Chapter 48: Do you hear yourself?

Sienna turned to Viktor. Her voice came out even though she worked for that, she always worked for that, but she could feel the shock of it still moving through her system, the gun and the speed of it, and that voice she had never heard before.

"We were just talking."

"Go back inside." Viktor’s voice had dropped back into its usual register. Cold. Controlled. The lid is back on. "Right now."

"He didn’t do anything, we were just..."

"Sienna."

"What?" She felt it rising, the anger, the one she kept banked and managed and useful, and she let it come, because she was tired and her ankle hurt and she had laughed for the first time in days and now Marcel was being dragged away and she was being sent inside like a child and she was done.

"What? Now I can’t even talk to anyone?"

"You are mine." He said it the way he said everything, simply, completely, as if it were a fact of the natural world rather than a sentence that a person had decided to say to another person.

"No man is allowed to look at you. Much less speak to you."

"I am not your property." The words came out clean and sharp, and she meant every syllable. "You don’t own me, Viktor."

"Go back inside." He had already turned. Already done with the conversation in the way of a man who had never once in his life continued an argument he had decided was over. "Marco,"

"I’m not finished,"

"Take her inside," Viktor said to Marco, not to her, and walked away across the grounds without looking back, the anger still visible in every line of him, in the set of his shoulders and the pace of his stride.

And underneath the anger, something he hadn’t been able to hide in the half second his eyes had found her face.

The laugh.

He had seen the laugh.

"Ma’am." Marco appeared at her side, his voice carrying the gentle diplomacy of a man who had been navigating impossible situations his entire professional life. "Please."

Sienna watched Viktor’s retreating back.

"He put his own brother in a dungeon," she said.

Marco said nothing, which was its own answer, and she filed it away. Brother confirmed the thing she had suspected since the gala, now sitting in her chest with the weight of something that mattered.

"Fine."

She turned. Arranged the crutches. Walked back toward the house with the controlled fury of a woman who was not done, and everyone present was aware of it.

The morning room doors opened for her.

She went through them.

Behind her, she heard Marco exhale long, quiet, the exhale of a man who had successfully moved an object that had not wanted to be moved.

The house was cool and still.

Sienna stood in the hallway and stared at nothing.

Marcel’s shrug stayed with her that easy, unbothered roll of his shoulders as they dragged him away, like the dungeon was a mild scheduling inconvenience.

She didn’t know him well enough to worry about him, not really. But Elena was his mother.

Elena, who had stood in that gala with her elegant bun and her quiet orchestrations and looked at Sienna like she was something to be swept off the floor, that woman’s son was now in Viktor’s dungeon, and the last thing Sienna needed was that woman deciding whose fault it was.

And beyond that... Beyond that, she was simply angry.

The kind of anger that had nowhere clean to go. Viktor was treating her like something he owned, something to be collected and stored and kept from the world, no conversations, no laughter, no people.

As if existing near another human being was an act of defiance requiring punishment.

She had a life before this.

A real one. Small and quiet and entirely hers. The library with its particular morning smell, old paper, dust, and the radiator that knocked in winter.

The work she did in the hours after closing, the work nobody knew about except one person, the work that had meant something.

Aria. The name moved through her like a current.

Aria Cross. Her best friend since university, sharp-minded and fearless, and the only person on earth who knew all of Sienna’s layers and had decided to stay anyway.

The only person who knew about the secret work, who was part of the secret work, who would surely know by now that something was wrong.

Where are you, Sienna thought. Where are you? I need you to find me before I do something I can’t undo.

The thought of Aria made her eyes sting in a way she refused to allow, so she blinked it back and stared harder at the middle distance and reminded herself that crying in Viktor Kessler’s hallway with Marco watching was not something she was willing to do.

Speaking of Marco.

She could feel him behind her, patient as furniture, doing his job of existing near her in case she tried to do something inadvisable again.

She heard the front door.

Viktor came in like weather.

Still hot with whatever had happened outside, his shirt had told the story before he did, dark stains across the fabric, his right hand swollen at the knuckles, the particular look of a man who had used his fists to finish an argument his words had started.

Sienna turned.

Looked at the shirt, then at his hand. "What did you do to him?" It was not a question. The words came out before she’d decided to say them.

Viktor’s eyes found hers.

"What did you do to him? You don’t get to act like this, like I’m some prize exhibit who isn’t allowed to speak to anyone."

"In this house," Viktor said, and his voice was different, still controlled, but only just, the control sitting on top of something that hadn’t finished burning, "people who disobey me pay a price." His jaw shifted. "Something you will learn. Very soon."

"You really are something." The anger was fully out now, no banking it, no managing it. "You walk around like you’re some kind of lord. Like everyone just has to bow to whatever you decide."

"I am the King." It came out simple and absolute. "My word is law."

"Your word is law," she repeated, and the disbelief in her voice was genuine, the kind you couldn’t manufacture. "Do you hear yourself?"