Chapter 116: A wet one

Sleep finally claimed Sienna sometime after midnight. It wasn’t peaceful. Fragments of the day drifted through her mind.

The chapel. The vows. The wedding ring resting on her finger. Viktor’s quiet voice telling her they had a lifetime. The scenes blurred together until they no longer felt like memories.

She found herself standing in the mansion’s moonlit garden. The roses were in bloom, their fragrance carried by a cool breeze. Everything was silent. Too silent. She looked around.

"Viktor?" No answer. She took another step. White petals drifted through the air like snow. Then she heard footsteps behind her. Slow. Confident. She smiled before she even realized she had.

"You knew I’d find you." His voice was low, warm. She turned.

Viktor stood a few feet away, no suit this time, only a simple white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. The moonlight softened the sharpness of his features, making him look less like the feared mafia king and more like an ordinary man.

"You’ve been hiding."

"I was waiting."

"For what?" He smiled. "For you to stop running." She scoffed. "I don’t run."

"No?" He took another step closer. "Every time I get close..."

"...you find an excuse to leave."

"I don’t."

"You do." She opened her mouth to argue. Nothing came out. He was standing directly in front of her now. Close enough that she could smell the faint cedar scent she had begun to associate with him.

Close enough that her heartbeat betrayed her. "You still don’t trust me."

"I..." She looked away. "I don’t know." He gently tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

"So stubborn."

"You make it difficult."

"I know."

"And yet..." His thumb brushed lightly across the back of her hand. He looked at their joined hands.

"You want me." Something inside her chest tightened. She wanted to tell him he was impossible. That he lied too much. That he drove her mad. Instead she found herself laughing softly.

"Say you want me, Sienna," he whispered. His voice was a low vibration that skipped across her skin like an electric current. He reached out. His hand was warm, calloused, and terrifyingly steady as he cupped the side of her neck.

His thumb traced the line of her jaw. A simple touch. A devastating one. She should pull back. She should find her logic, her caution, her armor. Instead, she leaned into it. The internal war she had been fighting for weeks ended in a bloodless surrender.

He leaned down, his lips ghosting over the pulse point at her throat. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. She felt the heat radiating from him, a dark sun that promised to burn everything she knew to ashes. And for the first time, she wanted to burn.

Only the quiet sound of the wind moving through the roses. She closed her eyes. The warmth of his hand felt surprisingly real. Safer than it should have. The dream shifted. She saw flashes of things that hadn’t happened.

The two of them sharing breakfast while arguing over coffee. Reading on opposite ends of the same sofa. Walking through the gardens at sunset. Laughing. Teasing each other. Living a life neither of them had ever imagined.

A simple life. One without bloodshed. Without revenge. Without fear. Then, just as Viktor reached out to cup her face. A loud knock echoed somewhere in the distance.

The garden dissolved. The moonlight disappeared. Sienna’s eyes flew open. Morning sunlight filtered through the curtains. She stared at the ceiling, breathing a little faster than normal.

"...It was a dream." She raised a hand to her forehead. For a moment, she could still almost feel the warmth of his touch. She groaned and buried her face in a pillow.

"This is bad." Sienna pressed her fingers to her temple, willing the last traces of the dream to dissolve before they could take root. "Very bad," she whispered again, as if saying it twice might make it true, might convince her body to stop humming with the memory of it.

She still could not believe she was dreaming of Viktor like that. Of his hands, unhurried and sure, learning the shape of her waist. Of his mouth finding hers with a patience the real Viktor never seemed to have for anything.

She pressed the heels of her palms against her closed eyes, as if she could physically push the images out of her head, but they only lingered brighter, his voice low against her ear, the way he’d whispered her name like it was something worth savoring.

Just then, the door opened, and Viktor walked in.

She startled upright so fast the blanket slipped from her shoulders, heart lurching in a way that had nothing to do with being caught off guard and everything to do with the fact that she had just been imagining his hands doing exactly what they were currently doing, resting, casual and unhurried, in the pockets of his trousers.

"What is bad?" he asked.

Sienna felt her whole body go warm, that particular kind of shy heat that started at the back of her neck and crawled up into her cheeks.

She fixed her gaze somewhere safely near his collarbone, refusing to let it drift to his mouth, refusing to let herself remember what her mind had just spent the last several minutes doing to that mouth in a dream.

"Nothing," she said, too quickly, straightening her spine, trying to look composed.

Their second wedding night behind them now, though celebrated was a generous word for what Viktor clearly wanted it to be, and survived was closer to what Sienna felt about the whole arrangement.

Forced into a marriage she never asked for, to a man whose family people have been taught to fear their whole life, of course she didn’t want to celebrate any of it.

And yet.

That was the maddening part. The part she would never say aloud. Somewhere between resenting him and resisting him, she had started to like him.

Genuinely, foolishly like him the low rumble of his laugh when he thought no one was paying attention, the way his jaw ticked when he was holding back words he thought she wasn’t ready to hear.

It terrified her more than the wedding ever had. Hate, she knew how to survive. This whatever this softening in her chest was she had no defense against at all.

Viktor studied her, his head tilting slightly, that same smug smile settling onto his mouth as it lived there permanently.

His hands stayed in his pockets, but his eyes did not stay still; they moved over her face slowly, cataloguing every shift of color in her cheeks.

"Are you sure?" he said. "You looked as if you had a terrible dream." A pause, deliberate, his smile deepening at the edges. "Or maybe a wet one."