She kept her pace exactly the same. Casual. A woman on a morning stroll is enjoying the landscaping. Nothing to see here. Certainly not a brand new wife doing reconnaissance in silk.
Don’t look directly at it, she instructed herself. You’re just walking. You live here. You are a person who lives here and enjoys walking near gates for no reason whatsoever.
She drifted closer. The guards weren’t moving. Nobody was stopping her. Nobody was saying anything at all.
Oh, she thought, with a spike of something electric running up her spine. Oh, this might actually.
She kept walking. Unhurried. Getting closer with every step, close enough now to see the street beyond the iron bars, close enough to clock the gap between the left gate post and the guard’s position, close enough to start doing math she very much wanted to finish.
"Ma’am." She stopped.
Dammit.
She arranged her face into something pleasant, which was genuinely the hardest thing she’d done since signing the marriage contract, and turned around slowly.
"Just looking around," she said brightly. "Beautiful grounds. Really. Whoever does the landscaping...."
She looked up.
Viktor was standing approximately ten feet behind her with both hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who had watched this entire performance from the beginning and had opinions about it.
The morning light caught him in a way that she found deeply inconvenient.
"Trying to run again, Mrs. Kessler." His voice was low and unhurried and landed with the weight of a man who was not remotely surprised. A single eyebrow moved approximately two millimeters upward.
Mrs. Kessler, she thought wildly. He called me Mrs. Kessler. I am Mrs. Kessler. That is my name now. I need a moment.
"Me?" She put a hand to her chest. Opened her eyes wide. Gestured vaguely at the garden, the fountain, the general innocent landscape of a woman simply enjoying her morning. "I was just..."
"Walking," he said.
"Walking," she confirmed.
"Toward the gate."
"The gate is part of the grounds."
"You were three feet from it."
"I like iron." She paused. "Architecturally."
Viktor looked at her for a long moment. Then something happened in his eyes. Brief, quickly suppressed... that looked dangerously close to wanting to laugh.
He crossed the distance between them. Stopped beside her. Looked out at the gate she had almost, almost reached, with the tranquil expression of a man reviewing a chess board.
"You were so close," he said. Almost gently.
"I wasn’t going anywhere."
"You were absolutely going somewhere."
I hate him, she thought. Then, immediately, I don’t hate him. I hate that I don’t hate him. I hate that he almost laughed. I hate the shoulders. I hate the grounds. I hate everything about this morning except the food at breakfast, which was genuinely excellent, and I will take that to my grave.
"Come." He turned back toward the house with the unhurried certainty of a man whose morning was going exactly as expected.
Sienna looked at the gate one last time.
Tomorrow, she told it silently. The gala. Chaos. Gaps.
She turned and followed her husband back toward his beautiful, infuriating, impossibly well-landscaped mansion.
Three feet, she thought, falling into step behind him. I was three feet away.
Next time, she promised herself, I’m wearing flat shoes. The hand at the small of her back was light. Almost polite.
Sienna was not fooled.
"I told you." His voice was even, measured, the voice of a man revisiting a subject he considered unfinished. "There are consequences when you run."
"You can barely call that running." She kept pace beside him, chin up, eyes forward. "You said I could walk around the mansion. I was walking around the mansion. The gate is part of the mansion’s general vicinity."
"Three feet, Sienna."
"I was admiring the ironwork."
"You were calculating the gap between the left post and the guard’s shoulder."
Damn. She kept her face neutral. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"If I had been anyone else," he said, almost conversationally, "you would be in a car right now going somewhere considerably worse than this house."
"Lucky me," she said sweetly.
They walked in silence for a few steps. The mansion loomed ahead, beautiful and enormous and absolutely inescapable, with its maids who hated her and its guards who resented her existence and its counting machines and its cigarette smoke and its...
"And for the record," she said, because she apparently had no self-preservation instinct whatsoever, "if I actually planned to run..." she glanced sideways at him, " you would never catch me."
Viktor stopped walking.
She stopped too. Looked up.
He was looking at her with the expression of a man whose day had just become interesting.
"Really."
"Really." She held his gaze. Steady. Committed to this now. "Today was not a real attempt. Today was reconnaissance. When I actually decide to leave..." she paused for effect, "... you won’t see it coming."
A beat of silence.
"I think," Viktor said slowly, "I need to punish you."
"Oh, fantastic." She threw her hands up. "Go ahead. Lock me in a cage. Have your men beat me up."
"No."
"...drag me through the..."
"No."
"Then what?" She turned to face him fully. "That’s how Viktor Kessler handles people who cross him, isn’t it? I’ve heard the stories. Tie them to a car, drive them through the..."
"Far worse than that," he said. With amusement. Actual, genuine amusement, which was somehow more alarming than the alternatives she’d been listing.
She blinked. "What could possibly be..." His hand closed gently around her wrist.
One step to the left, smooth and unhurried, and suddenly they were in the alcove beside the garden wall out of the eyeline of the guards by the east entrance, the maids who’d been pretending not to watch from the upper window, the general audience of people who worked in this house and had opinions about its new occupant.
Just the wall. And him. And approximately six inches of space between them. Oh no, something in her chest said. Oh absolutely not, said her brain.