“Then you’ll do that, too?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Even if I freak out?”
“Da.”
“Even if I—”
“If you ask me to stay, then I will stay,” he said quietly.
There were far too many parts of Viktoria that were screaming at her to listen to her instincts. The parts of her that were just scared because she was always fucking terrified of something or someone. And then the parts of her that had so many questions to ask … Something had to be wrong, right? Hadn’t he just gotten called away from a party with her brother because something happened at the Compound? Why was he here? And who had brought him here, anyway?
It was the other part of her …
The part that felt dead, but she’d learned was just sleeping. The part that was very much a young, sexual woman who’d thought she would never feel something like attraction or lust again, who had suddenly been woken up, who stepped back from the doorway and opened it wider.
Pavel nodded, and stepped inside after her.
Viktoria still didn’t turn her back to him.
He didn’t miss it.
“I have three knives on me,” he said, “would you like to take them?”
She stilled in the hallway and hesitated to close the door. Once she did that, he was in here. No one would hear her cry for help or see that something was happening. It would be just her and him, and way too much blind faith and trust.
“You don’t need a knife to hurt me,” she muttered.
Pavel lifted one shoulder. “But do you still want them?”
Why lie?
“Yes, I would.”
Unquestioningly, Pavel emptied his pockets of the three knives he’d been hiding. Viktoria took each of them, and while it didn’t make her feel safer to have the weapons in her hands, that wasn’t the point.
It might not make her feel safer.
It didn’t have to.
It was the fact that he did it at all that meant something. She felt a lot of things in those moments—the usual war of emotions that kept her head barely above water while she still felt like she was drowning at the same time.
The one thing she didn’t feel?
Regret.
Not about him.
“Why three?” she asked.
“Hmm?”
“Three knives. You only have two hands.”
“Backup.”
He glanced her way and winked.
If Pav noticed that Viktoria made a conscious choice to trust him enough to walk ahead of him, then he didn’t say anything. It was unusual for her to let anyone walk at her back, but especially a man. He followed behind her silently as she headed for the kitchen to finish what she had been doing before he showed up.
Except now …
Well, now she didn’t have very much interest in the liquor she’d left sitting open on the counter. That’s where she went first, closing the bottle and opening the freezer to put the bottle back in its place. No doubt, there would be another night when she needed to pull it out and drink herself to sleep.
“Do you often drink alone?”
Viktoria spun around quickly, a sharp reply at the ready on the tip of her tongue. She ended up swallowing the reply when she found Pav was at the other side of the kitchen, looking over the items on her table.
Or rather, the sketch she had been working on since she’d come home. She thought it might settle her mind to sit down and draw with charcoal—it always used to, anyway. It had been far longer than she wanted to admit since she’d felt the desire to draw literally anything. But tonight, after being with him on that back porch, she’d wanted to do just that.
“Well?” Pav asked, his head tipping up when she stayed silent. His gaze landed on her and he arched a brow high. “Do you often drink alone?”
“Sometimes.”
He nodded. “You shouldn’t.”
Had that been someone else standing there telling her what she should and shouldn’t do with her body and time, she would have told them to shut their fucking mouth. Her business was her business, and it wasn’t up for discussion. Her sharp nature was the best and first defense she had to keep people in line and at a distance.
For some reason, she bit her tongue.
She said nothing to Pav.
Nothing except, “Yeah, I know.”
Pav went back to the sketch on the table and Viktoria was hyperaware of how hard her heart had started to beat in her chest. The sketch was unmistakable—there was no way he could look at it and not recognize his own image staring back at him.
She wasn’t wrong.
“It’s me,” he said, half amused and half curious.
Viktoria wet her lips, trying to settle her nerves. “It is.”
“It’s very good. You even got the detail of the scar on my eyebrow right.”
“Details are important.”
Something akin to a smile curved the edge of his mouth, but he didn’t look away from the sketch. “They are very important.”
A part of her wanted to hide the sketch away from view and keep it safe from scrutiny. It wasn’t that she thought he would criticize her art, but rather, she didn’t want anyone seeing what she was drawing at the moment. Her art had always been a peek inside her mind, and maybe that’s why she’d stopped drawing
