Page 83 of Essence of Fear

Where was home?

Was that what he was missing?

“It’s harder to hit a moving target.”

Viktoria glanced back at him. “What?”

“It feels like we’re sitting ducks here, even with the people watching the place. Sitting ducks, nonetheless.”

“A bit.”

“What would it hurt to move around for the night?”

Viktoria grinned, catching on. “Do you have a place you’d like to go?”

“A couple,” he admitted.

“What about the men watching the hotel?”

Pav shrugged. “One at the back, and the front. They’re not watching every exit because one can only leave the exits, but they can’t enter. They’ll see us when we come back in the morning, but what will it matter, then? What’s done is done.”

Viktoria’s laugh colored up the room, and he hadn’t even blinked before she was in front of him again. Leaning in, she caught his lips with her own in a bruising, hard kiss. It took his breath away and made his lungs ache.

He kind of loved that.

And her.

Wasn’t that what this feeling in his chest was? All tight, heavy, and yet warm and wonderful at the same time? Like he was going to hurt if she was gone, but he was okay while she was here? Like life really wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t looking at her every single day of it?

Love?

It felt like it.

He’d figure it out later.

• • •

Pav kept his arm locked tight around Viktoria’s waist as they maneuvered through the crowd of people getting closer to the cage in the middle of the warehouse with every passing second. He dragged her closer to his side, wanting to breathe in her vanilla and pear perfume, and feel her warmth soaking through his clothes.

At the same time, he murmured in her ear, “The first time they brought me to these fights, I was fourteen.”

He didn’t tell her the rest—that he’d found someone he’d recognized from his past who had lived in the large loft where he and his father stayed. That the person told him, no matter what, he could come back home, and they would always recognize him. He didn’t mention how he had gotten the shit beat out of him that night in the cage, but this was one of the places where he’d learned to fight.

Here, he’d learned how to survive.

“Did you fight, too?” she asked.

Pav laughed low. “I did.”

“And?”

“I lost—terribly.”

Understatement. He’d suffered a broken nose, a cracked rib, and the guy who was at least a half of a decade older than him had been going in for the kill—pretty usual in these fights—when someone stepped in to pull Pav out of the ring before his opponent could end him. He’d had a concussion so bad from the fight that he only had brief memories of different things that happened throughout the night.

But he remembered that person.

That familiar face who’d said his father’s name …