Chapter 49: Put me down!!!

Sienna held his gaze and didn’t move and didn’t look away, and something shifted in Viktor’s face, the anger cycling through something she couldn’t name, something that looked almost like a man losing a war he hadn’t expected to be in.

He thought for a moment.

Then he crossed the room, turned her around in one motion, and put her over his shoulder.

"What!! Put me down!!! hey!! Viktor...."

He was already moving. One arm locked across the back of her knees, completely unmoved by the fists she was putting into his back, by the furious, continuous stream of put me down right now, I am not joking, put me down that she was delivering directly into his ear.

He walked past Marco, who found something deeply interesting to look at on the opposite wall.

He walked out the front door.

Into the morning. Into the open air and the grounds and the light that Sienna could only see from upside down, her hair falling forward, the gravel and then the grass passing beneath her as Viktor carried her with the purposeful calm of a man who had made a decision and was seeing it through.

"Where are you taking me?" she demanded. "Viktor. I am serious. I will not stop. I will never stop. Put me down this instant, do you hear me? I will make your life absolutely impossible, I will..."

He said nothing. Just walked.

And the grounds opened up ahead of them into something she hadn’t seen yet, somewhere she hadn’t mapped, and for all her fury and all her threats, Sienna felt it, the treacherous, unwilling spark of it.

Curiosity.

Where, she thought, still furious, still fists-in-his-back, still fully intending to make good on every threat.

Where on earth is he taking me?

"Should I help shut her up, boss?"

One of the guards called it out as Viktor crossed the gravel toward the cars, Sienna still over his shoulder, still delivering her continuous, detailed, extremely specific list of grievances directly into his left ear.

Viktor didn’t break stride.

"I can shut my wife up myself," he said.

Behind him, Marco fell into step without being asked, phone already out, already making calls, already doing the quiet arithmetic of a man who had just understood where this was going and was getting ahead of it.

Sienna saw the cars upside down.

Black, large, engines already running the Kessler fleet always ready, always waiting, the infrastructure of a man who made decisions and expected the world to have prepared for them in advance.

She saw Marco on his phone. She saw the guards repositioning. She saw the particular organised momentum of people who knew what we’re leaving looked like when Viktor Kessler decided it.

"Where are you taking me?" Not a question anymore. A demand. "Get me down. Don’t you dare... don’t you touch me..."

Viktor opened the car door and put her in with the careful efficiency of someone packing something fragile that was pretending not to be fragile.

Before she could locate the door handle, he had reached across her, the seatbelt clicking into place with a finality that felt deeply personal.

"Stay put." His voice was still running hot, still that unfamiliar register from the hallway, but underneath it now was something with direction, something that had found its outlet. "I’m going to Italy."

He moved around the car to the other side.

"And you’re coming with me."

The door closed. Sienna sat with that sentence for approximately one second.

"What?"

Viktor settled into the seat beside her, looked forward, and said nothing further.

"Italy." She turned to face him fully, the seatbelt pulling tight. "Italy. No. No, absolutely not, I am not going anywhere, you cannot make me, that is... that is illegal, that is ..."

Italy.

The word landed the second time differently, and what followed it was not anger but something colder and more practical, the geography of it, the distance, the Atlantic between her and everything she knew.

Philadelphia was her city. She knew its streets and its shortcuts and its rhythms, she knew where to go and who might help and how far she could run before.

Italy, she didn’t know at all.

Italy was his world. His language and his contacts and his dungeon equivalents and she would be completely, utterly, comprehensively.

She lunged for the doorknob.

Viktor’s hand closed around her wrist in the same motion, the handcuff appearing from somewhere with the practiced speed of a man who had anticipated this specific moment, and the metal was cool and certain around her wrist before she had finished forming the plan.

He tapped the driver’s headrest once.

The car moved.

Sienna pulled against the cuff.

It held.

She tried the angle. The position. She looked at Viktor’s wrist where the other end was fastened, at the chain between them, at the window, at the door, at every available option with the rapid, focused attention of a woman running calculations in real time.

None of them were resolved.

She tried anyway. For several miles she tried, adjusting, testing, refusing to accept the arithmetic while Viktor sat beside her with his bruised hand resting on his knee and his eyes forward and the expression of a man who had decided to wait her out and had infinite patience for it.

Eventually, somewhere past the city limits, her wrist was sore, and her ankle was reminding her it existed, and she had found every edge of every available option, and none of them had opened into anything.

She stopped.

Sat back.

Stared at the passing highway with the furious composure of a woman who was thinking rather than doing.

The car was quiet except for the road, and Marco’s murmured Italian into his phone in the front seat and the sound of Sienna breathing through her nose in the specific way of someone not saying everything they were thinking.

Viktor, beside her, said nothing.

—-

The private terminal appeared through the tinted windows.

Small, unmarked, the kind of facility that didn’t appear on public listings, just a building and a tarmac and a plane sitting on it, white and sleek and waiting with the patient readiness of everything in Viktor Kessler’s life.

The car stopped. Viktor stepped out. Sienna looked at the plane. Looked at the handcuff.

Looked at the terminal building and the men standing at the perimeter, and the complete absence of anything resembling an option.

Viktor opened her door. She turned to face him and opened her mouth.