Essence of Fear - Bethany-Kris Page 0,1

name, child?”

Pav heard the shudder of papers, caused by the comic book’s pages fluttering as his hands shook. He bet his eyes were peeled as wide as they could go as he struggled to find words to say to this large, domineering man waiting for an answer.

Around him, shoes shuffled on the floor, and a cough echoed. Other than that, it was all silence and fucking dampness.

He would remember that the most about this place, later in life when he relived these memories. The dampness and silence.

“Your name.”

“Pa-Pavel,” he whispered.

The man above him grunted, and Pavel tried to ignore the stinging in his arms and legs from the many scratches and scuffs he’d received as he’d fought against the men who had dragged him out of his father’s car.

Dimitri had told him to stay, after all.

They didn’t listen, though.

“Could just … get rid of it,” a man behind Pavel suggested. “I know the kid’s father—there ain’t a person to take him, boss. He’s got no family. A mother who died from shooting poison in her veins, and everybody else is gone, too, or they want to stay gone because of what his father was involved with.”

Again, the man above him grunted as cold, gray ices looked Pav’s way once more. “Seems a shame, no? A child as a sacrifice because his father’s a thief. But what else could be done with him? Look at him—small, and frightened. Like a puppy.”

“Puppies can be trained and kept,” someone else muttered.

The man’s eyes lit up for a minute as he regarded Pav with a hint of a smile forming. “Yes, trained and kept. Just like a puppy.”

Pav blinked.

What?

The large man kneeled down, but was careful to never let his dark, fitted suit touch the dirty cement floor as he came eye level with Pav. He pointed between Pav’s wide-eyed gaze with two fingers, and then at his own narrowed eyes in the same way.

“I see you, Pavel Kotov,” the man murmured, “and soon, you’ll learn to see me, too. My name is Vadim Boykov, but like everyone else, you may call me boss. Learn it quickly, follow the rules, and unlike your father, you may someday see the outside of these walls again.”

Vadim.

Pavel was never going to forget that name.

Then, Vadim used those two fingers of his to tap at the bottom of his throat. An action Pavel didn’t understand, but the coldness that radiated from Vadim as he did it was enough to make him shiver on the ground.

“You belong to me now. To the Boykovs.” Vadim tipped his head to the side and nodded to himself, adding, “Beware of those who show you mercy, young Pavel, for those are the people who know the essence of your fear.”

• • •

Ten years later …

The screams down the hall were only muffled when a morbid crack echoed down the corridor. Pavel continued his work three chambers down, as though he hadn’t heard anything at all and nothing was wrong. That was best. A decade working in the Boykov’s Compound taught him there was nothing worse than sticking one’s nose where it did not belong. Unless something directly involved him, Pavel was better off staying far away.

Filling the bucket with ice-cold water from the tap sticking out of the wall again, he headed to the man shackled in the corner. Other than the food Pavel brought him once a day—which wasn’t much—water and bread, just enough to keep him alive in between daily beatings and whatever punishment he was delivered from Vadim—this was the man’s hell.

Cold water splashed on him regularly. A beating whenever someone came in to deliver it, unless it was Pavel ordered to do it. Food when the time struck twelve in the afternoon. A hard, cracked cement floor that was always cold and wet. Shackles around his wrists and ankles, and occasionally one around his throat when he needed to be reminded that he was now a Boykov dog, and nothing else—an animal made to sit in his own waste, and be fed or taken care of when someone else deemed it appropriate.

He was no longer in control of his life.

Pavel didn’t even know the man’s name. He also didn’t know why this man—or why any of the other people locked in the chambers of the Boykov Compound—had been brought to this place. All he was told was that quite simply, these people deserved to be here because perhaps they had broken the rules, or maybe they had stepped out