Chapter 58: Who are you, really?

Viktor’s gaze stayed fixed on her, slow and unblinking, the way a man looks at something he thought he’d already figured out and is now realizing he hadn’t. Who are you, really? The question didn’t leave his mouth, but it was written plainly enough across his face that Sienna could read it without him saying a word.

She held his stare and gave nothing back.

Marco had reported back to him and said the guy was killed at the library that night when they went through his apartment after finding pictures of Sienna.

A lot of them. Different days, different places. Not recent either, some of those pictures looked weeks old. Maybe longer. Meaning he was watching her before that night, before he ever crossed paths with her.

His eyes drifted back to Sienna one more time, lingering, the question still sitting unanswered between them. Who are you, really?

"I thought you needed to go save some girls," Sienna said, and there was something almost lazy in the way she said it, a reminder, not a question, the words placed deliberately to nudge the room back into motion.

Viktor didn’t move right away. He stood there a moment longer than the situation called for, his eyes still on her, still turning her over in his mind like a puzzle box he hadn’t found the seam of yet.

His little librarian. That was what he’d taken to calling her in his head, somewhere between irritation and something he hadn’t quite named, a woman who spoke three languages he knew of and probably more he didn’t, who cracked encryption like it was nothing, who’d just sat calmly through a man holding a gun to another man’s skull and negotiated terms like she did it for a living.

A mystery he was trying to crack, piece by piece, and getting nowhere fast. He said none of it out loud.

"Marco." He finally looked away from her. "You ready?"

"Yes, boss. Ready." Marco held up his phone, the screen still open to the file Sienna had cracked. "Got the location."

"Good." Viktor turned toward Manuel next. "You stay behind. Watch her."

Manuel’s face fell almost instantly. "But I want to come." There was a whine to it, the kind only a younger brother could get away with.

"The battlefield isn’t your thing," Marco said, not unkindly, already shrugging into his jacket. Then, glancing toward Sienna with the faintest trace of a smile, he added,

"Besides, Mrs. Kessler’s going to need company. There are a lot of mines out there, and she likes her little walks. Wouldn’t want her stepping on something by accident."

Viktor’s smile spread slowly and satisfied as he watched the words land on Sienna’s face, watched the brief, almost imperceptible shift, the flicker of calculation behind her eyes as she filed away the location of every mine on the property she hadn’t known about a minute ago.

"I’m not a fool," Sienna said, her voice flat, unbothered, like the comment hadn’t touched her at all. "I’m not about to go running through a foreign country with no passport and no one I know waiting on the other side."

"Good." Viktor’s smile didn’t fade.

"Good night," she added, turning toward the hall, not even bothering to look back at him properly. "Try not to get killed. I still need to get home, and I can’t do that if you’re dead." A pause, her face perfectly still, not a flicker of warmth in it. "Though nothing would make me happier."

Viktor laughed under his breath, low and genuinely amused, the sound following her down the hall. "Don’t miss me too much," he called after her, and threw in a wink for good measure, the kind he knew would annoy her more than anything else he could have said.

Sienna rolled her eyes without turning around.

Behind them, Marco gave his younger brother a light tap on the shoulder hold the fort and the two men headed out into the dark, gravel crunching underfoot, leaving the house quieter than it had been in hours.

—-

Sienna went to bed, though sleep didn’t come easily. She lay there in the dark, staring at nothing, telling herself she wasn’t worried, not about him, never about him, and almost believing it, right up until she heard the sound of a car tearing up the gravel drive far too fast, far too loud for a job that had gone the way it was supposed to.

She was on her feet before she’d decided to be.

By the time she reached the stairs, the house had already filled with noisy voices overlapping, footsteps pounding through the hall. She came down to find Marco slumped between Viktor and Manuel, his side dark and wet, the blood soaking through his shirt in a way that left no room to pretend it was minor.

Viktor was covered in it too, his hands, his sleeves, his face set in a hard line that hadn’t been there before tonight. Manuel hovered just behind them, eyes wide, his whole body trembling with the particular kind of fear that comes from watching someone you love bleed and not knowing how to stop it.

"Get the fucking doctor here, now!" Viktor’s voice tore through the phone, raw and furious, the kind of yelling that came from fear dressed up as anger. "Stay with me, Marco. Stay with me."

Sienna stood at the bottom of the stairs for half a second, watching the three of them, Viktor’s hands shaking as he pressed down on the wound, Manuel close to tears, Marco’s face going the wrong kind of pale.

And then something in her shifted, quiet and automatic, the panic in the room simply switching something on in her that she didn’t have to think about.

"Get me a pair of scissors, alcohol, and a towel," she said, already moving toward Marco, her voice cutting clean through the chaos.

Manuel looked at her for only a beat before he ran, grateful, it seemed, to have somewhere to put his fear.