Chapter 41: He threatened my wife

Viktor kept walking. The doors. The steps. The cold night air hit her face like permission. Sienna exhaled.

And then Viktor’s hand was on her arm, not harsh, not grabbing, but there, sudden and firm, and she turned to find him not looking at her but looking past her, and his face had done the thing, the thing that she had only seen once or twice, the thing that meant the calculation had resolved, and the answer was not good.

The men were coming up the steps.

Six of them. Seven. Dark coats, the particular way they moved, not guests leaving, not staff, not the unhurried drift of people wrapping up an evening. Purposeful. Converging.

Armed.

"Sienna," Viktor said her name the way you say something you need to land immediately, no room for misunderstanding, and his arm came around her, pulling her into his side, and he was already reaching for his phone with his other hand.

"Marco." One ring. Answered on the first. "Get her out. Now."

Yes, boss. Marco’s voice, instantly alert, already in motion. Where

"Front steps. Move."

The black car appeared from somewhere Marco had, as always, been approximately thirty seconds ahead of being needed, and Viktor was moving her toward it, his hand solid at her back, his body angled between her and the men on the steps, blocking the geometry of it.

"Boss." Marco had the door open, his eyes moving rapidly from Sienna to the men to Viktor and back. His voice shifted, dropped into something more private, more urgent. "Boss. Come with us. Please."

Viktor turned.

The door to the Morozov villa was still open behind them. Warm light spilling out. Music. The sound of a party continuing, because parties like this always continued, because the point of them was to continue.

And somewhere inside, Don Amel. And the phone call. And whatever was already in motion. Viktor looked at the door.

Sienna watched him look at it. Watched the thing moving behind his eyes the pull of it, the need to know, the specific calculation of a man who had not survived this long by driving away from things he didn’t understand.

He wanted to go back in there. She could see it clearly, the way you could see clearly when you had been watching someone carefully enough.

Then he looked at Sienna. She didn’t say anything.

She didn’t need to. The night was in her face the vase, the gun, the men on the steps, all of it sitting just beneath the surface of her expression, and she was holding herself very still in the particular way of a person who was refusing, with some effort, to let it show how much she wanted to not be standing here.

Marco, quietly, said "Please."

Viktor got in the car.

The door closed. Marco was moving before it latched, pulling away from the Morozov villa in the smooth, unhurried way of someone who had been trained that speed attracted attention and attention was the enemy.

The gates. The road. The city opening up around them, ordinary and lit and entirely unaware.

Sienna sat in the back seat and watched the villa disappear in the rear window. The warm light. The open doors. The men on the steps who had stopped moving now, just watching the car go, which was somehow worse than if they’d followed.

Viktor sat beside her.

Neither of them spoke.

The silence had a different texture than the silences before, not the careful mutual quiet of the drive there, not the charged, sparring quiet of the gala. This was something else. Something that had been through the evening together and come out the other side and didn’t quite know yet what it was.

Outside, a traffic light. Red. Sienna almost laughed. Viktor’s eyes moved to her face in the dark of the car. Catching the question without asking it.

"Nothing," she said quietly. He looked at her for another moment. Then he looked forward.

His jaw was tight. She could see it the thing he’d left unfinished back there, the door he hadn’t gone back through, sitting in his chest like something unresolved.

He had chosen the car. He had chosen to leave. Sienna didn’t know what to do with that. She looked out the window at the city sliding past the restaurants, the couples, the ordinary lives, and she thought about Don Amel’s face in the window, and the phone pressed to his ear, and the men on the steps.

She thought about how easily Viktor had thrown money at a man’s feet in front of his entire world.

She thought about the word wife. And she thought, very quietly, in the part of her mind that never stopped making plans. Whatever is coming next, it is going to come fast.

And we are not ready. It was the look of a man making a plan. And the plan, whatever it was, was already in motion.

"Make plans, Marco."

Viktor’s voice filled the car like weather. Cold front moving in, pressure dropping, the kind of stillness before something broke.

"We need to get rid of all the Morozov men." Marco, to his eternal credit, did not flinch.

"I heard what happened, boss." His eyes stayed on the road. His voice was the voice of a man who had talked Viktor Kessler off various ledges before and had developed a technique for it, calm, steady, factual, the verbal equivalent of a hand extended in the dark.

"The organisation is behind him. Killing him will start a war. A big one." A pause. "We are not ready for that."

"Do I look," Viktor said, "like I give a fuck?" The car filled with the specific silence of that sentence.

"He threatened my wife." Each word its own sentence. It’s own verdict. "And he tried to pull a smart one on me. In front of everyone."

His hand, resting on his knee, had closed into a fist without him seeming to notice. Marco said nothing, which was, sometimes, the only available response.