Chapter 30: I’ll buy you a whole store

The hall settled into silence. Sienna was still holding her arm.

Viktor crossed to her. Slowly this time. No sudden movement. He stopped in front of her and said nothing for a moment, just looked at her face, at the arm she was holding, at the ruined dress, with an expression she didn’t have a clean category for.

He reached out. Carefully. His hand open, waiting, not taking.

She looked at it.

Looked at him.

Then, slowly, she held out her arm.

He turned it gently. Pushed the sleeve back. A small burn, red and angry, where the coffee had caught before she’d moved. He looked at it for a moment with the jaw doing the thing it did when he was working very hard to stay in the quiet register.

"It’s fine," she said.

"It’s not."

"I’ve had worse."

"That," he said, "is not the reassurance you think it is."

He released her arm. Straightened. Looked at the door Elena had walked through and then back at Sienna, standing in the gold dress that was no longer gold in several places, still holding herself together with the posture and the chin and the absolute refusal to be anything other than upright.

"The dress is ruined," she said. Flat. Stating a fact.

"Forget the dress." He said it like the dress was a minor inconvenience he intended to resolve in the next twenty minutes. "I’ll buy you a whole store."

Sienna looked at him.

He meant it. That was the thing. He said it the way other people said I’ll get the bill... casually, completely, with zero awareness that it was an unusual thing to say.

What a completely normal Wednesday, she thought.

She had changed into something simple, a clean dress from the options already in the room, nothing remarkable, and Viktor had appeared at the door with his jacket and his keys and three cars’ worth of security personnel and the calm expression of a man running an errand.

The boutique was the kind of place that didn’t have prices on anything.

Sienna knew this type of establishment. She had walked past this type of establishment her entire life with her face forward and her pace unchanged, performing the very specific dignity of someone who knows they are not going in.

She was going in.

Viktor sat in the cream chair by the entrance with his ankle crossed over his knee and his phone in his hand like a man who had cleared his schedule and intended to use it. Guards at every door. Staff who materialized from nowhere with champagne she didn’t ask for and a measuring tape she didn’t need.

She made a face at him.

He smiled.

Of course he’s enjoying this, she thought, heading toward the racks with the focused energy of a woman on a mission. Of course.

Dress one. Black. Simple. She came out and turned once. Viktor shook his head.

"Next."

Next, she repeated internally. Just next. Like I’m a slideshow.

Dress two. Navy. Elegant. She turned again. He looked at her for three full seconds.

Shook his head. "Next."

I will not roll my eyes, she told herself. I am a composed adult woman, and I will not. She rolled her eyes on the way back to the dressing room.

Dress three. Burgundy. Actually beautiful, she acknowledged privately and immediately filed that acknowledgment away.

Head shake.

"Next."

Four. Five. Six. Each time she came out with slightly less enthusiasm and slightly more of the specific energy of a woman doing something against her will, but doing it thoroughly because that was simply who she was.

Dress seven, she came out with her arms slightly out at her sides and her expression communicating directly and without ambiguity that she was a museum exhibit who had recently developed opinions about museums.

Viktor looked up from his phone.

Something happened in his expression. He pressed his mouth together in a way that looked like a man physically preventing himself from laughing.

"Next," he said. Steadily.

Eight. Nine.

Dress ten.

Sienna stepped out of the dressing room and stood in front of the full-length mirror, looking at Viktor in the reflection with the flat, exhausted expression of a woman who had tried on ten dresses and rolled her eyes approximately nine times and was standing here in display like a very tired, very well-dressed museum piece and wanted him to know she knew that and was filing it away.

She turned once. Slowly. With the energy of a woman completing a contractual obligation. Viktor was looking at her.

Not at his phone. Not at the door. At her. The way he looked when he thought he wasn’t being noticed or when he didn’t care that he was. That slow, deliberate study that had nothing efficient about it.

He hadn’t shaken his head yet. Sienna looked at herself in the mirror. Then at him.

"Well?" she said.

He stood up. Crossed the room. Stopped behind her in the mirror, the same mirror, the same configuration, the same too-close proximity that seemed to follow them from room to room like a recurring theme she couldn’t edit out.

His eyes met hers in the glass. "This one," he said quietly.

Sienna looked at her reflection.

At the dress. At him standing behind it. At the whole composed, impossible, gold-and-silk picture of a morning that had started with a knife at her face and somehow ended here.

"Fine," she said.

"It’s not fine," he said. Almost gently. "It’s perfect." Don’t, she told her face in the mirror. Whatever you’re about to do... don’t.

Her face did not entirely cooperate.

Viktor watched her look away from the mirror and move back toward the dressing room and felt the now-familiar, deeply inconvenient sensation of a man who had everything and had recently discovered there was something he wanted considerably more.

She was trying on dresses in his boutique with coffee on her arm from his stepmother’s attempt at intimidation and she was rolling her eyes at him and she had poured a teapot on Elena Kessler before nine in the morning.

He had built an empire.

He had never once, in the building of it, been this entertained.