Chapter 153: I’m not worried about it

"Let me explain." Viktor reached for her hand.

"So it’s true." She didn’t let him finish, didn’t let him touch her.

"Really, Viktor. So what... why? Why drag me into this dangerous world of yours? Force me to marry you. Make me..." Her voice caught, and for a moment she looked like she might not finish the sentence at all.

"Make me fall in love with you. Just so I could find out I’m just holding ."

The room went very quiet.

Viktor had heard a great deal in his life. Threats. Confessions. Men begging for their lives in every register a human voice could produce. None of it had ever landed the way those four words did, falling in love with you said not tenderly, not as a gift, but as an accusation, wrung out of her like it hurt to admit.

"Did you just say you fell for me?" He said it slowly, like he didn’t trust his own hearing, like the sentence might dissolve if he moved too fast around it.

"Get out." Sienna’s voice cracked straight down the middle. She pushed herself back against the headboard, putting the whole width of the bed between them like it might be enough. "I said get out."

"Sienna,"

"Get out!" It tore out of her, raw, nothing careful left in it at all.

"Let me explain." He didn’t move, not at first, hands lifting like he could hold the moment still by sheer will.

"I don’t want to hear it. Get out. Now. Leave."

She was off the bed before he could argue further, and whatever strength she had left after eight hours unconscious, she spent all of it shoving him backward, both palms flat against his chest, again and again, each push smaller than the last but relentless, until he’d retreated a full step through the doorway without ever having decided to.

"Sienna, honey, just hear me out..."

The door shut in his face.

"Come on." His palm landed flat against the wood, voice low, urgent, nothing commanding left in it at all. "Sienna. Hear me out."

There was no answer.

On the other side of the door, Sienna had already curled herself into the corner of the bed, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them like she could hold herself together by force alone. She pressed her lips shut, jaw tight, willing the tears to stay wherever they’d been hiding all this time.

She didn’t cry over men. Not ever. Not for when her family, not for anyone who’d walked away from her before, not for anything that wore a man’s face and broke a promise.

But her eyes were burning anyway, and no matter how hard she pressed her forehead to her knees, the first tear slipped free before she could stop it, and then there was no stopping the rest.

Viktor stayed by the door a long time. He could still hear her on the other side, quiet now, but he knew that kind of quiet. It wasn’t peace. It was someone trying hard not to make a sound.

He didn’t knock again. He just stood there, staring at the wood grain like it might tell him what to do next.

She said she fell for me.

The words kept looping back through his head. He turned them over and over, the way a boy turns over a stone he found and can’t stop touching.

He’d heard her say a lot of things to him in anger, in fear, even in tears just now but not that. Never that. And some part of him wanted to knock the door down just to make her say it again, slower, so he could be sure he hadn’t imagined it.

As for the marriage pact, he barely thought of it at all. It was old paper. Old promises made by a dead man. It had never once kept him up at night.

Footsteps came down the hall. Marcus, unhurried, hands in his pockets, face arranged carefully into something neutral. Almost too neutral.

"Boss." A beat. "Were you just thrown out?"

"No." Viktor’s eyes cut to him, sharp enough that Marcus’s mouth twitched and then wisely stopped twitching. "She just needs a moment." He straightened, and whatever softness had been sitting on his face a second ago folded itself away, gone as it had never been there. "Have you picked up those two?"

"Yes, boss. Our men are already on their way to bring them in."

"Good." Viktor started walking, and Marcus fell into step beside him without needing to be told. "I want you to look into Don Konstantin Ivanov."

Marcus’s steps slowed half a beat. "The kingpin from the Middle East? The one who saved your father’s life, helped him take the Kessler clan back, all those years ago?"

"That one."

"Is this about Fabio? Because we already checked he’s not working with Ivanov. We still don’t know what Fabio wanted with Sienna. Might’ve just been about his son. But I don’t see why we’re digging into Ivanov’s business now."

"This isn’t about Fabio." Viktor kept his eyes forward. "It’s about a marriage pact my father made. With Ivanov’s daughter."

Marcus stopped walking for a second, then caught back up. "A marriage pact." He said it slow, testing the shape of it. "Boss, I smell trouble.

" A pause, and something almost like understanding crossed his face. "No wonder Mrs. Kessler is angry."

"You’ve had too little to do lately," Viktor said flatly, though there was no real heat behind it.

"I’m not worried about it," he went on.

"It’s been twenty years since that deal was made. His daughter went missing during a ceasefire. My father died not long after. Whatever partnership they had died with him, and that pact died right along with it." He let out a breath through his nose, something between a scoff and a sigh.

"But I want to be ready. In case Ivanov ever decides to show his face. I want to be prepared."