Chapter 51: Considerable other pleasures at thirty thousand feet

Viktor reached in and lifted her out of the car in one motion, the chain between their wrists going taut, and she was over his shoulder again before the words arrived.

"Let go of me. Viktor, I am serious. Put me DOWN, you sick jerk."

He walked toward the plane.

The stairs were already down. The engines are already running, that low hum that meant departure and no return, and everything changes now.

"I will scream," Sienna said, "I will scream the entire flight, I will not stop, I will." Viktor carried her up the stairs.

"She’s coming with us."

Viktor said it to the man at the foot of the jet stairs without breaking stride, Sienna still over his shoulder, still cataloguing her objections into his ear.

The man stared.

He was young, younger than Marco, with the same careful eyes but a different quality behind them, the eyes of someone who processed the world in spreadsheets rather than security perimeters. Manuel.

Marco’s younger brother, who had come up under Viktor’s wing, not through the usual channels, not the training, not the guns, not the particular education the Kessler organisation offered to boys who came in through its doors, but through something rarer.

He had the kind of brain that saw patterns in numbers the way other men saw patterns in threats, and Viktor had recognised it early and pointed it somewhere useful.

He had never quite gotten used to scenes like this one.

Marco passed him with a look that communicated, efficiently and completely. Do not say a single word.

Manuel nodded and said nothing.

Viktor set Sienna into the seat with the careful precision of a man who was angry but not careless, fastened her seatbelt with one hand, checked the handcuff with the other, and took the seat opposite.

Looked at her.

"If you had behaved," he said, the anger still present but banked now, cooling into something drier, "and not pushed me to this, you would be enjoying this flight right now." He leaned back. "Champagne. Comfort. Considerable other pleasures at thirty thousand feet."

Sienna stared at him for a moment. Then she laughed. It was short, sharp, entirely without humour.

"I am not a bag of potatoes," she said, "that you can ship from place to place and expect to be grateful about it." She held up the cuffed wrist pointedly.

"So don’t expect me to be delighted with the travel arrangements." Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"Not a bag of potatoes," he agreed. "My amusement." He stood. "Get some rest. I hope you find a way to get comfortable."

"Wait." She shifted forward against the seatbelt. "At least take the handcuff off. Viktor. Viktor."

He paused.

Looked back at her with the expression of a man genuinely considering it.

"No," he said. "I know how your brain works. I know exactly how your brain works. I don’t want any funny business at altitude." The ghost of something crossed his face not quite a smile, not quite warmth, something that lived in the narrow space between the two.

"Stay there. Be a good girl. And think about your ankle, it won’t thank you for moving too much." He pulled the curtain closed between the cabin sections.

The sounds that filtered through were not what she expected.

Voices first Viktor’s, Marco’s, Manuel’s, the low register of men settling into a journey, some laughter at something she couldn’t hear.

And then a woman’s voice.

Light, practiced, designed to carry just far enough.

And then gradually, unmistakably, sounds that had nothing to do with the flight and everything to do with what happened when powerful men had long flights and no particular reason for restraint.

Sienna stared at the ceiling of the cabin.

She pulled against the handcuff once, purely out of the desire to do something with her hands, and achieved nothing except wrist soreness.

She couldn’t cover her ears.

She tried, with the limited mobility available to her, to find a position in which she could pretend the curtain didn’t exist.

Her blood had reached a temperature that had nothing to do with the cabin heating and everything to do with the absolute, staggering audacity, the sheer architectural nerve of this man, who had cuffed her to a seat and then...

Disgusting, she thought. Absolutely disgusting. I hope the turbulence is catastrophic.

Somewhere between the fury and the handcuff and the slow, maddening sounds from behind the curtain and the low hum of the engines and the particular exhaustion of a body that had climbed a wall and broken an ankle and survived a gala and crossed an ocean all in the span of twenty-four hours.

Sienna slept.

Deeply. Completely. The sleep of a body that had simply decided it was done, regardless of the circumstances.

She didn’t dream. Or if she did, she didn’t remember.

What she remembered was the change in the engines the subtle shift in pitch and pressure, the feeling of descent, the world reorganising itself around a different gravity and she opened her eyes to the window.

Dawn light. Or evening light. She had lost track of time entirely.

And below coming up through the thin cloud, terracotta and gold and ancient, spilling down hillsides toward water that was a colour blue she had only ever seen in photographs

Italy.

The plane touched down with a sound like a full stop at the end of a very long sentence.

Sienna sat with her cuffed wrist in her lap and looked out the window at a country she had never chosen and thought about Aria, and the library, and the small door in the garden wall that was now an ocean away.

The seat beside her shifted.

Sienna turned.

Viktor was already watching her. Not with the anger from before that had cooled somewhere over the Atlantic, filed away into wherever he filed things he was done with for now. This was something quieter. More dangerous, in its own way.

"You look gorgeous when your mouth is shut," he said. Conversational. Almost gentle.

"Peaceful." A pause. "Adorable, even." Sienna looked at him.

"I bite," she said. "So watch your back."