Viktor pulled the car over. Got out.
The rain received him immediately and completely, cold, heavy, the kind of summer downpour that soaks through everything in seconds and doesn’t apologize for it.
He stood on the wet pavement with both hands braced on the roof of the car and looked at nothing in particular for a long moment.
His body was not cooperating with his principles.
He ran a hand through his hair. Soaking now. Rain running down the back of his collar, down his jaw, plastering his shirt to his shoulders. He stood in it and let it do its work.
Not like this, he told himself. Never like this.
Viktor Kessler had done many things in his life that he would not apologize for. He had made decisions that other men would lose sleep over, and slept fine.
He had built an empire on a foundation that polite society preferred not to examine too closely and had no particular feelings about their discomfort.
But there were lines. He had two. He’d had them since he was fifteen years old, and neither of them had ever moved.
He stood in the rain until his breathing was his own again. Then he got back in the car.
Sienna had stilled slightly, the restless movement quieter now, her head resting against the window. He reached across her, carefully, not touching anything he didn’t need to, and pulled the seatbelt across her body. Buckled it.
Then he took the excess length of the belt and looped it gently around her wrists, where they rested in her lap.
Not tight. Not punishing. Just enough.
She looked down at her hands. Then up at him. Her eyes were glassy but somewhere behind the drug, something flickered. Something that was still Sienna in there, watching.
He held her gaze for exactly a moment. Then he picked up his phone. One contact. Two rings.
"Get the priest." His voice was even. Decided. The voice of a man who had made up his mind somewhere between the seventh-floor apartment and a rain-soaked stretch of road and wasn’t going back. "Draft the contract." A pause. "The wedding is in the morning."
He ended the call. Sat for a moment in the drumming rain with his wet hands on the wheel.
He was not a man who had ever wanted to do things correctly. Correctly had never been available to him, not at fifteen, not at twenty, not now. He had taken what he needed and protected what was his and let the world form its opinions from a safe distance.
But sitting in this car with this girl in a wedding dress with her hands loosely bound in a seatbelt because he refused to let anything happen to her that she hadn’t chosen.
He wanted, for reasons he wasn’t prepared to examine, to do this right. He pulled back onto the road.
Beside him, Sienna had gone still at last. The drug was pulling her under properly now, her breathing evened out, her head tipping slowly against the window.
The white dress pooled around her in the dark of the car. The rain kept coming. "I have to run," she murmured, barely audible.
Viktor glanced at her. "I will make sure you don’t try again," he said quietly. She was already asleep.
He drove through the rain with the city falling away behind them and the priest’s number already dialing, and he did not examine too closely why the thought of her running, the white dress, the ivory heels, the absolute refusal to be anyone’s anything, made him want to give her a reason to stay.
He was Viktor Kessler. He had never needed reasons before. She was making him need them.
The ceiling again.
Sienna stared at it for a long moment before she let herself fully arrive in the morning, before she let the familiar weight of where she was settle back onto her chest.
Same coffered ceiling. Same obscene square footage. Same quality of light coming through the curtains that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe.
Viktor’s bed. She sat up slowly. Looked down at herself. Black silk. A nightgown, thin-strapped and expensive, that she had absolutely not put on herself.
The wedding dress was gone, folded over the chair in the corner with the careful precision of someone who had handled it deliberately, respectfully.
She looked at the dress. Looked at the bed. Looked at the space beside her that was undisturbed, unslept in, the pillow still perfectly arranged.
He didn’t touch me.
The thought arrived plainly, without the complicated feelings that followed immediately behind it. She sat with it for a moment. Turned it over.
She had been drugged. Barely conscious. Practically delivered to him wrapped in white silk, and she had apparently spent the night alone in his bed while he, what? Slept somewhere else? Didn’t sleep? Sat in a chair somewhere being enigmatic?
What does he actually want?
Then the other memories arrived. Less comfortable ones. Her own hand on his arm in the car. Her own voice saying make me forget my name with absolutely zero input from her better judgment. She pressed both palms flat against her face and held them there for three full seconds.
That was the drug, she told herself firmly. That was entirely the drug. She moved her hands. Stared at the ceiling. It was the drug.
And then Simon. And Lily. Both arriving in her chest at once like they’d been waiting politely in a queue. Two years. Two years of Simon’s hand in hers and his voice saying my love and the comfortable, ordinary safety of a person who knew your coffee order and your worst habits and apparently also your best friend.
She pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth and breathed through it. Later. She could be devastated later. She had survived yesterday. She would survive today.
Which brought her to Aria.
The thought surfaced quietly, carefully, the way good ideas do when your brain has been working on them while the rest of you was sleeping. Aria Cross. The name settled like a key in a lock.
They had grown up two streets apart. Aria family is old money, old power, old connections that run through this city like roots under concrete. Aria, who had once told Sienna over cheap coffee that if she ever needed anything, anything, Sienna, I mean it, she only had to ask.
She had one friend left. One card. I just need to get to her.
She was still working out the geography of that, the how, the when, the particular shape of whatever gap in Viktor’s perimeter she hadn’t found yet, when the knock came.