of the stairs. He carefully took the only free wicker chair and kept his gaze on the line of property at the horizon. It was better than the war that seemed to blow up inside his head every time he was forced to make nice with this man across from him.
“Coffee?” Vadim asked.
Pav shook his head once. “No, spasibo.”
“Food, then? I suspect you haven’t eaten this morning.”
Was it smart to eat food from the palm of the Devil?
Pav didn’t think so.
“I’m not hungry.”
Vadim made a noise under his breath, which drew in Pav’s attention. He stared at the man while Vadim worked on stirring half a spoon of sugar into his black coffee. The man added nothing else—no milk or cream. Coffee would be good right now, but Pav still wasn’t keen on taking anything from Vadim.
“You must feel … bitter toward me,” Vadim murmured.
“For what?”
A slow, sly smile curved the edges of the man’s lips, and instantly, Pav felt a strong fucking need to reach over and wipe it from Vadim’s face. That cold grin … he’d seen it one too many times. He’d seen it out of the corner of his eye as Vadim ordered men to beat the hell out of a sixteen-year-old Pav when he hadn’t done his job properly. He’d seen it when he was still a fucking kid, and Vadim had told him the monsters in his dreams were nothing compared to the monsters that he would find behind the walls of the Compound.
The bastard was right, too.
Pav was looking at the biggest monster of them all.
Vadim got a sick enjoyment out of seeing others suffer. Pav had not been immune to that simply because he took care of the people in the chambers. For those first few years, if anything, he had been an easy target for Vadim’s sadistic games.
Just how far could he push?
When would Pav break?
It had all been a game to him.
Now, Pav didn’t know how to be anything but the man that he was—this thing that Vadim had molded him into. Somedays, he wasn’t sure that he felt human. Other days, he felt embarrassingly human and weak.
“So, you’re saying you don’t feel bitterness for me?” Vadim asked.
“I feel very little for you, Vadim.”
The man did look up at that, and his gaze locked on Pav. “Shame, you would have died on those streets had I not taken you in.”
“Maybe death would have been better—did you ever consider that?”
“Not even once. Ask your father how death suited him, boy. If he could talk, I doubt he would tell you that was the better option.”
Pav’s jaw tightened as he clenched his teeth in an effort to keep the sudden surge of anger at bay. He had no doubt that Vadim knew exactly what he was doing. Purposely poking at Pav and all his weaknesses. Things that he kept tight to his chest—things no one else knew and that he told no one. Oh, he was sure some knew that his father had been killed by Vadim, and that was how he’d come to the Boykov Compound, but he doubted they really understood all the details. Or what came for years afterward, either.
“Well, I don’t know what my father would say, do I?” Pav smiled just as coldly as Vadim had moments earlier. “You never gave me the chance to hear him speak when it would have mattered to me the most.”
Vadim scoffed. “Boys. Boys and their fathers. Fathers in this life forget all too often that the boys they bring into the world are nothing but little soldiers who need to be taught how to behave. They’re not meant to be spoiled hellions running wild. That will do them no good when their time comes for the Bratva.”
“I didn’t know anything about the Bratva back then.”
“Another error on your father’s part.”
Pav swallowed hard. “What did you do to him, anyway? Where did you bury him?”
If they even did …
Vadim shrugged as he slathered cream cheese on a bagel like they weren’t having a conversation about the murder of Pav’s father fourteen years earlier. He might have been bothered by that on another day, but frankly, he was accustomed to this. He found comfort in death more than anything else.
Something else caused by Vadim.
“Amusing,” Vadim said under his breath.
“What is?”
“That you assume he was immediately killed that night.”
Pav stiffened in the chair, all of his muscles and bones turning into ice at the simple suggestion Vadim had just made. “Excuse me?”
“Your father