Chapter 249: I love you

The room was silent. It was the thing everyone else in this house was too afraid to say, and Sienna had said it to his face.

Don Konstantin did not look angry. He looked hurt. His eyes were wide and wet, and he pressed a hand to his heart as if she had struck him there.

"I am your father, princess."

"No."

"I love you. I have been looking for you for twenty years." His voice shook. "If you want a DNA test, then we will do a DNA test. I have nothing to hide." He turned to the doctors. "Run a full test with her blood. And take my wife’s as well. Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind."

The doctor with the tablet nodded. One of them carefully put Sienna’s tube into a cooled box. Another turned to Helena, who held out her arm without a word. Her eyes stayed on the floor.

Sienna watched all of it. He was willing to play this game for so long. Even now. She could not believe how patient he was. A lesser man would have shouted. He simply stood there and let her insult him, and smiled.

That was what frightened her most.

"I don’t have a father," she said. "I never had one. And I don’t need one."

"I know you’re hurt." The Don’s voice was gentle. "I understand, my dear. I do. And I want to start putting it right." Before she could speak, he took her hand.

He did it slowly. He did not grab or pull. He held her fingers in his hand like holding something breakable, and he began to lead her toward the door.

It would have been easy to yank free. Somehow it was not. The gentleness made it harder to refuse. Viktor moved at once.

His shoulders went tight and his hand dropped to his side, and Sienna knew what was in that hand’s reach. Two guards stood at the door. Another was in the hall. If he moved, the room would run red in seconds.

She turned her head and looked at him. Please, her eyes said. Not now. Viktor’s jaw shook. Every muscle in his body was fighting. He looked like a man holding a door shut against a storm.

Then, slowly, Sienna shook her head. Viktor breathed out, once, hard through his nose. He stayed where he was. And then he followed.

Helena walked behind them with her head down, still holding the cotton where the needle had been. Carina slipped in from the hall at the end of the line, pale and silent, as if she wanted the wall to swallow her.

They went down the long white hallway in a strange little parade. The father and daughter led the way. The husband, the mother, and the other daughter followed.

Behind them, in a quiet room, a cooled box was closing with a soft click. Sienna kept her eyes forward. Her hand was still in his. It was warm, and it was the worst thing she had ever felt.

The Don stopped at the end of a quiet hallway, in front of a tall white door with no handle.

He pressed his palm to a small panel. Something inside the wall clicked, and the door slid open without a sound. "Come," he said. "Come and see."

Sienna stepped inside, and the light came on by itself.

It was a room the size of a small house. The walls were lined with glass shelves, and every shelf shone. There was gold in thick bars and gold in chains as long as her arm. There were diamonds sitting in rows on black velvet, and pearls as big as grapes. Emeralds, rubies, and blue stones she had no name for lay in open cases. Along the far wall hung designer bags, dozens and dozens of them, in every color, each one wrapped in soft cloth like a sleeping baby.

Behind her, Carina made a small sound. Sienna glanced back. Carina stood in the doorway with her mouth open, her hand at her throat. She had lived in this house for years. She had never seen this room. Not once.

She was looking at something that had been kept for someone else her whole life.

"I collected all of this over the years," the Don said. His voice was soft and proud. He walked along the shelves, touching the glass.

"Every birthday you missed. Every holiday. Every festival, every trip I took to another country, I saw something and I thought of you. Then I bought it." He turned to her, smiling. "Twenty years of gifts, Katalia. The rarest pieces in the world. All of it for my princess."

He waited, with his arms a little open. He had no idea who she was.

Sienna looked at the diamonds. She looked at the pearls. Her face did not move at all. She did not touch a single thing. "This," she said slowly. "This is you making it up to me?"

The smile on his face wavered, just a little. "You think this fixes it?" she said. "Twenty years, and you think it fits in a glass box?"

He was a man who had gotten away with everything all his life. Money had bought him doors, and power had closed the mouths of people who tried to speak. There was nothing in his world that could not be fixed with one or the other.

So he did not get angry. He only smiled again, the patient smile, as if she had told him a small, sweet joke.

"There is more," he said. "Come."

The second place was on another floor, and it was very different.

The doors opened onto a cold white room full of bright light and humming machines. Long tables held rows of glass tubes. Screens glowed on the walls. A woman in a white coat looked up from a microscope, saw the Don, and quickly looked down again.

It was a lab. A real one.

"This is where I have been working," the Don said. He walked to a wall covered in papers, charts, and scans, all pinned in neat lines. "I have spent years on your condition, Katalia. The best doctors. The best research. Everything I could find." He looked at her with soft, wet eyes. "I wanted to be read y. The day I found you, I wanted to be able to help."

Sienna walked slowly along the wall.