“Why do you keep staring at me?” she asked suddenly.
She hadn’t even been looking at him.
“How do you know—”
“I can feel your eyes.”
Pav might have smiled, but he couldn’t be sure. “I was thinking,” he lied, “that you don’t look like the typical tattoo artist, no? I don’t see any obvious tattoos.”
The tight tank top she’d exposed after pulling off her leather jacket had suddenly made the room a lot hotter for Pav, although he’d managed not to acknowledge it. How, he wasn’t sure. Great fucking control, maybe.
She flipped up her hand, and for the first time, he noticed the cursive B tattooed on her middle finger. “For Boykov, obviously.”
He chuckled a bit, realizing when she flipped someone off, it was like she was silently saying fuck off from the Boykovs. “I didn’t see that one earlier. My mistake.”
He had been too busy staring at her face … the delicate, sexy line of her shoulders under that tank top, and the way her collarbones peeked out around the collar, asking to be bitten. Fuck, he had a serious problem right now.
“No others?” he asked.
Viktoria glanced up from her world, and those ice-blue eyes of hers found his instantly. “None that you can see.”
“And none that I want to see,” Konstantin murmured from across the room. “Save that for another time and place; we are here to work, not to talk.”
Pav had the strangest urge to see if he could throw something and hit Konstantin in the head from his position, but nothing was really close enough, and he didn’t think it would help his case. Not with the man across the room or with the woman currently working on his chest. He had to consider those things—they were important, he supposed.
Viktoria rolled her eyes, but quickly went back to her work. “This last bit of shading is going to hurt. Fair warning, yes?”
Pav smirked a bit. “I have felt far more pain than your little gun is going to do to me.”
“Machine.”
“What?”
“It is a machine, Pav. It is not a gun. It does not shoot anything from the needles, yeah? It is a tattoo machine.”
“Fascinating.”
It really wasn’t.
He thought the way she said it was, though.
Viktoria looked up at him again, all ice-blue eyes wide and fear still lingering around her aura. Yeah, he could still taste it, too. As strange as that was. He could feel it, and he wanted to soak it all in. Because despite the fact she was clearly terrified of him, she was trying to suppress it. She pushed it down, and he wanted to know why.
Why for him?
“Almost done,” she whispered.
Pav nodded. “Spasibo.”
Viktoria said nothing and went back to her work.
He went back to staring at her again.
Seemed like a fair trade, no?
• • •
“Do not remove the wrappings for at least six hours,” Viktoria said as she finished packing up the kit she’d brought along. She didn’t look up at him as she worked, but he didn’t mind. “Make sure of it.”
Pav nodded as his fingertips drifted over the cellophane that had been taped over his tattoos. “Understood.”
“No scratching.”
“I won’t.”
“And that’s it,” Viktoria said, standing straight and turning to face him. Although, instead of looking his way, she looked at her brother standing beside him. “Is that all for me?”
Pav didn’t miss how Viktoria had easily reverted to the woman who had been sitting in the chair when he’d first entered the office. Cold and made from stone. Unfeeling and distant. She didn’t want to be there, she just was.
He wondered why.
Konstantin nodded. “That is all. I’m grateful.”
She nodded and then glanced Pav’s way, finally. “I probably won’t see you again, but it was … interesting to meet you, Pavel.”
He didn’t miss how she purposely didn’t use the words good or nice to describe meeting him. Not that he blamed her. He wouldn’t use those descriptors about himself, either.
“And you, Viktoria,” he returned quietly.
She didn’t wait to be dismissed by her brother like every other person who came into Konstantin’s presence would do. Pav watched her go and didn’t turn back to Konstantin until she was entirely gone from the office, and the door closed loudly behind her.
“She’s broken,” Pav said.
Konstantin blinked, but quickly fixed his expression. “Pardon you?”
“That woman. She is broken. In her mind … something is wrong.”
“I—”
“I can tell,” he interjected before the man could interrupt him. “Mine is the same way.”
Konstantin cleared his throat and shifted on his feet as his gaze darted to the door where his sister had disappeared. “Viktoria has reason to be a little different from everyone else. I won’t lie and say she doesn’t have issues—she clearly does. This was … different, though.”
Pav reached for the shirt and jacket he had thrown over a chair earlier before sitting down to let Viktoria work. Slipping the shirt on, and then the jacket, too, he asked, “What was different?”
The man’s curious gaze—no longer sharp and calculating—drifted to Pav again. “She smiled … laughed for you.”
“And?”
“Well, nothing,” Konstantin murmured. “Not if it was left up to her.”
Pavel didn’t understand what in the hell Konstantin was talking about, and he really didn’t have the time to figure it out, either. He had other things to do now. The chambers had been left alone for a good portion of the afternoon, and that made him anxious. He wasn’t used to leaving the cells and men inside them alone for so long. He needed to get back down there and make sure everything was as it needed to be.
He couldn’t sit here and discuss a woman he would probably never
