Chapter 255: Tell me what I want to know

Sienna had seen death before. Not a lot. A handful of times. When you were married to a man like Viktor, you sometimes stumbled onto it, a body in a hallway, a whispered name, a locked door you weren’t meant to open. She had learned how to walk past it.

But seeing it again did not make it feel normal. It never got easier, and that frightened her more than anything. Some part of her had hoped she would harden. She never did.

Her stomach still rolled. Her hands were cold and damp. And her heart was beating too fast.

She noticed it slowly. First it was a flutter under her ribs. Then a hard, quick thump, like a bird hitting glass. She pressed her head back against the seat and tried to breathe the way she had been taught, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

It did not slow.

Without thinking, she took her own left wrist in her right hand. Two fingers found the place under the bone. She closed her eyes. One. Two. Three.

She counted. She had done this a thousand times, on other people’s arms. Never on her own, never like this.

Too fast, she thought. And it’s not steady. "Sienna?" Helena’s voice was very soft. Her hand touched Sienna’s knee.

"Are you feeling alright, baby?"

In the front seat, Viktor turned his head. He looked back over the seat, and Sienna saw his face, tight and worried, and the small red mark on his jaw.

She let go of her wrist quickly and set her hand in her lap. "I’m okay," she said. Nobody in the car believed her.

"I just need to rest," she added. "And eat something. That’s all. It has been a long day."

It was a good answer, calm and reasonable. Viktor searched her face for another second, and then he nodded slowly and turned back around. Helena’s hand stayed on her knee.

Sienna leaned her head against the window and looked out at the road. But her pulse kept telling her something.

It knocked against her fingers and against her ribs, steady and stubborn, and it would not be ignored. She knew what it might mean. She knew, because she was a med student, and she had read the signs a hundred times.

She was too scared to say it.

So she buried it beneath everything else, beneath the Don and the cells and the red room and the man on the wall. There was so much weight on top of it. If she piled enough on, maybe it would stay down.

It can’t be, she thought. Her lips barely moved. "It can’t be," she whispered, to no one.

The car drove on toward the white house.

–

Don Konstantin stared at the showroom long after Helena, Carina, and Sienna had left. The place had gone quiet.

Only the soft hum of the lights remained, along with the faint scent of perfume that seemed to cling to the walls no matter how many times the room was cleaned.

He turned and walked toward a narrow door hidden at the far end of the showroom. His private room. Only he had access to it.

Inside, the room was big and dark, with a huge sofa positioned before a wide panel of one-way glass. From this side, he could see everything happening in the showroom without anyone knowing he was watching.

He stood there for a moment. Then the memories came. Aliya. He remembered watching her from this very room.

Day after day, she had served every man and woman who came through those doors. She had learned to keep her face empty. To smile when she needed to. To endure whatever was demanded of her.

The client had given her a name. The Diamond of the Season. Don Konstantin remembered the night everything changed.

There had been a long queue that evening. Naked men waiting impatiently for their turn with Aliya. She had endured it until she finally couldn’t anymore.

He could still remember her voice. The screaming. The desperation as someone slammed into her hard and rough. And then, through her tears, the words that had stopped everything.

"I will tell you the truth." Aliya had sworn that she would never tell Don Konstantin who his real daughter was. She had protected that secret because she knew exactly what it meant.

But that night, she wanted a way out. And the truth became the only thing she had left to offer.

"I will tell you who she is." That was how Don Konstantin learned about Sienna. His missing daughter. The daughter he had spent years believing was lost to him.

Aliya had expected freedom in exchange for the truth. She never received it. Don Konstantin hadn’t set her free. Instead, he had taken her away from the showroom and made her serve him exclusively. To Aliya, even that had felt like mercy.

At least she no longer belonged to everyone. Don Konstantin’s eyes remained fixed on the empty showroom. His phone suddenly rang. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen.

One of his doctors. His expression changed. He answered immediately. "Yes?" The voice on the other end spoke. Don Konstantin listened without saying a word.

Then his gaze slowly returned to the showroom. "Understood." He ended the call, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and gave the empty room one last look. Then he walked out.

–

The lab was quiet when the Don arrived. The hum of the machines was soft and steady. The woman at the microscope had gone. The papers still hung on the wall in their neat lines, the charts and scans and careful handwriting. Under the bright white lights, everything looked clean and cold.

The Don’s shoes made no sound on the floor. He had washed his hands. He had changed his cuffs. There was no smoke on him, no dust, nothing to say where he had been an hour ago.

Three doctors stood waiting beside a long steel table. They straightened as he came in. The one with the stethoscope took a step forward. He held a sheet of paper in both hands, and the paper shook a little.

"Boss," he said. "We have the result."

The Don said nothing. He walked to the table and stood with his hands behind his back.

"The DNA is a match. We ran it twice, to be sure." The doctor swallowed. "The analysis proves it. The young miss is Madam Helena’s missing daughter." He waited for a smile. A breath. A word of thanks.

The Don did not look surprised. He did not even look interested. He glanced at the paper like a man glancing at a clock he already knew the time on.

He had seen her face on the runway. He had seen her mother’s eyes in it. That had been enough for him. The test was only a piece of paper.

"I already knew that," he said. The doctor’s mouth closed.

"Now," the Don said, and his voice changed.

All the warmth from earlier was gone. The soft, wet-eyed father who had cried had vanished, and in his place stood someone flat and sharp. He turned his full attention on the doctor, and the doctor felt it like a cold hand on his neck.

"Tell me what I want to know. Can the pattern be recreated? Using the analysis from her blood?" The doctors looked at one another.