Chapter 276: I have a good memory

The steel door opened with a soft click.

Sienna had typed the code without looking at the keypad. Six numbers, fast and smooth. Viktor turned his head and stared at her, and Sienna shrugged one thin shoulder.

"I have a good memory," she said. Nobody answered. They stepped inside, and the door sighed shut behind them.

The lab was cold and bright, just as it had been that afternoon. The machines hummed softly. The long tables shone under the white lights. The woman at the microscope was gone, and the room felt hollow without her, like a church after the last prayer.

On the far wall hung the papers, pinned in their neat lines. Sienna crossed the floor in a few quick steps.

She went through the files like a woman reading her own name on a gravestone.

She pulled folders from the cabinet and flipped them open on the table. Charts. Scans. Long columns of numbers in small, neat handwriting. Pages with her blood type, her birth date, and a tiny photograph of her face at a younger age, with a stranger’s pen note beneath it. She read fast, and her eyes moved the way they did in the library at night, hunting for one line in a hundred pages.

Her hands were not steady. She told them to be.

Viktor stood by the door with his ear against the steel. Every few seconds he lifted a hand, and he heard nothing, and he lowered it again.

Aliya wandered along the wall.

She did not touch anything. She only looked, with her arms crossed tight over her apron. Her eyes moved from the scans to the glass tubes to the humming machines. There was something sore and distant in her face. "If only I had been his real daughter," she said quietly.

Sienna did not look up.

"Or if he had never found out. Then tonight would have been about me." Her mouth twisted. "I would be at the table. I would be wearing white, and everyone would be clapping."

She laughed, very softly. It had no joy in it. "You never stood a chance," Viktor said.

He did not say it cruelly. He said it like reading a fact from a page. He did not turn his head from the door.

"The pretending was never going to hold. Not for long." His voice was low. "You can fake a name. You can fake a smile. You cannot fake his real daughter’s heart condition. You cannot fake her blood work."

Aliya was quiet for a moment. "Maybe you have a point," she said. She walked a few steps further, and then she stopped. She did not turn around.

"I am sorry," she said. Sienna’s hand paused on a page. "I am sorry I had to tell him about you."

The words came out in a rush, cracked and dry. They fell into the humming room like stones into water. Sienna set the folder down slowly.

"The torture he gave me, for the truth, was more than I could bear." Aliya’s voice shook, and she pressed her lips together to steady it. She did not cry. She seemed to have used up all her crying somewhere else. "I did not want to say it. At first, I did not. I did not want to be the one who brought the missing princess home to her daddy."

Her hands closed into fists against her apron.

"But it became my only way out. I thought it would save me." She laughed again, that small bitter sound. "It did not." Nobody moved.

Sienna stood very still, with a page half raised in her hand. Across the room, Viktor had turned from the door. The two of them looked at each other, and the whole day came together in a single, quiet click.

The runway. The white suit. Katalia, my baby. The question that had followed them through every hour since. Who told the Don?

They had asked it in the car, and in the corridor, and in the long, dim hours of the afternoon. They had looked at Carina. They had looked at every face they trusted. They had carried the question like a splinter, and the answer had been standing next to them all this time, in a gray apron, with a cut on her thumb.

It was Aliya.

And somewhere under that, a second question stirred. How did she even know? How had a girl in a stolen name come to learn who Sienna truly was, when so few people alive did?

Sienna opened her mouth. She closed it again. Not now. That story was for another time, and it was going to be a hard one. There was only one thing that mattered at this moment, and it was not who had opened the door. It was getting out of it.

"Later," she said, very quietly. Aliya’s shoulders shook once. She nodded and turned her face to the wall.

Sienna went back to the folders.

She worked faster now. She tore through the stack, then the next, then the one below. She went to the wall of papers and ran her hand along the pins. Her eyes slid along the lines and did not stop.

Then they stopped. It was a single sheet, near the bottom, pinned a little crooked. It was covered in small handwriting, and halfway down was one line that had been underlined twice.

She read it once. Her heart skipped.

It was only one beat. One hard stumble in her chest, like a foot missing a stair, and for a moment the room went white at the edges. She put a hand on the wall to hold herself up. Her breath came short. The line sat on the page and looked back at her.

She read it again, slowly, all the way through. She did not say what it was.

Her face did not change. Her fingers did not shake. She only reached up and pulled the pin free and folded the sheet in half, then in half again. She slid it down the front of her gown, flat against her ribs, and smoothed the white silk over it.

She took two more pages from the pile, quickly, without looking. A thin blue folder from the table. She tucked them in the same place.

"Do you have everything?" Viktor asked. His voice was low and careful. He had been watching her.

"Yes," she said. It was a very small word. It sounded far away. "We can leave now." They turned toward the door.

Viktor reached it first. He put his palm against the steel, and he held up his other hand for silence, and they all stopped. For a second there was only the hum of the machines. Then they heard it.

A step in the stone passage outside. Slow and uneven, with a little drag at the end of each stride, as if one foot did not want to land.

Aliya’s face went white. "Stay down," Viktor said.