Chapter 26: The librarian girl

She thought about Simon’s apartment. The sounds through the door. The couch. Lily, in the robe, hand on her hip, telling Sienna with genuine conviction that it was her own fault for not providing enough.

She thought about the water glass. Okay, she thought. Fine. He can have that one.

She set the phone down. Picked it back up. Set it down again.

The thing about Simon and Lily was that the anger was still there, hot and immediate and completely available whenever she reached for it.

Two years. Her best friend. The specific, particular betrayal of people who knew exactly where to aim because they had helped you build the target.

They will wait, she decided, with the cold clarity of a woman who had recently survived considerably worse and come out the other side still standing.

They will absolutely wait. I have a kidnapper husband and a gala tomorrow and an escape plan in progress.

Simon and Lily are not going anywhere. And neither, she thought grimly, is my memory.

She opened the laptop.

New. Fast. The kind of machine that cost enough to make her feel guilty about wanting it, which she didn’t, because she hadn’t asked for any of this, and if Viktor Kessler wanted to furnish her captivity with good technology, then she was absolutely going to use it.

She opened a browser. Typed: Aria Cross. Then stopped. Looked at the screen. Looked at the laptop.

He gave me this, she thought slowly. Which means someone, somewhere, can probably see exactly what I do on it.

She closed the browser. Sat back.

Picked up the phone instead and turned it over in her hands, thinking about Aria, about the gala tomorrow, about half brothers who arrived in the night knowing things they shouldn’t.

Play nice, she reminded herself. Look settled. Look like the phone and the laptop worked. She set the phone face down on the nightstand.

Lie back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling.

Simon, she thought, one last time, you absolute disaster of a human being. You had better hope I’m stuck in this mansion for a very long time.

Because the day I get out . She smiled at the ceiling. Small and private and not very kind.

You’re next.

Outside the bedroom door, the house moved through its afternoon.

Somewhere in it, Viktor Kessler was doing whatever Viktor Kessler did when he wasn’t dismantling her composure or deleting her ex-boyfriend’s contact information.

Sienna Vale was lying on his bed in his house, wearing his silk nightgown, planning her escape.

And thinking, with profound reluctance, that whoever had transferred her contacts had done her the single greatest favor of the week.

She would not be telling him that. Ever.

The organization’s main office was a different beast from the study in the mansion.

Bigger. Colder. The kind of room that had been designed to remind everyone who walked into it exactly where they stood in the order of things. Monitors lined one wall. Maps on another.

The counting machines here were industrial, not one but four, running simultaneously, the sound of them a constant low river under everything else.

Viktor sat behind the desk like he’d been built for it. Which, Sienna would have said if she were here and feeling particularly honest, he absolutely had.

He was reviewing figures on the monitor when the door opened without a knock, which told him everything he needed to know about who it was before he looked up.

He didn’t look up.

"Viktor." Elena Kessler had a voice like expensive crystal beautiful, precise, and capable of cutting you if it wanted to. She crossed the room with the confidence of a woman who had decided long ago that every room she entered belonged to her by right of sheer presence. "Guess what I brought back with me."

She placed the photograph on the desk in front of him.

He looked at his monitor.

"Don Capri’s daughter." Elena’s finger tapped the photograph. A woman, undeniably striking, looking at the camera with the composed ease of someone raised to be looked at.

"Aliya. Gorgeous. Cultured. Your style entirely." A pause for effect.

"I thought the gala would be the perfect introduction. Everyone will know you have the Capri name at your side. The message it sends.."

"Mother is absolutely right," Marcel said from the doorway, brushing a hand through his long hair with the unhurried ease of someone who had practiced looking relaxed.

"I’ve actually told Aliya myself that I thought she and I would..." a pause, the particular pause of someone enjoying their own delivery.

"... suit each other. But as always, the finest things in this family tend to get arranged for the boss."

The sarcasm had enough edge to cut glass. Viktor looked up.

He looked at Elena. At Marcel. Let his eyes move between them slowly, the way you look at a math problem that keeps producing the same wrong answer, and you’ve begun to suspect the problem is not the math.

They do this, he thought, with the weary clarity of a man who had been having variations of this conversation for fifteen years. Every time. Without fail.

They sit somewhere and they apply what they believe are their considerable brains to a situation, and they produce... this. This is the output.

He leaned back in his chair.

"I’m not interested," he said, "in any woman. But my wife." He let that land.

Elena blinked. Recovered. The recovery of a woman with excellent social architecture.

"Of course. The librarian girl." She said it with a smile that had nothing warm in it. "Sweet, I’m sure. In her way." She folded her hands.

"But Viktor... we are at war with the Capris. You need alliances, not.." she chose the next word carefully, "complications. Aliya at your side sends a message this family needs to send."

Viktor looked at her for a moment.

"Are you," he said quietly, "questioning my taste in women?" He tilted his head a fraction. "Or positioning your son for an inheritance that isn’t his?"

The room went very still.