Chapter 65: I was checking your temperature

This is exactly how it starts, she told herself, sharp, deliberate, the way she’d once memorized firewall protocols and false identities. This is how women get stupid. You don’t fall for the man holding your leash just because he occasionally chooses not to pull it.

And yet.

Her eyes kept drifting to his hands, loose now against the sheets, the same hands that had pointed a gun at Lion without hesitation, that had also reached for hers in the car like the rest of the world had stopped existing.

She thought about Philadelphia, about elegant rooms and worse men in nicer suits. She thought about the white jumpsuit still streaked with blood that wasn’t hers, about the particular, specific fury of biting a man’s hand to save her own life.

I should hate him, she thought, and the thought arrived without its usual conviction, thinner than it used to be, fraying a little more each time she reached for it.

I should still be planning how to get away from him. Instead, I’m sitting here babysitting his fever like some kind of...

She cut the thought off before it finished, refusing to give it a shape.

Outside, the night had gone fully dark, the kind of quiet that only existed in the aftermath of violence, when everyone left alive was too exhausted to fill the silence with anything at all.

Sienna shifted the cloth against Viktor’s forehead, checked his pulse out of habit more than necessity, and let herself, just for a moment, stop performing composure for an audience that wasn’t even awake to see it.

Her hand lingered against his skin a beat longer than medically necessary.

Just until he’s stable, she told herself, the lie sitting easily enough now that she almost believed it. Then I’ll figure out how to actually get out of here.

She didn’t move from the chair.

Viktor woke slowly, the way a man surfaces from deep water first the dull throb at his side announcing itself, then the awareness that he wasn’t moving, wasn’t in danger, wasn’t anywhere that smelled like gunpowder anymore.

Then the second thing he noticed: a hand, resting against the side of his face, fingers curled loose like they’d forgotten they were still there.

He opened his eyes.

Sienna was asleep in the chair beside the bed, head tipped at an angle that promised her a stiff neck come morning, her hand still pressed to his cheek where she must have left it sometime after checking his fever and before exhaustion finally caught up with her.

The cloth had slipped from his forehead onto the pillow. Her dress was still streaked with his blood, dried dark and stiff at the edges, and she hadn’t even bothered to change.

She stayed.

It shouldn’t have surprised him, he’d watched her bite a man’s hand to protect herself, watched her press a cloth against his wound with the kind of steady-handed focus most trained medics didn’t manage under fire.

But there was a difference between competence under pressure and falling asleep with her hand on his face like he was something worth keeping warm.

He let himself look at her a moment longer than he probably should have. The furrow between her brows even in sleep, like she couldn’t fully let her guard down even now.

The faint shadows under her eyes. The stubborn, infuriating tilt of her chin that hadn’t softened even unconscious.

Careful, he thought, with the dry, distant amusement of a man watching himself walk somewhere he already knew was dangerous. That’s the look of a man about to do something stupid.

He shifted slightly, testing the wound, wincing at the answering flare of pain, and the small movement was enough.

Sienna’s eyes snapped open, sharp and immediate, the soldier in her surfacing before the woman did.

For one disoriented second, she just stared at him, hand still on his face, clearly trying to catch up to where she was and why.

Then she yanked the hand back like she’d been burned.

"You’re awake," she said, voice rough with sleep, scrambling upright in the chair with all the dignity of someone pretending they hadn’t just been caught doing something deeply incriminating. "Good. That’s good. How do you feel? Does your head hurt? Is the fever..."

"Sienna."

"What?"

"You fell asleep touching my face."

"I was checking your temperature."

"With your whole hand."

"That’s how you check a temperature."

"Is it?"

"Shut up," Sienna said, color rising in her cheeks despite the flat command in her voice, and Viktor’s bullet wound, fever, near-death experience, and all felt something in his chest do something distinctly unhelpful at the sight of it.

"I’m not complaining," he said, quieter now, the teasing edge softening into something more deliberate. "For the record."

Sienna busied herself adjusting the blanket that didn’t need adjusting, refusing to meet his eyes. "Don’t get used to it. I told you, I just need you alive long enough to get out of here. That’s all this was."

"Mm." Viktor watched her, unconvinced, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who’d been shot twelve hours ago.

"And yet you’re the one who stayed in that chair all night instead of locking yourself in your room like you usually do."

"I fell asleep. It’s not a confession."

"Didn’t say it was."

"You’re smiling like it is."

"Can’t help it," Viktor said, eyes drifting shut again, exhaustion pulling at him despite himself. "You’re cute when you’re lying to yourself."

"I am not..." Sienna started, indignant, but he was already drifting back under, the ghost of that infuriating smile still tugging at his mouth even in sleep.

She sat there a long moment, glaring at a man who couldn’t even see her glaring, before finally exhaling and sinking back into the chair.

Cute, she thought bitterly. He calls me cute after nearly bleeding out on my hands. Unbelievable.

She didn’t move the chair, though. Not an inch.

—-

The doctor had only just stepped out when Sienna noticed Viktor watching her with that particular, unbearable patience of a man who’d clearly been awake far longer than he was letting on.

"How long have you been awake?" she asked, setting down the tray she’d been pretending to organize, mostly so she’d have something to do with her hands.