Except it wasn’t really a knock. It was the sound of knuckles making brief, uninterested contact with an already-opening door, the knock of someone who considered the gesture a courtesy they were barely extending.
A girl in a black and white uniform that suggested staff but worn with the energy of someone who found the whole arrangement mildly beneath them.
She was holding a dress. Long, silk, the deep green of something expensive. Her chin was up. Her expression had already decided it wasn’t going to be interested in whatever Sienna’s response was.
"The boss wants you downstairs." She set the dress over the door hook. "Right now."
Sienna opened her mouth. The girl had already turned and was walking away, heels precise against the marble, the door swinging almost closed behind her.
Sienna stared at the empty doorway.
"Good morning to you, too," she said, to no one. She looked at the dress. Looked at the door. "As if I want to be here."
Sienna got up anyway and took a quick bath.
The dress slipped on, and she stood in front of the mirror and performed the same small humiliation she had performed yesterday and the day before, hating how perfectly it fit, hating whoever had chosen it, hating most of all the part of her that looked in the mirror and saw something other than a prisoner.
She smoothed the front of it. Lifted her chin. Aria Cross, she thought, like a compass point. I just need to get to Aria.
One more day. One more opportunity. There’s always a gap somewhere. She stepped out of the room.
The house was quieter in the morning than it had been yesterday. No card game. No smoke. No chorus of male voices saying things she was supposed to pretend she hadn’t heard. Just the grand, indifferent architecture of too much space and the sound of her own footsteps descending the stairs.
She smelled coffee before she saw anything.
And something else. Food, real food, the kind that arrives with warmth and effort, drifting from somewhere to the left of the main hall.
Her stomach made its opinion known immediately. Not again, she thought. I am not being betrayed by my own stomach two days in a row.
She followed the smell anyway because she needed to eat. Because she needed energy. Because somewhere across this city, Aria Cross resources, and a family that even Viktor Kessler would think twice about crossing.
And because Sienna Vale had learned, in the last forty-eight hours, that surviving required being practical about absolutely everything.
Including breakfast.
She walked into whatever waited for her at the bottom of the stairs with her chin level and her plan already forming, and the green silk dress moving around her legs like it had been made for exactly this.
It probably had. She was choosing not to think about that.
She heard him before she saw him.
Not his voice, just his presence. The particular quality of stillness that preceded Viktor Kessler was the way weather precedes a storm. The kind of stillness that made a room rearrange itself without anyone moving.
Sienna reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped.
He was seated in the high-backed chair like he’d been there for hours, jacket on, coffee steaming at his elbow, one ankle crossed over his knee. Comfortable. Unhurried. The posture of a man who had already decided how this morning was going to end and was simply waiting for everyone else to arrive at the same conclusion.
Marcus stood behind him like a shadow that had learned to wear a suit.
To the left, and this was where Sienna’s eyes snagged and stayed a priest. Old. Uncomfortable. Holding his bible with both hands, the way a man holds something he’s been told to hold and hasn’t been given a reason to put down.
Beside him, a man she didn’t recognize with the build of someone whose job description had never once included the word gentle.
And a gun. Large. Resting with casual visibility against his thigh.
Sienna’s eyes moved from the bible to the gun. The gun to the bible.
Viktor opened the file on the table in front of him. Placed a pen on top of it with the neat precision of a man closing a meeting. Leaned back.
"Come over," he said.
She crossed the room because the alternative was standing at the bottom of the stairs pretending she hadn’t heard him, which would buy her approximately nothing.
"Sign."
She looked at the document. Looked up.
"Sign what?"
"Your choice." He said it the way other men said good morning. Easy. Settled. "Marriage." A brief pause. "Or death."
The room held its breath.
Sienna’s held hers.
Her eyes went to the priest again. To the gun. To the document on the table with its formal language and the blank line at the bottom waiting for her, as if it had been waiting for days.
Seven days. She had been promised seven days.
"I don’t really have a choice." She kept her voice even. Hated herself a little for how much effort that required. "Do I?"
Viktor tilted his head. And for a moment, just a flicker, something almost like amusement moved behind his eyes.
"You could always run." The corner of his mouth. That almost-smile she was beginning to recognize and deeply distrust. "I do enjoy a good chase."
Think. She needed to think. She needed thirty seconds and her brain back and some version of a plan that didn’t end with her name on that document, or the alternative, the man with the gun was apparently there to represent.
"This can’t..." She stopped. Started again. Kept her voice from rising through an act of pure will. "I don’t understand why you’re so determined to do this. To marry me specifically."
She spread her hands. Open. Reasonable. A woman making a sensible argument to an unreasonable man.
"I saw what I saw in that library. I understand why that’s a problem for you. But I am telling you right now... I won’t go to the police. You don’t even know me. You don’t know anything about me. This is..."
Viktor stood up.