“So are plenty of dangerous people.”
I turn back to him. “You think she poisoned someone and then cried in my bed?”
“I think,” Yuri says, “that if someone wants to reach you, the most effective route is the one you stop guarding.” He lowers hisvoice. “I’m not saying she did it. I’m saying you can’t remove her from the board because you want her.”
The night goes very still.
There it is. The real accusation.
Not that Sienna is guilty.
That I am compromised.
I let the silence stretch before I answer. “If I thought she was part of it,” I say, “she would not be upstairs.”
Yuri watches me for a second, then nods once. “All right.” He doesn’t sound convinced. Just finished. “That doesn’t mean I stop watching,” he adds.
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”
We stand there for another moment, the house lit behind us, the hedge line dark ahead.
Then I say, “Watch everyone.”
Yuri’s mouth shifts slightly. “Including her.”
I look at him. “Quietly,” I say.
He nods and heads back toward the terrace.
I stay where I am. Because now I have two problems instead of one.
Someone in this wedding party may try to kill me.
And the one woman I don’t want touched by any of it is no longer a woman I can afford to trust blindly.
16
SIENNA
By the timeI get back to my room, I’m too tired to think straight.
That should help. It doesn’t.
I change slowly, wash my face, pin my hair back again because it’s falling out everywhere, and sit on the edge of the bed for a minute staring at nothing. The house is quieter now, but not peaceful. Every sound feels loaded. A door shutting somewhere down the hall. Footsteps overhead. Plumbing in the walls. The kind of noises that make an old place feel like it’s listening.
I keep thinking about Viktor.
That is also not helping.
At some point I lie down without really deciding to, one hand over my eyes, and tell myself I’m not moving again tonight unless the building catches fire.
Then there’s a knock.
I sit up at once.
It comes again, soft but deliberate.
For one stupid second I assume it’s him. Viktor, back with whatever he didn’t want to say earlier. Viktor, ignoring common sense and propriety because apparently both of those are optional when he wants something.
