“Well, I think you look a little tired, but you don’t see me pointing it out, Vas.”
That perked his amusement.
Only a bit.
“Krasavitsa, beauty, I know how I look,” he said without inflection. “I have mirrors.”
And dark circles, thanks to the lack of sleep over the past forty-eight hours. The tail-end of a raging migraine kept his pain at a steady, sharp five on a one-to-ten scale as well. Amongst a list of other sufferings and complaints that wouldn’t make a damn difference to where this conversation was going, and none that he cared to share with her.
She didn’t need to worry.
Not about him.
“But no seizures lately,” Vaslav noted.
More to himself than Vera.
She still heard her.
“Oh?” Her whole face brightened.
“I’m about due for one, really.”
That didn’t impress Vera at all if the way her gaze narrowed, and her smile fell was any indication. “Why do you have to do that?”
“Do what?” Vaslav nodded at the birch keepsake box on the table as he came to stand beside the chair rather than behind it. She watched him the entire time. “Go on, open it. I am curious.”
“You said my father—”
“What about him? I put him to work. He’s waiting for lunch. We’ll take some down for him.”
Vera’s pinched expression nearly made him laugh. “He’s ... here?”
“At the guesthouse, yes.”
He enjoyed the dawning recognition lighting up her eyes, but it didn’t stay long when she leveled her next questions on him. “And he’s okay?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
Dryly, Vera muttered, “You tell me.”
Vaslav chuckled at that. “Stop it, kisska. I made a promise, didn’t I? You agreed, he wasn’t hurt. Simple.”
Vera smacked her tongue off her top front teeth. “It was more like a deal, let’s be honest.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“Of course, you don’t.”
Vera reached for the birch box with the hinged cover displaying a carefully wood-burned crown interwoven with roses. “I haven’t seen this since I was sixteen.”
“If it’s yours, why didn’t you bring it?”
“It wasn’t the right time,” she said.
Vaslav couldn’t say he believed her, though.
She had just unlatched the brass hook on the front when he told her, “I don’t appreciate uninvited visitors, and I tend to make that clear to anyone who needs the lesson more often than not, so we don’t have a repeat of the mistake in the future. I’m not particularly choosy about who it is, or how it’s done, Vera.”
Her hands clasped the sides of the box, and she glanced sideways up at him. “He is okay, right?”
He didn’t mind that she needed to ask again.
“Perfectly fine. The first day was the worst.”
Not that he planned to explain why. Her father, on the other hand ... Well, frankly, Vaslav didn’t give one good goddamn what Demyan told his daughter about his arrival and treatment. If he was determined to stick around for a visit, then he would play by the rules Vaslav put in place for the time being. Including his current whereabouts.
“My mother doesn’t think—”
“Ah, the wife,” Vaslav interjected in a rumble of laughter. “Is she what sent you all the way here today?”
“You could pretend like you care.”
“I do, actually. About you.”
Vera blinked. “This is a strange way of showing it.”
So be it.
Vaslav gestured at the box. “Go on, then.”
She flipped open the lid fast without fanfare or even hesitation. It took all of the suspense that had kept him curious about the contents of the birch box and stomped it into the ground when the lid thunked loudly against the table. Instead of admiring the items resting in crushed, navy-blue velvet, she glowered at him.
“They were my mother’s,” she said.
Vaslav reached for the larger of the two items in the box. A veil made of mostly lace that had been packaged and preserved inside a smaller, cardboard box with a plastic window for viewing. He didn’t pull it out of the velvet it had been nestled into, but he studied as much of the lace’s design as he could before setting it back into place.
Vera picked up the smaller box, wrapped in black leather with a hinged cover, than set aside the box preserving the veil. He guessed the contents of the box in her palm by the size alone, but she took more time to open the ring box than she had with the initial lid.
Vaslav let her.
He didn’t have the same emotional attachments to things like wedding rings and other mementos. Especially when they were tied to other people. Nonetheless, when she had asked to pick her own engagement ring, he never considered it was because she already had one.
“She never got to wear the veil, but it was her grandmother’s,” Vera explained quietly. “The ring ... My father told me once that she sketched it out while he was clearing out the room they planned to use for my nursery. He had it made shortly after by the jeweler who made his mother’s ring.”
“She wore it, then? The ring?”
Vera lifted her shoulders, but even the action felt helpless when they dropped back down like a heavy weight had come to sit down on delicate bones. “Not for long.”
The lid on the ring box creaked when she flipped it open. Nestled inside a similarly blue crushed velvet was an oval diamond sitting on a band of thin, white gold. At least five carats, every facet of the gem caught the dim lighting in the room. A classic style that complimented most women, but he thought was perfectly fit for Vera.
People would notice it.
The way the ring would sit on her finger; how the diamond was sized just right. It wasn’t even on her finger, and already, he could practically see how she would look wearing it while she stood in a room full of people.
Like she was entirely his.
She took her time to reacquaint herself with the ring by tracing her thumb around the oval diamond, but she didn’t pull it free from its safe place. He figured it was time to give the ring a new home. Where he intended for it to stay.
“Let me see that,” he murmured.
Before she could refuse, Vaslav plucked the ring box from her hand and swallowed it with his own. He only grinned at her confused expression when he offered her his other hand to help her stand from the dining chair.
“What are you doing?” Vera asked as she allowed him to direct her a few paces away from the table.
“Something proper,” he returned.
Vera laughed. “You?”
“You’ll soon see.”
And then he dropped down to one knee.
All her giggles died, then.
Vaslav gave her a rueful grin. “Cat got your tongue?”
She didn’t look away as her tongue wet the pillow-soft seam of her lips, and she whispered, “That’s not what you’re supposed to say when you’re down there with a ring.”
“Right, back to the proper bit,” he told her. Gone was her earlier fire, but the careful tone she had used couldn’t be as easily dismissed. “Or do you not want me to ask you like this?”