They had learned their lesson.
Viktoria had truly only asked for one thing—that she be allowed to make her father feel like he had done to her. To put hope and trust in his hands, and then rip them away from him. It was what she had been owed, after all.
“I’ll be upstairs, Pav,” Viktoria said.
He nodded her way, and then she was gone.
Pav still found comfort in this place.
He hated it.
But he knew it well.
Vadim’s gaze drifted to him, but the man still stayed silent even as he tugged against his chains like he thought that might save him from Zhatka. It wouldn’t.
“Nothing to say now?” he asked the man on the floor.
Vadim trembled, but said nothing. Pav didn’t really mind. He didn’t need Vadim to speak for him to have the last word, honestly.
“Do you remember what you told me that first night I spent in the Compound?” Pav chuckled a bit and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels. “After you dragged me from the car that I was hiding in … before you decided my life was no longer my own, do you remember what you said?”
The man kept quiet.
Pav understood why.
“You don’t have to speak because it feels most appropriate tonight for me to remind you of those words,” Pav said, grinning just a bit. These walls were no longer his home, but he might come to visit occasionally. Why not? “Beware of those who show you mercy, for those are the people who know the essence of your fear.”
Pav kneeled down, three knives already in hand. He knew without a doubt as he put the knife to Vadim’s throat, and the man’s eyes widened back as huffs of air left his body from fear, that Viktoria was still close enough to hear her father’s death.
That’s what she’d wanted.
Pav smiled at the man.
Death always smiled.
“Say hello to the Devil, and tell him the Reaper sends another one, Vadim.”
The knives slid in.
21.
One month later …
KOLYA LET out a harsh hiss when Viktoria started the shading on the left side of his chest where he wanted one of the cupolas on top of the church to be black and white. The rest were in color, but with all the shading work that came along with a portion of a black and white piece … well, it wasn’t comfortable.
Especially on top of scar tissue.
At first, when her brother had tugged off his shirt to begin this session, it’d taken Viktoria more than a couple of seconds to look away from the scarring covering the majority of his chest. He still had his eight-pointed stars, and his Latin script under his throat, as well as the epaulettes on his shoulders to signify his rank in the Bratva.
A long time ago, he’d used to have a cross, too. A thieves’ cross. It was put there, not by his own choice, but because Vadim decided Kolya would be the man to take over once their father was done with his position.
And then, when Kolya had chosen to go against their father, Vadim decided to have the tattoo removed. She hadn’t known very much about the incident. Her brothers never talked about the night that event happened, or how it was done.
Now, she figured out why.
She understood.
They didn’t want to tell her about the horrors that caused his knotted, puckered pink skin that covered a good portion of her brother’s chest. It would not have been an easy punishment to have his tattoos burned off, not by any means.
“It still hurts, no?”
She glanced up at her brother, away from where her black-gloved hands were pulling the skin taut as she tried to work fast over a particularly rough edge of a scar that was bothering him. She could always fill anything in later, but the most important part today was just laying down as much ink over the bad scarring as she could.
“Sorry,” she whispered, glancing back down at her work.
“Not you,” Kolya muttered. “Well, yes, you too right now. You’re not as heavy-handed as some tattooists I’ve sat in front of, mind you, but yes it hurts quite a bit. I just meant in general. I wake up, and it’s tender, or I shower, and it burns for a while.”
God.
No one deserved this kind of punishment.
“Take a minute,” Kolya said when Viktoria didn’t put her machine back to work right away. “And then we’ll get back to it, Vik.”
She nodded, grateful for the second to think.
“You were lucky this didn’t kill you,” she said.
Kola grunted under his breath, a mixture of disgust and a laugh. “It almost did. Infection was terrible, and Maya about finished the job when she realized it got infected again.”
Viktoria didn’t even try to hide her smile. “She’s good for you, Kolya.”
“She is. We don’t tell people that, however.”
“Never,” she promised.
He gestured at his chest, and the scarring. “I know it looks bad to you, but I’ve become accustomed to seeing it, now. And it is just a moment in time, you know? Something that happened before but is over now. That’s how I see it, and that’s how you should see it. Don’t feel guilty or bad over something that is over and won’t happen again.”
How simple that sounded.
She didn’t think it was.
“I idolized him for a long time,” she said quietly.
Their father, she meant.
Kolya sighed. “That doesn’t change anything.”
He always saw things as black or white … a lot like Pav, too. Their minds were either made that way or broken that way. She couldn’t say quite the same about hers, but she would try to look at
