Page 61 of Essence of Fear

Pav blinked. “I don’t understand—”

“Vadim. How is he treating you? Does he speak to you? Does he … instigate you? These are things I had been concerned about with sending you there to watch over her.”

“He barely speaks to me at all,” Pav replied, “and when he does, he calls me Zhatka.”

“I see.”

“He’s not asked about business, or my circumstance, if that’s what you’re trying to get at. He’s …” Mostly. “… acting like a properly exiled man.”

“He’s still Vadim at the end of the day, which means I cannot trust him with even an inch. The spies I keep on his guard try to keep me informed, but when someone is not close to truly control the hands that feed them, one has to be worried they’re not being entirely truthful.”

“Is that what you believe?”

Konstantin made a noise on the other end of the call. “What I know is that Vadim is a secondary problem to me right now. He is exiled—far the fuck away from me where he can’t really cause problems. His calls are monitored. His access to everything and anything is carefully supervised. No man is allowed on those grounds unless I know who they are and have given permission. Hell, even the whore he calls in to suck his cock is one I approved. He cannot move without me knowing it.

“The bigger problem that I have to handle right now is here,” Konstantin snapped. “The man who attacked my sister is still on the loose, one of our warehouses was burned to the ground, and the gang activity in the Heights has picked up so badly that I even needed to put men down in there to try and get it under control. Vadim isn’t even a blip on my radar right now.”

“But you said it,” Pav murmured. “There is a chance that you’re not able to control each and every man in this house when you’re so far away.”

“And I will handle that when I can. There is nothing Vadim could possibly do to me, my brother, or the Bratva when he is where he is—a place I put him. He is a secondary problem and he will be treated as such.”

Who was Pav to argue?

That didn’t mean he had to trust Vadim.

Vadim taught him not to.

“So, the problems there,” Pav started to say.

“Some may be related to Boris getting free. Others, probably not.”

“Huh.”

“It’s not for you to concern yourself over,” Konstantin replied. “You are where you need to be, Pav. Continue keeping an eye on her and try to make her slightly more comfortable. I don’t want Viktoria coming back here unless I have no choice but to bring her back. We don’t have any indication that Boris is going to attempt to come after her, but considering all the Boykovs have done to him over the last two years …”

“It’s unlikely that a part of him wouldn’t blame her and want retribution.”

“That,” the man agreed, “and the fact he likely knows it would hurt us a great deal if he were able to do to her a second time what he did the first time.”

He regretted more and more every day that he hadn’t broken the rules of the chambers more often when he had been delegated to taking care of the men in the cells. Unless one died for other reasons—sometimes, their bodies just had enough—Pav wasn’t allowed to kill a man except if he was given permission.

But how would they have known?

He could have said it was anything, burned the body, and been done with it. It would have been fucking easy. Yeah, he was really regretting that now.

Hindsight, and all.

“I will see what I can do,” Pav said, “here, I mean.”

“Do that.”

Konstantin didn’t waste any more time on the phone. He hung up without a goodbye, but Pav wasn’t offended. He had other things to do—starting with finding Viktoria and trying to convince her to come out of her room for longer than five minutes.

• • •

Pav was momentarily distracted from his task of going to Viktoria’s room by the bright, blue sky outside. For the most part, the weather had been dreary since they’d arrived. Rainy or cloud-covered skies. Chicago hadn’t been much better before they’d left.

It was strange.