Page 5 of Crowned

“All of you, shut up,” I say, shaking my head like I’m embarrassed.

“It’s true.” Vasily turns to the other two. “Get this. I go around to Elyah’s apartment one afternoon. He’s half naked and all hot and flustered. Tells me he’s beensleeping.” He elbows Kirill in the chest. “Behind him on the carpet, what do I see? A red Versace handbag. The same red handbag that Lilia Kalashnik was always carrying around. I knew right then what was up, and I couldn’t fucking believe it. Elyah’s lucky I’m not the sort of man to rat on him to our boss.”

Silence falls around the table. Vasily is still chuckling, and he doesn’t notice the chill wind that has swept through the room.

I tap my finger on my glass. “But that is not right, Vasily. That is not what you told me the day Lilia disappeared.”

“Hm?” Vasily looks up at me, and his face drains of color. “I—what?”

I stare at him as he scrambles to straighten out his lies from the truth, and all the while my heart is swelling with rage. “You told me that you already knew that there was something up between me and Lilia.”

There are three seconds of brutal silence before Vasily gabbles, “I mean, yes! I already knew, which was why I knocked on your door. To stop you from making a mistake. But it was just so funny seeing her purse lying on your floor for anyone to see.”

“For anyone to see,” I repeat. I play the memory in my mind. Answering my front door to Vasily. Him looking past me and seeing the red purse lying on the carpet. Me turning to stare at it.

I must have looked so fucking guilty.

Vasily must have come up with the whole plan in that moment. He would pin everything on the cheating wife.

Vasily puts down his vodka. “Anyway, I should get going. I forgot that I was supposed to be meeting someone.”

As he gets to his feet, Kirill stands up and forces him down. “But we are about to talk business,korotyshka.”

“Another time,” Vasily stammers, but can do nothing as Kirill shoves his glass back into his hand and pours vodka into it. Kirill keeps pouring as he moves the bottle up Vasily’s arm and above his head, still pouring. The vodka runs through his hair and spatters in his lap and on the couch.

“Please, I’ve got to go,” Vasily whines.

His voice sets my teeth on edge. He thinks that if he whimpers like a wounded animal I will take pity on him. I can feel the ropes in my hands, the ones I wound around Lilia’s neck. I tortured the woman I love. I nearly killed her because of thisblyat.

“I lied. I have seen Lilia Aranova.”

Kirill stops pouring vodka on Vasily’s head and he blinks to clear his eyes. “You—you have?”

“I locked her in cage. I starved her. I tortured her. I hanged her with noose.”

His face goes blank with shock. Then hope bleeds into his expression. “She’s dead? It’s what she deserved, that treacherous bitch.”

A muscle tics in my jaw and the room has narrowed into a point. Thepushkatattoo on my ribs burns for blood. I killed for my sisters. If any man hurt them, I broke all the bones in their bodies and feasted on their screams, but I’m the one who hurt Lilia. Her agony is all because of me, and all because I put my faith in the filthy rat that sits before me now instead of trusting the woman I loved.

I get up and walk slowly over to Vasily, taking off my leather jacket and then pulling my T-shirt over my head. He knows what this means. I did this the first night we met, and Ivan Kalashnik put a baseball bat in my hands.

I’m going to beat a man to death.

“No, no, no,” Vasily moans, turning white.

I take the empty bottle of vodka from Kirill, smash it over the edge of the coffee table, and hold the jagged edges to Vasily’s throat. “I was not fucking my boss’s wife,” I seethe. “I loved my boss’s wife. She loved me. She was so close to falling into my arms forever. With her husband dead, she could have been mine. I would have found out where her father took her, and I would have gone to her.”

My shout echoes around the room. Neither Kirill nor Konstantin move.

“But she betrayed us, Elyah,” Vasily whimpers.

What burns the most after the memory of the way I tortured Lilia is the fact that I was tricked by a sniveling little runt. This lowlife piece of shit made me believe that Lilia betrayed me.

Vasily.

Vasily made me hate her.

Vasily made me put my hands on her in anger. Threaten to kill her.Nearlykill her.

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