Chapter 37: It was a very good smile

Sienna smiled. It was a very good smile. She had practised it in the car, unconsciously, without knowing she was practising it, the smile of a woman who was perfectly fine, perfectly comfortable, perfectly content to be exactly where she was.

She held it until he turned and moved toward the bar, the crowd adjusting around him like water around a stone.

Then she let it go.

I don’t want to see your face, she thought, watching him move away through the black suits and candlelight and careful watching eyes.

I don’t want to be in this dress, or this room, or this city, or this life you have decided is mine now.

I don’t want to feel my heart do what it just did when you said wifey in that voice like it was something private, something just for me.

She reached for a glass of champagne from a passing tray. Took a slow, steadying sip. Told her heart, firmly, that it was being ridiculous. Her heart, for the second time that evening, did not agree.

Across the room, a man she didn’t recognise was watching her.

Not the way the others watched, curious, gossiping, assessing. This was different. Quieter. His eyes moved from her to Viktor’s retreating back and then to her again, and there was something in his face that wasn’t admiration or hostility or any of the things she’d learned to catalogue since all of this began.

It looked, from here, almost like a calculation. He caught her looking. He didn’t look away.

And Sienna, who had been mapping this room since she walked in, who had been counting exits and reading faces and filing everything away for later, for the plan that didn’t exist yet but would.

Sienna looked back. And waited to see what he would do next. Aliya moved through the crowd like she owned the floor beneath her feet. Which, Sienna supposed, was entirely possible.

"Sienna."

She appeared from the left, materialised, almost, the way women like this materialised, suddenly simply there, close and composed and smelling like something that cost more than Sienna’s monthly rent had. The black mermaid dress. The long hair. The extended hand and the smile that had been assembled with great care looked effortless.

"Wasn’t it? I’m so glad we’ve finally met." A pause, warm and perfectly timed. "I’m Aliya." Sienna looked at the hand. She looked at Aliya’s face.

And she understood, in the space of approximately four seconds, everything she needed to understand.

The eyes gave it away they always did. Not the jealousy itself, people hid that well enough, but the kind of jealousy. There was the jealousy of a woman who wanted what another woman had and knew she didn’t deserve it.

And then there was this something older, deeper, more proprietary. The jealousy of a woman who believed, in the way of people who have never been told otherwise, that something already belonged to her.

Aliya had been born into this world. You could see it in the way she held herself, not performed confidence, not learned confidence, but the real thing, the kind that came from growing up in rooms exactly like this one, from understanding its rules before she understood anything else.

She was dangerous. She was also, Sienna noted, not particularly subtle. Sienna did not take the hand.

She smiled instead, pleasant, unreadable, and let the extended hand exist in the air between them for one beat too long before Aliya smoothly withdrew it, as if she’d meant to all along.

"So, Sienna." Aliya turned to stand beside her, both of them facing the room now, the posture of women having a conversation that is also something else entirely. "Tell me what your taste in wine is?"

A small, silver smile. "You must have refined taste," she said. "Landing a man like Viktor Kessler."

The compliment was a blade wrapped in silk, and Aliya had delivered it with the ease of long practice. Sienna smiled back.

"I don’t know much about wine," she said, pleasantly, conversationally, the way you discuss the weather. "But in men..." she tilted her head slightly. "I like to think I do."

A beat. "And it seems like you have a type as well."

Aliya’s smile didn’t waver. If anything, it deepened, the way a blade goes deeper when you push it. "Darling," she said, with a small laugh.

"Everyone does. But he’s yours now." She plucked a glass from the tray of a passing waiter with practiced ease and held it out. "You should try this vintage. It’s extraordinary. Appropriate for an evening like tonight."

Sienna took the glass. She held it. Did not drink it.

Around them, the room had done its usual thing the not-watching that was entirely watching, the conversations that had quietly reoriented themselves in this direction, the peripheral eyes of people who understood that something was happening here even if they couldn’t quite name it.

Sienna waited.

She had seen it the moment Aliya shifted her weight. The almost imperceptible adjustment of her footing. The way her free hand had dropped slightly to her side, positioning. The angle of her body relative to Sienna’s, relative to the glass.

There it is, Sienna thought.

Simple. Effective. Designed for maximum damage, not to Sienna, not really. To the dress. The red dress that had already made every statement it needed to make tonight, ruined, stained, Sienna standing in the middle of Viktor Kessler’s world wearing the evidence of her own humiliation.

Neat, she thought. Old trick. Aliya’s hand moved. Sienna moved faster.

She stepped back.

One step, clean and unhurried, the champagne flute tilting in her hand as she turned, and there, directly behind her, was a waiter. A waiter carrying a full tray. Of wine glasses.

The physics were immediate and non-negotiable. Sienna’s shoulder caught the tray’s edge barely, barely, the most glancing contact, and the tray tilted and the glasses went, and somewhere in the cascade, something larger gave way, something that had been sitting on a pedestal at the room’s edge, something tall and blue and ancient-looking that hit the marble floor with a sound like a small explosion.

The room stopped.