She leaned in just slightly then, not enough to be dramatic, just enough to make the warning feel personal. “It won’t end well for you,” she said. “Men like him don’t change because they want something for a night.”
Back in the present, my mouth moves before I can stop it.
“You.”
The woman pauses, the flowers still in her hands.
Her face stays perfectly composed. “I’m sorry?” she says.
I just stare at her.
It’s definitely her. Same voice. Same face. Same cool stillness. Only now she’s acting like she’s never seen me in her life.
“You were on that flight,” I say.
The faintest crease appears between her brows, not enough to look real. “I think you’re mistaken.”
No, I’m not.
Her denial is so smooth it almost makes me doubt myself for half a second, but then I remember the bathroom door, the look on her face, the way she saidhe’s a bad manlike it came from experience instead of gossip.
She knows exactly who I am. She just doesn’t want anyone else to know it.
I lower my voice. “You warned me about him.”
Her eyes flick once down the corridor behind me, checking whether anyone is coming. When she looks back at me, her expression hasn’t changed, but her voice has.
“You really do have me confused with someone else,” she says in a normal voice. Then she steps around me and keeps walking.
I stand there in the corridor, frozen, my binder clutched against my chest, listening to her heels disappear down the stone floor.
What the hell is going on?
7
VIKTOR
Morning arrives tooearly and with far too much structure.
There is, apparently, a breakfast on the south lawn before the wedding party is carted off for photographs, vows, champagne, and whatever other rituals people invent when they have too much money and not enough self-awareness.
I stand at the edge of the terrace with coffee I do not want, a headache I have earned, and a temper made worse by the fact that I slept perhaps three hours.
Not consecutive ones.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Sienna. Her face when she turned and found me in that room. The marks rising on her wrist. The way she saidnotoo quickly when I asked if the baby was mine. The way she kissed me back before that. The way her body fit against mine for that brief, catastrophic minute before everything changed.
I spent the better part of the night irritated with myself.
Not because I want her. That part is uncomplicated. I wanted her the first time I saw her. Wanted her more after the plane. Wanted her last night the second I stepped into that room and found her looking like she was holding herself together out of sheer stubbornness.
No, what irritates me is that I am no closer to understanding her than I was seven months ago. Perhaps less.
A string quartet is already tuning somewhere below. Staff move through the garden with trays and folded napkins and the grim cheerfulness of people paid too well to complain aloud. The lawn has been set with round tables under pale umbrellas, white flowers at the center of each one, silver catching the early light.
Elegant. Expensive. Entirely unnecessary at this hour.
“Still brooding before coffee is finished?”
