She doesn’t step back.
She doesn’t step forward either.
She just looks at me—measuring, furious, intrigued despite herself.
And in that moment, I know one thing with absolute certainty:
Sienna Roth isn’t afraid of me.
Which means this is going to be far more interesting than I anticipated.
Chapter 4 – Sienna
When Sebastian Rusnak said he doesn’t take no for an answer, he wasn’t joking.
After the art evening, he starts to show up everywhere—always impeccably timed, always polite, always asking the same question as if repetition might soften it.
“Just one date.”
I refuse.
Every time.
At first, it’s almost amusing. A coincidence, I tell myself. New York is small for people who move in the same circles. Art openings overlap. Donors attend the same dinners. Critics and artists inevitably collide.
But then it stops feeling like coincidence.
He’s at the café where I stop for espresso before work, standing at the counter like he belongs there, black coat draped over one arm, eyes lifting the moment I walk in.
He’s at the gallery in Chelsea, where I’m meant to preview a private showing—already mid-conversation with the curator, as if he’s been there all along.
He’s at a charity auction I didn’t even RSVP to, leaning casually against a marble pillar, watching me the way people watch storms roll in from the horizon.
Everywhere I turn, he’s there.
Always calm.
Always controlled.
Never crossing a line, just standing close enough to remind me that he exists.
“Dinner,” he says one evening as we end up side by side at a benefit. “I promise I won’t talk about art.”
“No,” I reply, without missing a beat.
He smiles, unbothered. “Tomorrow, then.”
I don’t even dignify that with an answer.
After the letters, I’m not new to his…tendencies. I know what this is. I know what it looks like from the outside. I know I could report it—to the police, to my family, to someone who would make it stop swiftly and decisively.
I don’t.
And that truth sits heavy in my chest.
Deep down, in a place I don’t examine too closely because I don’t like what it says about me, I like the attention.
I like the way he watches me—not openly hungry, not crude, but intent. Focused. As if I’m a problem he’s decided to solve. As if my existence has disrupted the clean order of his world.
