Chapter 70: The offer

"What?" Sienna asked, sitting up straighter now, her sleep fading fast, replaced by something sharper, something more alert. "Tell me."

"I want you to stay inside," Viktor said. "In this room. Today. Lock the door, and don’t come out." He gestured toward the small table near the window, where a covered plate sat waiting. "I made you lunch. It’s right there, until I come back. Don’t even come downstairs."

He leaned forward slightly, his eyes searching hers, as if trying to make sure the words were landing the way he meant them to.

"I promise. Only for today. So I can wipe out all those traitors." He held her gaze. "Can you do that for me?"

Sienna looked at him for a long moment before she answered. Her mind was already moving fast, piecing things together, the way it always did whenever Viktor gave her half of a story and expected her to be satisfied with it.

"What other choice do I have," she said slowly. "Killing Don Amel and Lion Morozov was certainly going to bring consequences. And now I’m sure they will want me dead."

Viktor chuckled, low and quiet, the sound rumbling out of him like it was nothing at all, like the idea of men wanting him dead was something small and almost funny to him.

"They had it coming," he said. "I have always wanted to get rid of them. I don’t like how they do business." He shook his head slowly, and for a second, something colder passed behind his eyes, something Sienna had learned to recognize by now. "Trust me. This has nothing to do with you."

Sienna wanted to believe him. That was the strange part. Some small, foolish piece of her, the same piece that had noticed how gentle his hand had felt against her cheek only moments ago, wanted to believe that she really was safe inside this room, that none of this danger could reach her, that Viktor would really come back through that door once it was all over.

But she had learned, too many times now, that believing Viktor came with a cost. That trusting him was never as simple as he made it sound.

Still, she nodded.

"Fine," she said. "I’ll stay."

Viktor’s face softened, just slightly, and he reached out one more time, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear with a gentleness that did not match the man Marcus and Manuel spoke of downstairs, the man who wiped out men like Don Amel and Lion Morozov without blinking.

"Good," he said quietly. He stood, straightening his jacket, and walked toward the door. Before he left, he turned back one last time. "Lock it behind me."

"Be safe," Sienna said.

Viktor smiled, that small, unreadable smile of his, and then he walked out, closing the door softly behind him. Sienna heard his footsteps grow fainter down the hallway, and then nothing at all.

She sat on the bed for a while after that, not moving, just listening to the silence of the house settle around her.

The plate of food sat untouched on the table by the window, the smell of it drifting toward her every so often, but she had no interest in eating.

Her mind was too full, too busy turning over everything Viktor had told her, and everything he had not.

Finally, she reached for her laptop.

She pulled it onto her lap and opened it slowly, the small hum of it waking up filling the quiet room. If Viktor was not going to tell her everything, then she would find out for herself.

That was the only way she knew how to survive in a house like this, in a life like this. Information was the only weapon she had that no one could take from her.

She spent hours like that, hunched over the screen, digging through anything she could find about the council Viktor had mentioned. Names. Faces. Old records buried under layers of nothing, meant to keep people like her from ever finding them.

She needed leverage. If those men came for her the way Viktor seemed to think they might, she was not going to be caught with empty hands.

It was slow work at first. Frustrating. But she was a hacker, one who could slide into almost any system in the world without leaving so much as a footprint behind.

Sienna had used done this before. Within an hour of seaching, small pieces of information began to trickle in. A financial record here. A hidden property there. A name connected to a name connected to another name, until slowly, carefully, a picture began to form.

She did not know how long she had been sitting there. The light outside had shifted, the sun climbing higher, then beginning its long slow slide toward afternoon.

She had lost track of time completely, the way she always did when she was working, when the rest of the world fell away and it was just her and the screen and the quiet clicking of keys.

Then she heard it.

The sound of a key turning in the lock.

Sienna’s head snapped up. For one small, hopeful second, she thought it might be Viktor coming back early. But the door opened slowly, and the person standing there was not Viktor at all.

It was Elena.

Behind her stood Aliya, and behind Aliya, Marcel. Marcel’s face still carried faint bruises along one side, dark and yellowing at the edges, the kind of bruises that come from something heavy, something angry.

Sienna did not need to ask what had put them there. She already knew. It must have been whatever Viktor had done to him down in the dungeon.

Sienna’s stomach dropped.

Three of them. All at once. And Viktor was not here.

She thought fast, the way she always did when danger walked into a room uninvited. Fighting all three of them together was not an option, not with the door closed behind them, not with no one around to hear if things went wrong.

She had seen enough, and heard enough, about what people in this house were capable of when they wanted someone gone.

So she said nothing.