Page 23 of Essence of Fear

Never a smile, though.

He liked hers.

“Okay, Pav,” Viktoria said, “I’ll do your tattoos.”

Why did that feel like a battle won?

Whatever.

He’d take it.

• • •

Pav was hyperaware of Konstantin sitting in the corner of the office, surveying a newspaper he’d opened on his lap. Occasionally, the man would glance up from the paper and peek at what was happening across the room, but he never said anything to Pav or Viktoria, and he quickly went back to reading like he hadn’t looked at them in the first place.

Viktoria, on the other hand, was zoned in on her work as she wiped an ink-stained paper towel across Pav’s chest. She was almost done—he could tell not by the stars she was inking on his clavicles, because he hadn’t actually looked at them when he was too busy watching her—

but because of how long they had been sitting there now.

Three hours.

He was accustomed to doing nothing for long periods of time. Or rather, being told to shut up and stay still in a certain spot until someone was ready for him to step in and finish whatever business they wanted him to complete. He was, however, not used to staring at something as interesting as Viktoria Boykov while he had to do it.

“Why do you keep staring at me?” she asked suddenly.

She hadn’t even been looking at him.

“How do you know—”

“I can feel your eyes.”

Pav might have smiled, but he couldn’t be sure. “I was thinking,” he lied, “that you don’t look like the typical tattoo artist, no? I don’t see any obvious tattoos.”

The tight tank top she’d exposed after pulling off her leather jacket had suddenly made the room a lot hotter for Pav, although he’d managed not to acknowledge it. How, he wasn’t sure. Great fucking control, maybe.

She flipped up her hand, and for the first time, he noticed the cursive B tattooed on her middle finger. “For Boykov, obviously.”

He chuckled a bit, realizing when she flipped someone off, it was like she was silently saying fuck off from the Boykovs. “I didn’t see that one earlier. My mistake.”

He had been too busy staring at her face … the delicate, sexy line of her shoulders under that tank top, and the way her collarbones peeked out around the collar, asking to be bitten. Fuck, he had a serious problem right now.

“No others?” he asked.

Viktoria glanced up from her world, and those ice-blue eyes of hers found his instantly. “None that you can see.”

“And none that I want to see,” Konstantin murmured from across the room. “Save that for another time and place; we are here to work, not to talk.”

Pav had the strangest urge to see if he could throw something and hit Konstantin in the head from his position, but nothing was really close enough, and he didn’t think it would help his case. Not with the man across the room or with the woman currently working on his chest. He had to consider those things—they were important, he supposed.

Viktoria rolled her eyes, but quickly went back to her work. “This last bit of shading is going to hurt. Fair warning, yes?”

Pav smirked a bit. “I have felt far more pain than your little gun is going to do to me.”

“Machine.”

“What?”

“It is a machine, Pav. It is not a gun. It does not shoot anything from the needles, yeah? It is a tattoo machine.”