate and already called Mr. Pashkov up from the back for you, Miss—”
“Could you just call me Vera?” she asked, hating to interrupt Mira but knowing it also needed to be said.
Mira pursed her lips, and keeping her hands neatly folded at her front, bobbed a bit on the spot in response. “Informally, I suppose I can.”
Vera raised a brow.
“And I will,” Mira quickly added. Then, she leaned sideways to look beyond Vera the higher she came on the stairs. “Is Kiril coming in?”
“Maybe later. He’s got other things to handle right now.”
And that was the most she would lie for the kid, too.
Mira nodded, but the way her mouth pinched in a tight smile said she wasn’t entirely happy about it. Vera almost wondered ... did she want to be a mother—was that why she mothered Kiril whenever the young man was within breathing distance of her?