Chapter 152: I will make those

"I’m okay," Sienna said again, already pushing herself up onto her elbows, wincing as the room seemed to tilt.

"Careful." Viktor’s hand was at her back before she’d even finished moving, guiding her up slowly, propping the pillow higher behind her.

She let her head fall back against it, a hand rising to press against her temple. "My head hurts. A little." She looked up at him, testing the words before she said them, already half-expecting his reaction. "Should I call the doctor back?"

"No." It came out faster than he meant it to. His hand found her hair instead, smoothing it back from her face over and over, a motion that seemed to be steadying him more than her. "No, you don’t need him."

She didn’t ask why. Something in his voice told her not to.

He kept looking at her like he was still confirming she was really there, eyes tracing her face, her hands, the rise and fall of her breathing as if his body hadn’t caught up yet to the fact that the crisis was over.

"You gave me a big scare there, little bird." His thumb brushed along her cheekbone. "Every time I think you’ve run out of ways to do that to me, you find a new one." He exhaled, something rough underneath it.

"Why were you driving when you didn’t feel well?" A pause, and his jaw tightened around the next question before he let it out. "Why did you take the tea that the professor gave you?"

Sienna flinched. It was small, a flicker at the corner of her eyes, a stillness that came over her all at once, but Viktor felt it under his hand where it was still resting against her hair.

"Please tell me you didn’t kill him."

"He’ll live," Viktor said, evenly, watching her face rather than his own hands, which he kept very still in his lap, as if stillness could keep what they’d done a few hours ago from showing.

Sienna searched his eyes a moment longer, like she wasn’t sure she believed him, then let it go because she needed to believe him. After all, the alternative was a door she wasn’t ready to open yet.

"I knew he’d never hurt me," she said, quieter now. "I did smell something in the tea. But it was faint, so faint I told myself I was imagining it. I was fine driving, I swear, I felt completely normal, and then it just, it hit me all at once. Out of nowhere." Her hand found his sleeve, gripping it. "You saved me again."

She leaned into him before he could answer, arms coming around his neck, her face pressed into his shoulder. He went still with surprise for half a second she wasn’t often the one to close a distance like this, and then his arms folded around her, careful, as she might still break.

It warmed something in his chest that the last eight hours had frozen solid.

What if he hadn’t found me in time, she thought, her fingers curling into the back of his shirt. What if I’d lost control of the car? What if I’d hit something. Someone. For the first time since she’d opened her eyes, real fear moved through her, not for what had already happened, but for the version of tonight that almost had.

"I’ve got you, baby." His hand pressed flat between her shoulder blades, holding her there. Then, because she deserved to know, because keeping it from her felt like its own kind of lie: "The doctor didn’t do this because he wanted to. Aliya forced his hand."

Sienna went rigid against him.

"Aliya?" She pulled back to look at him, and the shock on her face was raw, unguarded. "After I left the professor’s office, I saw her. I saw her and Marcel together, in the hallway."

"I will make those two regret it." His voice had dropped into that low, flat register again, the one from the holding cell, the one that didn’t belong to the husband-face he’d put on for her. "I swear to you."

She looked at him for a long moment, and something else was working behind her eyes now hesitation, the kind that came from knowing a question might open a door she wasn’t ready for either. She almost let it go.

"She said something to me," Sienna said instead, slowly. "Before I left. Right before I got in the car. Aliya, she said something to me."

"What did she tell you?"

Sienna’s eyes didn’t leave his face. She needed to watch it happen whatever was about to happen there needed to see it before she let herself believe it.

"She said you have a marriage path. That your father, your late father, arranged it, before he died. With a kingpin’s daughter." Her voice was steady, too steady, the kind of steady a person built when the alternative was falling apart. "She said a war is coming. A bloody one."

Viktor’s eyes dropped. Just for a second, barely long enough to notice, but Sienna was already looking for it, already primed to catch anything that might tell her Aliya had lied. That half-second told her everything Aliya hadn’t needed to.

It wasn’t a lie. She could see that now, in the way he wouldn’t look at her right away, in the stillness that came over his shoulders like a man bracing for something he couldn’t stop.

Her mind moved fast, faster than she wanted it to. If there was a marriage path, there was no end to any of this. Not really. Not ever.

The danger she’d started to make peace with Marcel’s warnings, the guards at every door, the weight of loving a man like Viktor all of that had been sized to fit a war she thought she understood. Enemies close to home. People who already hated the Kessler name.

But a bigger war. A different family. A different kind of danger stacked on top of the one she’d already agreed, quietly, in the private places of her own heart, to survive.

She’d started to let herself feel something for him. Real, unguarded, the kind of feeling she hadn’t let herself have for anyone in years. And she’d made her peace with the cost of that when the cost seemed to have a ceiling.

This didn’t.

She pulled back from him. Not far, just enough that his arms fell away from her, just enough that the space between them turned into something with edges.

"Aliya told you that." It wasn’t really a question.