The words settle into my chest like something cold and deliberate.
I lean back on the couch, crossing my ink-stained fingers behind my head, arranging my body into a posture of calm I don’t feel. If I look unbothered long enough, maybe the reality will follow.
“Who is she?” I ask.
I expect a name that means nothing. Some Bratva daughter from another city. An oligarch’s heiress with manicured nails and hollow eyes. A woman raised to smile through negotiations and disappear once the ink dries.
“Sienna,” he says. “Sienna Roth.”
The name hits me like a fracture I never set.
It detonates inside my skull like a buried land mine someone stepped on.
For one long, suffocating moment, I forget how to breathe.
That name—
That voice—
That mouth—
That fire—
That night—
It all slams into me so violently it feels like a punch to the chest.
Sienna Roth.
I haven’t spoken her name in five years. I haven’t allowed myself to think about it. Haven’t permitted the memory to surface—the copper-red hair spilling down her bare back, the way her lips trembled when desire overtook her, the laugh that melted into a moan she tried and failed to swallow against my throat.
I buried her like a sin.
And now she’s back.
Not as a memory.
Not as a consequence.
Not as a regret.
But as my bride.
A bitter taste crawls up my throat.
I drop my gaze to the half-finished sketch a few feet away, desperate for something solid, something real, something that isn’t her name echoing in my head like a curse.
That’s when I realize it.
What I’ve been drawing all along.
It’s her.
Even when I didn’t know it yet.
The charcoal lines blur as my vision shifts, the abstraction snapping into focus. Her silhouette. Her profile. The curve of her mouth—the smile I once coaxed out of her before I betrayed her with a ruthlessness she never saw coming.
My fingers curl slowly, nails biting into my skin.
