Chapter 44: I said stay still

Not gently. Not roughly. With the careful controlled force of a man operating at the very outer edge of his patience, which for Viktor Kessler was a significantly further edge than most men possessed but an edge nonetheless, and she was standing on it.

He straightened. Looked at her.

The anger was everywhere in his jaw, in his shoulders, in the way he was breathing, slow and deliberate, the breathing of a man counting, measuring, deciding.

"You don’t listen." The words came out quietly. Which was, she had learned, worse than loud. "Do you?"

Sienna said nothing.

"You think this place is hell." He spread his hands slightly in the room, the mansion, all of it. "Fine. Should I free you?" He tilted his head. The voice is still quiet. Still controlled. "Bullet or a knife, which do you prefer?"

The question sat in the air between them.

"You are impossible, Sienna." Something cracked in his voice just slightly, just at the edge, a hairline fracture in the control. "You are testing every last piece of my patience."

He looked at her for one more second. Then he turned and walked out. The door closed.

Sienna sat on the bed and listened to her own heartbeat.

It was very loud.

She took one breath. Two. Looked at the closed door. Looked at the room around her the windows, the furniture, the locked door, and she thought about his face, and the quiet voice, and a bullet or a knife.

And she got off the bed.

She moved fast despite the ankle, which had entered a new phase of having opinions about everything. Under the table first, the large one near the window, with the heavy cloth that dropped to the floor on all sides, and she pulled the red dress in after her and went still.

You are not going down without a fight, said something in her chest. Correct, she agreed. She waited.

The door opened.

Footsteps. She tracked them, the weight of them, the pace, Viktor’s particular rhythm, which she had memorised without meaning to, the way you memorised things you were always listening for.

They stopped. Silence. She could picture him standing in the centre of the room. Looking at the empty bed. Looking at the room.

"Sienna."

Flat. Tired. The voice of a man who had given a significant number of orders tonight and was now adding find wife in own bedroom to the list.

"I know you’re in here. Come out." She did not move.

"Sienna." A pause. Something shifted in his voice, not softer, exactly, but different. "I can see the hem of your dress."

She looked down.

A full six inches of red fabric had escaped from under the tablecloth and was lying on the open floor in the lamplight like a flag of surrender she had not agreed to wave.

She closed her eyes briefly.

"Are you not angry that I tried to run?" she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she expected, muffled slightly by the tablecloth.

"Yes." No hesitation. "I am angry. Very angry." A beat. "Now come out, Sienna."

She let out a long breath. Then she got on her hands and knees, ankle complaining bitterly, the red dress doing its absolute best to complicate everything, and crawled out from under the table.

She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. "I’m not sorry," she said. Clearly. Directly. Meeting his eyes with the full weight of it.

"I will do it again." Viktor looked down at her.

Something moved through his face, the anger still there, still running hot underneath, but moving through it was something she didn’t have a clean name for, something complicated, something that had been accumulating since the red dress and the rolled eyes and the gala and the forest.

He reached down.

"Don’t..." She pulled back. "Don’t touch me..."

He picked her up anyway, one smooth motion, and she fought, properly fought, hands pushing at his chest, twisting.

"Let go of me, get off... don’t you hear me..." He set her on the bed. Came down over her.

She fought harder, because fear had a logic of its own tonight, because she had been managing it all evening with both hands and now it was slipping, now it was real, now she was pinned, and her ankle was screaming and she couldn’t..

His hands caught her wrists.

One efficient motion. A strip of something she didn’t see what and her wrists were bound to the bedframe above her head, and she pulled against it and it held, and she pulled again.

"Get off me. Please. Please, get off..." Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

Scared. Actually scared. Not the managed, operational fear from earlier. The real thing.

Viktor stilled.

He was above her, and he looked at her face really looked, the way he had looked in the lobby and outside the gala, and every time she hadn’t wanted him to see something clearly, something in him shifted.

He moved. Down.

Not toward her. Down off her completely, settling at the foot of the bed, and she felt the mattress redistribute his weight, and she was breathing hard against the restraint at her wrists, and she didn’t understand what was happening.

He had something in his hands.

The first aid kit. White. Practical. The kind kept stocked in houses where injuries were a recurring administrative matter.

He opened it. Set it on the bed beside him. And then, without a word, without looking at her face, he reached out. And took her ankle in both hands.

Carefully. The way you handle something breakable.

Sienna flinched, the pain arriving before she could prepare for it, and his hands stilled immediately.

"I said stay still."

Not cruel. Not gentle either. The voice of a man focused on a task, the tone of someone who needed you to cooperate because the alternative was that you would hurt more.

She went still. He examined the ankle, turning it by degrees, fingers pressing lightly along the bone, reading it the way she read spines of books, knowing what he was looking for.

"You are so stubborn," he said quietly.

He wasn’t looking at her face. His eyes were on her ankle, his hands moving with a precision she hadn’t expected, hadn’t prepared for.

"See what you did to yourself." His jaw shifted. "Now you are in pain."