Sienna sat very still for a moment and worked on getting her breathing back to a normal pace and absolutely did not touch her own lips.
"Fine." She set both hands flat on the table. Composed herself. "Now that we are married..." she put the word down like a legal document, "... I want to establish some rules."
He looked at her with polite attention. The look of a man prepared to be entertained.
"No sex." She held up one finger. Steady. "Separate rooms." Another finger. "And..." she gestured vaguely at the air between them, "... no more of that."
Viktor looked at her for a long moment.
Then he smiled. Slow. The dangerous kind that started at the corner of his mouth and went nowhere fast.
"Are you sure about that?"
"Completely."
"What if..." the smile deepened fractionally, ".. you’re the one asking for it?"
"I will never.."
The last word dissolved somewhere in her throat. She pressed her lips together, looked at the table, and refused to acknowledge what his expression was currently doing.
"I’ll be waiting," Viktor said pleasantly, "for never." He snapped his fingers.
The sound was small. The effect was not.
Five maids appeared, moving with the practiced efficiency of a choreographed sequence, carrying bags, boxes, and cases. Jewelry catches the morning light. Clothes in colors that cost more than they had any right to. And a card, matte black, slid across the table toward her like a final point in an argument.
"Limited," Viktor said. "Relatively speaking."
Sienna looked at the card. At the bags. At the quiet parade of beautiful, expensive things arranged in front of her like a peace offering from a country she was still at war with.
"You can’t buy me." She pushed the card back an inch. Looked at him directly. "I’m not going to fall for you because of material things."
Viktor rose from his chair. Came around the table with that slow, inevitable walk that covered distance without appearing to hurry. Stopped close. Always close. She was beginning to think proximity was his primary language.
"We have a whole lifetime for that, baby girl." His eyes moved over her face in that careful, cataloguing way. "The falling will happen all on its own."
Before she could produce a response to that, and she was working on one, a good one, he continued.
"Tomorrow night. There’s a gala." He straightened slightly. Back to business. The switch was instantaneous, like a light going off in one room and on in another.
"I’ll be introducing you. As my wife." His eyes moved down the green silk and back up. "I want you to look your best. The bags stay."
Then Marco appeared at his elbow. Silent. Precise. He leaned close and said something in Viktor’s ear that took approximately four seconds to deliver.
Whatever it was, four seconds was all it needed. Viktor’s face changed.
Not dramatically. Not the way other men’s faces changed, no color rising, no jaw dropping. Just a single degree of shift, like a temperature dropping in a room before anyone’s skin has registered it. The stillness is becoming a different kind of stillness entirely.
His eyes found Sienna’s.
"Don’t let me down tomorrow, Mrs. Kessler." He said it quietly. Final. And then he turned and walked toward the office with Marco at his heels, and the door closed behind them both without a sound.
Sienna sat at the long table in the sudden quiet.
The maids had retreated. The bags and boxes remained, arranged along the wall like a very luxurious evidence trail. The card still sat on the table. She looked at it. Looked at the office door.
Something was wrong.
She’d learned to read rooms growing up and had developed it the way children in uncertain homes develop all their sharpest skills, out of pure necessity. And this room, two minutes ago, had changed temperature.
Marco’s four seconds had done something to Viktor’s face that she hadn’t seen before. Not anger. Not quite. Something underneath anger. The foundation of it.
Trouble, she thought.
And then, immediately after. Distracted.
She looked at the office door. In the hallway beyond the dining room. At the windows where the morning light was doing nothing wrong.
Viktor Kessler had just walked away from his wife for the first time since she’d signed the contract.
She picked up the black card from the table. Turned it over once. Set it back down.
He said the mansion, she thought carefully. He said for now, the mansion. Which meant the perimeter. Which meant walls and gates and men at doors.
But walls had schedules. Gates had shift changes.
And a gala tomorrow meant preparation, caterers, staff, outside vendors, vehicles coming and going, the organized chaos of an event that needed to look perfect for an audience.
Chaos, Sienna thought, has gaps. She reached out and picked the card back up. Held it between two fingers.
Play nice, she reminded herself. Looks like you’re settling. Looks like the card and the clothes are working. Looks like Mrs. Kessler.
She looked at the office door one more time. Then she looked at the bags along the wall with entirely new interest.
She needed to look her best tomorrow, he’d said. Sienna Vale intended to look absolutely, breathtakingly, unforgettably her best.
She also intended not to be there by midnight. One thing at a time.
The study smelled like money and smoke.
Not metaphorically. Literally, the sharp green of fresh bills cycling through the counting machine mixed with the slow curl from Viktor’s cigarette, two smells that had shared this room for so long they had become one thing.
The machine ran its steady rhythm. Numbers climbed on the display.
Viktor stood at the window. Smoking. Watching the grounds below with the particular quality of attention that never fully switches off.
"Did you deal with him?" Not a question.
"Yes, boss." Marco stood at the door. Still. Reliable as a wall. Viktor drew on the cigarette. Exhaled slowly.
"And my half-brother." He turned the cigarette between his fingers. "My stepmother. When did they arrive?"
"Last night." A pause that had something inside it. "They seem to know something, boss."