Chapter 121: Looking for his son

Sienna leaned closer to the screen, staring at the face for a long moment, something uneasy stirring low in her stomach. She knew that face. She’d seen it somewhere before she was certain of it, but the memory hovered just out of reach, slippery and half-formed, like trying to catch smoke between her fingers.

She kept staring, kept turning the photograph over in her mind, and slowly, piece by piece, the memory sharpened into focus.

The library. The night of the murder. The night she’d first met Viktor, standing over a body in a room that still smelled faintly of gunpowder and old paper.

Her breath caught. She looked at the photo again, heart hammering now, pieces of a puzzle she hadn’t even realized she was assembling suddenly slotting into place with terrifying clarity.

If this man had been at the library that night it wasn’t a coincidence. None of it had ever been a coincidence.

She was so deep in the tangle of it, so completely lost in tracing the threads back through everything that had happened since that night, that she didn’t hear the front door open.

Didn’t hear the low murmur of Viktor and Marcos’s voices as they stepped inside, arms full of supplies from town.

Not until Viktor’s footsteps stopped abruptly behind her.

She glanced up just in time to see his face change.

Whatever easy, sun-warmed version of him she’d spent the last three days memorizing vanished in an instant, replaced by something cold and unreadable, his eyes locked on the photograph glowing on her screen.

Recognition flickered hard and fast behind his gaze she watched it happen, watched something in him go rigid and distant all at once.

He knew that face too. She could see it plainly.

"How do you know him?" Viktor asked, his voice low, careful, stripped of every trace of the warmth it had carried all morning.

Sienna’s pulse spiked, the question landing somewhere far more dangerous than she’d expected. She closed the laptop halfway, some instinct telling her to protect the information even from him, even now.

"Why did you kill him?" she asked instead, her own voice quieter than she meant it to be, though there was no mistaking the steel underneath it.

Viktor’s jaw tightened. For a moment, she thought he might deflect, might turn the question back on her the way he always did when he wanted to stay in control of a conversation. But he didn’t.

"Because he was on my territory," Viktor said simply, flatly, as if that single fact erased every other question hanging thick and unspoken in the room between them.

Sienna’s stomach turned over slowly, the warmth of the last three days feeling suddenly very far away, replaced instead by the cold, familiar weight of everything she’d been trying foolishly, she realized now, to leave behind at the mansion.

Sienna closed the laptop the rest of the way, as if putting distance between herself and the screen might somehow soften what she was about to say.

"And apparently, his father is the tattoo man I asked you to have your men follow," she said, watching Viktor’s face carefully. "His name is Fabio Fernandez."

Something shifted behind Viktor’s eyes, a slow, dawning tension that settled into the line of his shoulders. He exchanged a brief glance with Marcos, who had gone quiet by the doorway, arms still full of supplies he seemed to have entirely forgotten about.

"Well, that is strange," Viktor said slowly, "because that same man, Fabio Fernandez, is asking about you." He set down the bag he’d been carrying, his full attention on her now.

"Marcos and I just found out he has men asking around for a girl who works at the Skyford University library." His eyes narrowed slightly, searching her face for something she wasn’t sure she wanted him to find.

"Now, are you ready to tell me who this man really is or was to you?"

There was confusion tangled beneath the sharpness of his voice, a genuine bewilderment at the idea that a mafia king with reach across the Middle East could possibly have any thread connecting him to his quiet librarian of a wife.

"As I told you," Sienna said, careful, measured, "out of curiosity, I just wanted to know who he worked for. That’s all it was supposed to be." She gestured toward the closed laptop, frustration creeping into her voice despite her effort to stay calm.

"And now it turns out he knows the guy you killed at the library that night. Which means that guy was there for a reason. And that reason could be me, not because he crossed your territory."

The words hung heavy in the room, and Sienna watched Viktor’s jaw tighten as the implication settled over him.

"So none of this was a coincidence," she pressed, needing the answer more than she wanted to admit.

"Why did you follow him to the library? You could have killed him anywhere." She held her breath slightly after asking it, some small, hopeful part of her hoping, needing for it to have been random. Because if it hadn’t been random, that meant she hadn’t simply stumbled into witnessing a murder that night. It meant she’d been standing exactly where someone had wanted her to be.

Viktor’s expression darkened, memory flickering behind his eyes. "The plan was to assassinate him," he said. "So I followed him to see what he was doing. And he ended up at the library." A pause, his voice lower now, more clipped.

"I thought he was waiting to strike that he was there to spy on my operations. That’s why I took him out. We’d been following him all day."

Sienna exhaled slowly, the pieces refusing to settle no matter how she turned them over. "Now we’ll never know why he was really there," she said, more to herself than to him, frustration bleeding into her tone.

"Aside from the fact that it was because of me. But why?"

Viktor studied her for a long moment, something careful and searching in his gaze, as if he were trying to read a version of her she hadn’t shown him yet.

"Does this have to do with your family?" he asked quietly. "Could you be related to the mafia?"