Viktor stood up. He opened the file again. Turned it around.
And then he began to read.
"Your first kiss was at nineteen." His voice was conversational. Unhurried. "A boy named Laric. You regretted it approximately two minutes later." He turned a page.
"You were adopted. Your relationship with your adoptive family has been ..." a slight pause,
"....complicated, at best. You hate peanuts." He looked up briefly.
"You like flowers. Chocolate. Ice cream, specifically the kind with the ripple through the middle." He closed the file.
"You have two friends. One is currently in a very compromising situation with your former boyfriend." He began walking toward her. Slowly. "And the other is on a trip."
Sienna stepped back. He kept coming.
"You are ..." he continued, something in his voice dropping half a register, "... currently also experiencing a chest condition your doctor has been asking you to take seriously for the last eight months and you have not made a single follow-up appointment."
She stepped back again. Hit the wall. He stopped in front of her. Close. The file held loosely at his side, unnecessary now. His eyes on hers.
"I know everything about you, Sienna." Not gloating. Not cruel. Just true. Which was somehow more unsettling than either. He leaned in, one hand braced on the wall beside her head. "Everything."
He reeled off the rest without breaking eye contact. Her dress size. Her shoe size. The particular height she’d been since she was sixteen. Her bra size, which she was absolutely not going to react to she refused, she would take that to her grave.
"Stop..." She pushed against his chest. He was immovable. She pushed again anyway. "Let me..."
His hand found her waist. Gently. Pulled her back to center. "Yes, Sienna." The whisper arrived just below her ear.
"You are stuck with me. And you are mine." He stepped back... giving her air, giving her space, as if he hadn’t just had her cornered against a wall and gestured toward the table. "Sign."
She stood there for a moment. Looked at the priest. The gun. The document.
Looked at Viktor, standing with his hands loose at his sides and his face composed and his mind already three moves ahead of wherever she thought she was.
Fine.
She walked to the table. Picked up the pen. The nib hovered over the line for one breath, two. She signed.
Then she set the pen down, turned around, and looked him dead in the eye.
"I will marry you." Clear. Decided. The voice of a woman who has chosen her battlefield.
"But we do this my way." She lifted her chin. "The moment the police stop asking questions about what happened in that library, the moment it’s safe for both of us, you let me go. Those are my terms."
The room was silent.
Marco, behind Viktor, had gone very still in the way of a man witnessing something he has never witnessed before and isn’t sure he believes.
Viktor looked at her.
Something happened on his face. It was brief and unguarded and gone before she could fully catch it, but she caught the edge of it. The tail end of something that looked, impossibly, like it might have been delight.
He crossed the room.
Stopped in front of her. Close again, always close, always inside the distance that made breathing a conscious decision.
His hands found her waist and pulled her toward him in one slow, deliberate motion.
"No one," he said quietly, "has ever bargained with me before."
"There’s a first time for everything."
His lips were at her ear. His voice dropped to something that was only for her, that the priest and Marco and the man with the gun were not meant to hear and couldn’t have if they’d tried.
"No one has ever come this close to me," he said, "and wanted to leave." His hand spread warm at the small of her back. "Very soon, Sienna very soon you won’t want to."
She felt his words more than heard them.
"And then you will understand." The softest certainty. The most dangerous kind. "That I own every bit of you."
Sienna stood inside the circle of his arms in the green silk dress with a signed marriage contract on the table behind her, and the morning light falling through the tall windows, and the priest quietly relieved that no one had been shot.
She did not lean in. She did not step back.
She stood exactly where she was and looked straight ahead and thought about Aria Cross and the gap she hadn’t found yet, and the fact that owned was a word that required the other person’s agreement to mean anything at all.
She hadn’t agreed. She’d signed a piece of paper.
Those, she had decided, were two completely different things. The pen was still on the table. Her name was on the document.
And somewhere in Viktor Kessler’s chest, in a place he hadn’t opened for anyone in a very long time, something that had been quiet for years turned over once.
Like something waking up. He didn’t examine it. Not yet.
The priest’s voice filled the hall like water filling a glass, steady, practiced, the Latin blessing of a man who had married people in churches and gardens and hotel lobbies and had apparently now added mafia hallways at gunpoint to his professional repertoire. He made the sign of the cross. Said the words. Closed his bible.
And just like that. Sienna Vale was married. To Viktor Kessler. In his hallway. In a green silk dress.
With Marco as the witness and a man with a gun as the other.
She stared at the priest’s retreating back as he was quietly escorted out and thought about how this was not how she had imagined her wedding day as a child, and how life had a genuinely terrible sense of humor.
"Now that I’m your wife..." she turned, and put the word down between them like something with weight, something she intended to pick up and use,
" and not a prisoner." She held his gaze. "I want my phone back. My laptop is in my apartment. And free access to move around."
Viktor looked at her.