Chapter 4
VIKTOR
Seven Months Ago
The airport lounge is all muted light and money. Dark leather, smoked glass, low voices kept carefully polite. I sit near the window with Yuri across from me, a cut-crystal glass untouched at my elbow, and try not to think about the three months I have just wasted.
We were supposed to close a shipping agreement in Piraeus by last night.
Two cargo lines, three shell companies, and a discreet route for moving weapons through the Balkans without anyone asking questions that would become inconvenient later.
Clean on paper. Profitable in practice. The Greeks wanted my protection, my ports, my men keeping customs inspectors blind and rival crews nervous.
In return, I wanted the route, the percentages, and their silence.
Simple. Until one of them got nervous.
Nervous men are the ruin of good business. They sweat, they stall, they start talking about caution and timing and exposure like those words can save them from the fact that they’ve already come too close to me to back away safely.
It’s a waste of my time, and I don’t forgive that easily.
I rub my thumb over the inside of my arm, more out of habit than pain.
The wound is healing, but not quietly. A week ago, someone decided to test his luck and almost managed to put a bullet through me.
He missed. Barely. The graze is hidden under a bandage and a dark sweater, but every so often it reminds me it’s there.
Yuri notices the movement, of course. He notices everything.
“You should have canceled the trip,” he says, once we’re seated.
I look at him over the rim of my glass. “And reward incompetence?”
He snorts. “I was talking about your arm.”
“My arm will survive.”
“That’s not the point.”
I don’t answer. The lounge is quiet, expensive, full of people pretending not to look at me while very obviously looking at me. I’ve long since gotten used to that. Men assess. Women stare and then pretend they didn’t. It’s the usual dance.
Yuri drinks his coffee and watches me with the same tired patience he’s had for years.
“You’re in a worse mood than usual,” he says.
“The deal collapsed.”
“It was weak.”
“The men were weak.”
He gives me a look that says there isn’t much difference. “I’ve got news from my sources that Voronin was the reason the men got spooked.”
“No shit,” I say.
Yuri raises a brow. “You don’t look surprised.”
I rub the bridge of my nose. “He’s been a pain in my ass for years, little surprises me nowadays.” Mikhail Voronin is unpredictable, but he is a force to be reckoned with.
I get a text from Anna: Heard your son is dating some heiress now?
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. I don’t bother replying to her.
I lean back in the chair and glance toward the windows.
Beyond the windows, rain moves in silver lines over the tarmac.
The jet waits under the dull glow of the runway lights, sleek and still, while ground crews pass beneath it in bright jackets.
Inside, the lounge hums on around us, elegant and forgettable.
I know what I look like reflected in the darkened glass.
A man old enough to unsettle people. Dark hair touched at the temples with silver. A face made harder by years instead of softened by them. Broad shoulders under a cashmere coat, hands that look exactly like what they are capable of. Age has done me favors.
“We board in five,” Yuri says.
I rise, button my coat, and pick up my phone. The room barely changes as we walk out, but eyes follow us just the same. They always do. Some men recognize power and resent it on sight. Some women recognize it and look a little too long before remembering themselves.
We pass through the private doors and into the corridor leading toward the gate.
That’s where I see her.
She stands a little apart from everyone else, near the long stretch of glass overlooking the runway, one hand wrapped around the handle of her carry-on, the other curled around a paper cup she’s forgotten to drink from.
Her coat hangs open over a soft sweater and fitted pants, nothing dramatic, nothing designed to be seen, and still she catches my eye so completely that I slow without meaning to.
She looks like she’s wandered into the wrong place by mistake. A lost bird in a room full of predators.
Young, but not girlish. Soft in all the places men dream about in private and deny in public.
Dark hair falling over one shoulder. Big eyes scanning the terminal with that careful, guarded look some women have, the look of someone used to taking the measure of a room before the room can take the measure of her.
Her mouth is full, a little flushed, and there’s something about the curve of her body that makes the whole polished world around her seem bloodless by comparison.
She looks warm. Alive. A woman made of softness and nerves and quiet beauty, standing under cold airport lights with rain behind her, as if she doesn’t know every man with a pulse would turn to look twice.
Then she glances up.
Our eyes meet.
For one brief second she freezes, and something flickers over her face. Surprise, maybe. Or the simple awareness of being caught looking at a man who is too old, too dangerous, too much.
I hold her gaze a moment longer than I should.
Then I look away.
Because she’s young enough to make restraint necessary. Because she’s a stranger. Because wanting to know how she would sound with my hand around the back of her neck is not a thought I need to indulge in the middle of an airport.
“Viktor.”
Yuri is already moving. I follow him toward the gate. But I feel her at my back all the same, like a question I have no business asking and no interest in forgetting.
Present Day
And now she is here.
Not under airport lights. Not half-hidden behind glass and rain. Not a passing temptation I can dismiss on principle and revisit later in memory.
Here. In front of me.
Her eyes are wide. Not soft. Not dreamy. Shocked. Hurt. Furious. I watch the recognition hit her in real time, see it move across her face like lightning under skin, and something low in my body answers before my mind does.
For a moment, the room disappears.
I see her as she is now, flushed and furious and hurt, a binder clutched to her chest like armor, her coat open over the soft lines of her body.
I see the strain in her face, the effort it takes to keep herself upright while a room full of people watches.
And then, because memory is a vicious thing, I see something else layered over her all at once.
Her on the plane, head tipped back, mouth open on a gasp. My hand spreading her thighs wider while I fuck into her slow and deep, making her shake for me, making her take it while the cabin trembles around us.
I shut the memory down at once.
Not here. Not now. I have just walked into my son’s rehearsal dinner to find her being humiliated in front of a room full of guests, and whatever else this is, whatever she was to me for those hours in the air, it can wait.
My voice lands flat and cold across the table.
“That’s enough.”
Silence falls so quickly it feels unnatural.
Ethan turns first, then stills when he sees me. “F-Father,” he says.
I take another step into the room and look from him to Camille, then to the place card, then back to Sienna. Her fingers are white around the binder. She’s holding herself together by force, and the sight of that does something ugly to my temper.
“What exactly,” I say, “is going on here?”
No one answers.
Camille opens her mouth, thinks better of it, then says, “There was a problem with the seating.”
I don’t look at her. “Was there?”
Ethan clears his throat. “It’s handled.”
I let my gaze settle on him. “No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
His jaw tightens.
The room has gone still in the way rooms do when people realize something entertaining has turned dangerous and they are no longer sure which side of it they are standing on.
I stop beside the table. “Apologize to her.”
Ethan blinks. “What?” The word comes out thin, as if he’s buying time.
I don’t give him any. “Apologize,” I repeat. “Now.”
Camille says, a little too quickly, “Viktor, really, this is just a misunderstanding.”
I turn my head and look at her.
That’s all it takes. She falls silent.
Then I look back at my son. “You do not insult a woman in public,” I say. “And you do not stand there smiling while other people do it for you.”
His face hardens. Embarrassment, resentment, the first stirrings of anger. None of it interests me.
“Father, I didn’t—”
“You did.”
A beat passes.
Then another.
I can feel every eye in the room moving between us, but I keep mine on Ethan.
“Apologize to her,” I say again, more quietly now, which makes it land harder. “Before I forget you’re my son.”
He swallows.
Good. He knows that tone. He grew up with it. He knows exactly how little patience sits behind it, and exactly how much worse this becomes for him if he decides to test me in front of witnesses.
“Sienna,” he says stiffly, not looking at her for long, “I apologize.”
It’s weak. Forced. Worthless in any private room. But here, in front of everyone, it will do for the moment.
Only then do I let myself turn back to her.
She’s still staring at me. Shock. Hurt. Recognition. Something hotter beneath all of it. Her lips part slightly, like she’s about to speak and has forgotten how. And God help me, I remember exactly what that mouth feels like under mine, exactly what it sounds like when I make it open for me.