All of them at once. The scramble was almost architectural, chairs, bodies, the slap of cards hitting the floor that nobody stopped to pick up, the collective sound of large men making themselves very small and very fast. The injured one was helped or dragged, the distinction blurred toward the door by two others who had the good sense to look at nothing except the exit.
In eleven seconds, the hall was empty. The smoke lingered. It had nowhere to go. Viktor turned.
Sienna was still standing exactly where she’d been, spine straight, chin up, white dress and ivory heels and the posture of a woman who had decided a while ago that the world was not going to see her flinch.
She’d held it through the scramble of bodies and the sound of bone against bone and seven men evaporating from a room as they’d never existed. She was holding it now.
He looked at her, not the way his men had looked, which was inventory, which was calculation, but something slower and more deliberate. Like he was reading something she hadn’t meant to leave on the surface.
"No one touches you again," Viktor said. His voice had returned to its natural register, low, even, the verbal sound of deep water.
"Not without consequence." Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. "Not unless it’s me." Sienna opened her mouth, closed it and tried again.
"Thank you." The words came out before she could stop it, and as soon as they left her mouth she hated herself a little for meaning them.
She had told herself she could hold it together. She’d built the architecture of it this morning the dress, the heels, the chin, the walk constructed herself into something that could survive this house and the men in it and the impossible. She’d told herself she was Sienna Vale and Sienna Vale did not shatter.
But the adrenaline was leaving now. She could feel it going, like water draining from a bath, and what it left behind was a cold and shaking girl and a very long way from home.
Viktor was still looking at her. Then he crossed the space between them in three steps, unhurried, and before she could think, before she could rebuild whatever expression she’d been wearing, his hand came up to her jaw.
Tilted her face. Carefully but precisely. The same hands that had just rearranged a man’s face against a table now held her like something that might break if he wasn’t paying attention.
And then he kissed her. It was a slow, deliberate kiss. Almost... almost soft.
Sienna went rigid from her heels to her hairline. Her hands came up against his chest and pushed, she twisted, pulled back, turned her face away, and kept pulling until there was air between them, until his hands weren’t on her anymore, until she could breathe something that wasn’t him.
She put three feet between them in half a second. He let her.
Stood there, watching her with that expression she couldn’t read. Sienna pressed her fingers to her mouth once, then forced her hand back down to her side.
"Don’t," she said. At that moment, that was the only word that came to mind. Something moved in his eyes, and Sienna couldn’t name it.
And then Viktor Kessler bent at the waist, wrapped one arm around her thighs, and stood back up with Sienna folded over his shoulder like a coat he’d picked off the floor.
The world inverted, the marble floor his back. Her heels somewhere up. "What ..." The words left her in a rush. "What are you doing?! Put me down! PUT ME DOWN!"
She pushed against his back then pushed again. He moved through the hallway with the unhurried certainty of a man who had decided something and considered the matter closed. Her fists against his shoulder blades were no more persuasive than rain against a window.
"You put me down RIGHT NOW...." He said nothing. He walked like she weighed nothing. Like this was perfectly reasonable. Like she wasn’t promising, in vivid and escalating detail, exactly what she was going to do to him the moment her feet touched the ground.
The bedroom door had barely registered as open before it swung shut behind them. Viktor dropped her.
Not carelessly, nothing this man did was careless. She was beginning to understand that, but with a deliberate, controlled release that deposited her onto the bed like a decision being made. The mattress received her. The white dress fanned out around her legs. The ivory heels, somehow, were still on her feet.
Before she could move, before she could roll, stand, reach for anything that might constitute a plan, he was already there.
Both hands planted on either side of her head. One knee on the mattress. His weight above her like weather. Like architecture. Like something you couldn’t argue with. Sienna went very still.
Don’t let him see it. Don’t let him see a single..."Trying to run, baby girl." It wasn’t a question. It was the verbal words of someone setting a chess piece down and waiting for you to realize you’d already lost four moves ago.
His voice was low in the way that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with proximity, and right now proximity was the entire problem. She held his gaze. Kept her breathing even through an act of pure, furious will.
"What do you want?" She asked it straight. No tremor. No apology. Her voice landed clean and flat between them like a card on a table.
Viktor looked at her for a moment, that same unreadable study, the lights-off window, and then something at the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one. The memory of one.
"Let’s find out," he said quietly, "how loud you can get." His hand closed around her wrists, gentle and absolute, pressing them above her head into the pillow. "Without the attitude."
His mouth found her neck. Slow and unhurried. Like a man who owned every clock in the building and had turned them all off. Sienna stared at the ceiling. Jaw set. Pulse doing things she had no intention of acknowledging.
"Go on, then." Her voice came out steadier than she deserved credit for. She turned her head away from him, giving him nothing but the sharp line of her profile.
"Isn’t this what you wanted? A toy. Something to play with until it stops being interesting." A beat. "Something to break and toss away."