move, and he walked a bit down the hallway before he realized she wasn’t following him. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder with another arched brow.
“I will take you to him, come on,” he said.
Viktoria still didn’t move.
Who was this man?
She didn’t know.
That bothered her.
The look of him … the unknown … all of it was horrifying to her. Her worst fears and the nightmares that constantly plagued her sometimes started exactly like this, and that’s what scared her the very most. Not that she could tell this man that. She didn’t even tell her brothers these things, honestly.
She was terrified.
He was terrifying.
The world was playing a joke on her, surely.
“I don’t know you,” Viktoria managed to say.
Maybe then, he would understand her discomfort.
At that statement, the corner of his lips did lift into something akin to a crooked smile. It did nothing to soften his features, but rather, darkened them further.
“I don’t know who I am either, woman, but most people just call me Pav.”
“Pav,” she echoed.
“Or Pavel.”
That doesn’t help, really.
It seemed like he could read her mind because he shrugged, adding quickly, “At the end of this hallway, you will find an elevator. It’s loud and old, but it works. Press the button for the highest floor, and it will take you to Konstantin’s office.”
He didn’t give her the chance to say anything before he turned around and passed her by in the hallway. He took extra care not to touch her as he passed, and he didn’t even glance at the kit she had dropped on the ground. He disappeared around the corner of the hallway and never once looked back over his shoulder.
Viktoria was still frozen.
Fear was horrible like that.
4.
PAV WATCHED the second hand on the clock on the wall across from Konstantin’s office tick past the two with a slowness that rivaled death. He felt like he could safely make that statement. After all, he’d watched enough death in his lifetime to know it could be incredibly slow when it wanted to be. Even when someone begged for it to be faster.
He leaned against the wall and stared down the empty hallway. He never really understood why there was a hallway in this portion of the Compound. There was only one elevator here, and in Konstantin’s office, there was another elevator that brought someone directly inside the office, if that’s what the man wanted to do.
Then again, Pav supposed that was probably meant to appease Konstantin’s paranoia and need for safety. Kind of like the way he also had entire sections of his walls—inside them, of course—that were just slabs of metal, in case someone outside with an automatic assault rifle got any bright ideas.
Between the two Boykov brothers, Konstantin was the one a person needed to mind, where the man’s thoughts were concerned. He was dangerous because he planned everything down to the slightest detail, never told a soul what he was thinking, and he was meticulous about it.
As for the other brother … Kolya, well, he was just plain fucking dangerous. And violent. Pav had been on the other end of a room one too many times when Kolya had come in ready to kill someone, and it was never very easy for the person who was about to die.
The two were quite different in that way. One, entirely subtle and cunning. The other, obvious and vicious.
Glancing up again, the clock’s second hand was moving past the six, now. Another thirty seconds and he could knock on the door. Konstantin had been clear—twelve, no earlier and no later. Pav was the type to be right on time.
The door to Konstantin’s office was closed tight. He couldn’t hear any noise coming from inside the space, but that wasn’t unusual, either. Not considering how thick the door was, and the effort Konstantin put into making sure his office was completely private.
Pav had only been inside the space a handful of times over the years, and that was usually to relay some message from someone else. He certainly didn’t stay in the office long enough to get comfortable or look around. Not that he could get comfortable in another man’s space. That wasn’t how he worked.
The only place Pav felt truly comfortable was in the shadows—deep in the belly of the Compound where no one bothered him, and very few called on him for their business. He could move between the cells, take care of the broken down there until it was their time to