Chapter 151: Consider yourself fortunate

Dr. Duncan said it like a confession inside the confession, the detail that hurt worse than any of the rest. He wasn’t ready to defend himself from what came next.

He’d already made peace with it somewhere on the ride over, some quiet surrender settling into his shoulders.

Something in Viktor wanted to end it right there. His hand had already found the hilt of the sword mounted on the wall before he’d fully decided to move, some older, colder part of him already ahead of his own thinking.

But another thought cut through the rage, sharp and unwelcome. She drank it anyway. Sienna, who trusted almost no one, who read a room the way other people read a book, she had smelled the tea and put it to her lips regardless.

That wasn’t carelessness. That was faith. Whatever this man was to her, it was enough that she’d overridden her own instincts for him.

He couldn’t let him walk away clean. But he couldn’t take his life either, not this life, not the one Sienna had trusted.

The sword came off the wall in one motion, no hesitation in it, no warning given. It moved almost too fast to see, and then Duncan’s scream tore through the cell, raw and animal, as five fingers hit the concrete floor in a spray of red.

He crumpled forward, cradling the ruin of his hand against his chest, blood soaking through his clothes, sobbing in a way that had nothing dignified left in it.

Viktor crouched again, unbothered by the blood pooling near his shoes, and looked at him with something that might have almost been mercy, if mercy could look that cold.

"Now you have no hand to carry my wife a cup of tea." His voice hadn’t risen at all through any of it. "And you won’t be practicing medicine again. Consider yourself fortunate you keep your life, only because nothing happened to her."

He straightened, wiped the blade once against his sleeve, and looked down at the doctor one last time.

"A word to anyone about what happened to your hand, and I’ll come for your head next." He turned toward the door without waiting for an answer, already done with him. "Get him out."

The guards moved in without a word, hauling Duncan up by what was left of his composure, dragging him back out through the cell door and into the dark beyond it, out to wherever they’d drop what remained of a man who dared to touch Viktor Kessler’s wife

—-

Viktor stood over the basin in the adjoining bathroom and watched the water run pink, then paler, then clear off his hands.

He scrubbed twice more anyway. When he finally straightened and caught his own reflection, the man looking back at him didn’t belong in a holding cell with a sword jaw shaved clean an hour ago, shirt a soft gray that Sienna liked, sleeves rolled just so.

He practiced the face before he left the mirror. Not the one that had watched fingers hit the floor without flinching. The other one.

By the time he sat back down at her bedside, he was only a husband again. Or close enough to pass for one.

He’d lost track of how many times he’d checked the clock on the wall since. It had felt like a mercy at first, something to do with his hands instead of reaching for a weapon. Now it felt like torture in its own right, the second hand crawling around the face so slowly he began to wonder if it had stopped altogether.

"Ten minutes," the doctor said, for what might have been the tenth time himself, checking his watch against the wall clock like he didn’t trust either one. "We’re, we’re just past ten minutes over the eight-hour mark now."

"What’s the difference?" Viktor’s voice came out low and then climbed, cracking across the quiet room. "It’s already been eight hours. Eight hours and she hasn’t moved, hasn’t so much as do something."

The doctor flinched back half a step, hands lifting on instinct, the same instinct that had made him nod without argument hours ago.

He opened his mouth there was nothing left to do. The drug simply had to run its course, he’d said as much three times already, but before the words could come out, before Viktor’s temper could go looking for somewhere to land, Sienna stirred.

It was small. A shift of her head against the pillow. A breath that caught differently than the ones before it. Then her fingers twitched against the sheet, and her eyelids fluttered, fighting their own weight.

Every other sound in the room seemed to fall away.

"Leave him alone, Viktor." Her voice was cracked and thin, barely more than a rasp, but it was hers, and it filled the whole room at once. "I’m okay."

For one full second Viktor didn’t move at all. Just stared at her like the words hadn’t finished arriving yet, like some part of him had already built a version of this room where she never said anything again, and he needed a moment to tear it back down.

Then he was up, chair scraping back hard enough to nearly topple, crossing to her side in three strides.

"Out." He didn’t even look at the doctor when he said it, eyes fixed entirely on Sienna’s face, on the slow, uncertain way her eyes were finding the light. "Get out."

The doctor didn’t need telling twice. He snatched his bag off the floor, glasses nearly falling in his haste, and was through the door before Viktor had even finished pulling the chair close enough to sit at her side again.

Viktor’s hand found her face the way it had hours ago, except now there was something under his palm to answer it warmth, a small turn of her cheek into his touch, her eyes blinking slowly up at him like she was still finding her way back into her own body.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, and his voice, for the first time in eight hours, wasn’t steady at all.