Lightning slashed the sky and flickered across his hard expression. If I wasn’t so frightened, I’d want to sculpt this moment. His face would be exaggerated as the young predator, satisfied with a recent kill and now hunting simply for the sport of it.
“Why are you here?” My voice was a shadow.
He didn’t seem like he was going to answer for a long moment, but he threw a hand up in a casual gesture. “I wanted to see him like this. I wasn’t there when it all went down. I heard it was the Italians.”
So, Vasilije hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger. It was both comforting and disappointing to know. His dark thoughts were loud on his face. He needed to see Sidor when he was at his most vulnerable and doing so made the Serbian man feel intensely powerful.
“My family wasn’t the one on this, but he fucking got what he deserved. You want to know why?” His question was rhetorical. “On top of everything else, he and Sergey ordered their lackey to burn a house down with a family inside. A normal fucking family, who had nothing to with us Serbs, or you Russians, or anyone.” He sneered. “He used that family as pawns, hoping to start a war.”
I pressed my palm to my chest, trying to shield my heart from the hurt his words caused. I knew Sidor was evil, but I didn’t want to hear the evidence. It was cowardly, but I needed to stay ignorant.
“I didn’t know,” I gasped as disgust roiled in my belly.
His eyes narrowed as he evaluated me, and it appeared he’d decided to believe me. His expression was icy. I wanted to point out it was all the more reason to end Sidor’s time on this earth, but from Vasilije’s standpoint, I understood. He wanted to maximize Sidor’s suffering.
“Something else you should know,” he said. “We can get to him anytime.”
Did he understand how empty that threat felt? It was stupid to goad him, but my situation was hopeless. “To do what? Stare at him?”
Vasilije’s eyes widened, then flooded with faint amusement. “You Russian women are tougher than your men.” His expression hardened and turned serious. “I meant Sergey. You tell him that next time you see him.”
I stared glumly at my knees. “I don’t want any part of this life.”
“Probably shouldn’t have married Sidor Petrov then.”
His glib remark rankled. He had no idea what I’d been through or sacrificed, but I was smart enough to keep my emotions under control. “Yes. It’s a decision I regret daily.”
He narrowed one eye, like he wasn’t entirely sure how to handle me. He cast a final glance at my husband, then back to me. “You should be careful.”
I sucked in a sharp breath.
He turned, headed for the door, and lobbed it at me over his shoulder. “I mean, the floor’s wet and I don’t want you to slip and fall. You’re a pretty girl and don’t seem to be as dumb as your husband. It’d be a shame if something bad happened to you.”
His thinly veiled threat vibrated through my bones long after he was gone.
Outside, the thunderstorm continued to rage. It left me no choice but to remain and wait it out. I sat in the darkness, my gaze fixated on the machines while not actually seeing anything. How was I going to escape this mess that was my life? It was possible I could go back to Russia, but I’d have to give up everything. I’d have to leave my sculptures behind, along with the hard-fought prestige I’d built for my name, and that was assuming the Petrovs would let me go.
Twenty minutes after Vasilije Markovic left, the nurse on the night rotation came in and startled when she discovered me. She was older, with a friendly face, but she moved about the room like she was behind schedule.
“I didn’t bring an umbrella,” was the idiotic thing I said to her when she asked how I was doing. The truth was scarier. I didn’t know what was waiting for me back at the enormous, childless house that was in Sidor’s name only.
The lights blinked off, plunging the room into darkness for a split second, and the respirator beeped as the power source was interrupted. Time suspended in the quiet that followed, and the emergency lighting that flicked on was pale and eerie. It was cast on us only long enough for a single heartbeat before the power whirred back on. The life support machines chirped again, switching off the batteries and back onto direct power.
“What was that?” I asked.
The nurse walked to the window and peered out at the parking lot below, which was dark. “It looks like we’ve lost power. This storm ain’t playing.”
I sat up straighter, and she must have misinterpreted my reaction as concern.