Chapter 53: Don Amel Morozov

Don Amel Morozov walked through it.

The same suit. The same silver temples. The same expression he had worn at the gala when Viktor had thrown money at his feet, the expression of a man who had decided something and was now simply executing on the decision, unhurried, certain of the outcome.

He looked at her and his mouth curved. "You’re coming with me."

"No," Sienna said. She swung the vase.

He ducked fast for a man his age, the reflexes of someone who had been in rooms like this one many times and had survived all of them and came up reaching for her arm and she stepped back and raised the vase again and..

The gunshot was enormous in the stone room.

Single. Clean.

Don Amel stopped. He looked down at his own stomach with an expression that was almost curious, the expression of a man encountering something he had not scheduled, had not planned for, had not believed was on tonight’s agenda.

His hand went to the spreading dark stain on his shirt. He pressed against it as if he might be able to reason with it.

Then his legs went, and he fell. Directly in front of her.

The blood reached the stone floor before he did, and kept going, and Sienna stood over him with the vase still raised and watched Don Amel Morozov’s eyes go to the ceiling and stay there.

She had seen blood before.

More than most people. More than she had ever explained to anyone, more than fit neatly into the story of a librarian from Philadelphia, more than she thought about in the ordinary hours of ordinary days. Blood was not the thing that undid her.

But a man dying.

In front of her. The specific terrible intimacy of it, the way life made its exit, the way a body that had been full of intention and momentum and thirty years of surviving this world became simply a weight on a stone floor in the space of a breath.

Her body made a decision without consulting her.

The edges of the room went soft. The vase was too heavy, suddenly, impossibly heavy.

A pain arrived in her chest, not panic, not the tightening of fear, something else, something she recognised with the distant clarity of a person watching themselves from a small distance, something that had been waiting patiently for exactly this kind of moment to announce itself.

The doctor said in a small, calm voice at the back of everything. The doctor said get it checked. Six months ago. Eight months ago. She said you would.

The floor tilted. You didn’t.

Viktor caught her before she reached it.

She didn’t hear him come in. Didn’t see him cross the room. One moment the floor was tilting and the next his arms were there, solid and certain and already moving, lifting her away from Don Amel’s body and the spreading dark and the room that was no longer safe, had perhaps never been safe, had been the wrong room from the moment they arrived.

He said something. She felt the words more than heard them, felt the vibration of his voice against her, felt the movement corridor, stairs, the cold mountain air hitting her face as they came outside, the night enormous and dark around them.

Cars. Voices. Marco, urgent, directing. Manuel closes behind.

Viktor’s arms didn’t loosen.

She was losing the edges of things now, the world narrowing to a tunnel with nothing at the end of it yet, just the narrowing, just the going.

"Sienna." His voice is close. Her name in his mouth like something that mattered. She tried to answer. Couldn’t find it.

"Sienna, look at me..."

The tunnel closed.

And the last thing she was aware of before the dark took everything and the mountain took the sound and Italy became nothing but the inside of her own failing consciousness.

Were Viktor’s arms. Holding on. Not letting go.

—-

Sienna’s eyes opened slowly.

The ceiling was different. That was the first thing she noticed, lying very still, blinking up at unfamiliar carved wood instead of the stone she remembered from the room before.

The light coming through the window was soft and golden in a way that suggested late morning had already arrived and made itself comfortable.

She lay there a moment longer, doing the careful inventory of a body that wasn’t entirely sure it trusted the world yet.

Then she looked down at herself. And went very still. This was not what she had been wearing.

Somebody had changed her into a silk nightgown, small, soft, scandalously simple, the kind of garment that seemed to have been selected specifically to remind her she was, in fact, a person with a body, in case she had forgotten.

She pulled the sheet up an extra inch, purely on principle, and lay there processing this development with the particular betrayal of someone who had been unconscious for the entire decision-making process.

Who, she thought. Who exactly. She decided, for the sake of her own peace of mind, not to ask.

The memories came back slower. In pieces. The vase. The door is breaking. Don Amel’s face had that calm, curious expression as he looked down at the spreading stain on his own shirt, like a man double-checking an invoice he hadn’t expected.

Viktor had killed him.

Killed him to save her. Killed him in a stone room in the mountains of Calabria, and somewhere underneath the horror of it and there was horror, real and unresolved, sitting heavy in her chest there was something else too, something she didn’t have a tidy name for and wasn’t sure she wanted one.

She didn’t know which was worse. Being alive. Or being the reason an entire dangerous world had just rearranged itself, in blood, around her.

She decided she would think about that later. Possibly much later. Possibly never, if she could arrange it.

She sat up.

Tested the ankle, better, much better, the swelling down to something almost reasonable. Tested her legs. Tested the floor. Everything held.

She crept toward the door with the dedicated, theatrical stealth of someone who had clearly learned tip-toeing from cartoons rather than any actual training in espionage, heel never quite touching first, both arms slightly out for balance, head swivelling at every imaginary sound.

The door opened without a creak.

Excellent, she thought, immensely pleased with herself, as if silent doors were a personal accomplishment. She crept into the hallway.

She made it exactly four steps.