Chapter 10 #2
I sit in the chair opposite her before my thoughts get any worse.
She drinks, then lowers the glass and watches me in the quiet that follows.
Something in her face changes. Not much. Just enough that I know she has noticed something.
“What?” I ask.
Her gaze drops to my arm. “You keep favoring that side.”
I hadn’t realized I was.
“It’s nothing.”
She continues to look at me in a way that tells me she doesn’t believe that for a second. Then she leans forward slightly and, before I can think to stop her, reaches for my arm.
Her fingers touch just above the wound.
I flinch. It’s small. Involuntary. There and gone. But she feels it.
Her eyes lift to mine at once. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing serious.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
I should brush it off. Tell her I pulled a muscle, slept badly, walked into a door, any of the half-useful lies men use when they don’t want women worrying over them.
Instead I hear myself say, “Just a wound.”
She goes still. “What kind of wound?”
I look at her.
There are moments when lying becomes more work than truth.
This is one of them. Maybe because she has already seen enough this morning to know my life is not clean.
Maybe because she called a friend and heard the word Bratva and then looked at me as if all the missing pieces had started to move.
Maybe because she’s sitting in my room after nearly being shoved to the floor, carrying a child she still will not name for me, and somehow we are past the point where pretending helps either of us.
So I tell her, “Someone shot me.”
She stares.
The words hang there between us, plain and ugly.
I’m faintly surprised to hear them from my own mouth.
Not because I’m ashamed of what happened.
Because I don’t make a habit of telling women the truth when the truth has bullets in it.
I especially don’t tell them while sitting three feet away from them, watching concern move over their faces as if they have any right to feel it.
And yet there it is.
She sets the water down carefully. “What?”
“Last night,” I add. And you came to me like an angel, and possibly saved my life. But I don’t say this part out loud.
“Someone shot you.” She says it like she’s trying to hear whether it sounds any less insane spoken back to me.
“Yes.”
“Why are you saying that like it’s a normal thing?”
“It’s not normal,” I say. “It is, unfortunately, familiar.”
That doesn’t help. If anything, it makes her look more unsettled.
“You were shot,” she repeats, more quietly this time. “And then you came to a wedding weekend and acted like that was just… background noise?”
“It missed anything important.”
Her eyes move over me, trying to decide whether she should be angry or horrified. “That’s not comforting.”
“No,” I say. “It rarely is.”
She sits back, looking at me in that intent, searching way of hers, and I know what she’s seeing now. Not just the tuxedo and the name and the money. The outline of the world beneath it. The part with blood in it.
“Was it because of…” She stops herself. She presses her lips together and looks away toward the windows.
For a moment neither of us speaks.
Then she says, “And you still think I should be answering your questions.”
I lean back in the chair and study her. “I think many things.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No,” I say. “It’s a warning that you may not like the answer.”
Her gaze returns to mine. She’s tired, frightened, too intelligent not to start connecting things, and still somehow brave enough to keep looking.
The knock at the door saves us both. Maksim enters without waiting to be invited, takes one look at the room, and says, “I see we’ve all had an excellent morning.”
I stand. “Check her.”
He looks from me to Sienna, then back again, and sighs the sigh of a man who has known me too long and approves of too little. “Of course,” he says. “Why make anything simple?”
He closes the door behind him and looks at Sienna the way he looks at all patients, directly and without fuss. “Tell me what happened.”
Before she can answer, I do. “Camille shoved her. Staff caught her before she hit the floor.”
Maksim gives me a brief look. “I was asking her.”
Sienna, despite everything, almost smiles. “Camille pushed me,” she says. “I lost my balance. Two of the staff caught me before I went down all the way.”
“Any pain?”
“My knees knocked the carpet a little. My hip feels sore. That’s it.”
“Dizziness?”
“Only for a second.”
“Cramping?”
She hesitates.
I feel my whole body tighten at once.
Then she says, “No.”
Maksim notices that hesitation. Of course he does. He notices everything. He moves closer and crouches in front of her. “How far along are you?”
There’s a pause.
“Eight months,” she says quietly.
The number settles in the room with a weight I don’t entirely understand until I feel it in my chest.
Eight months. I should have guessed close to that, but hearing it aloud is different. More real. More immediate. Less abstract in every possible way.
Maksim nods as if that explains several things at once. “All right. I need you to stand for a moment if you can.”
She rises carefully. He checks her pupils, her pulse, the steadiness of her breathing. Then he has her sit again and asks her to point to where she feels sore. He presses lightly at her hip, asks if that hurts, then more lightly still at her knees, her elbow, watching her face while he does it.
Finally he says, “You were lucky.”
“That seems to be a theme lately,” she says.
I look at her.
She doesn’t look back at me. She’s watching Maksim as if she can keep everything simple by refusing to glance to her left.
Maksim straightens. “From what I can tell, no serious injury. But if you feel cramping, pressure, dizziness, bleeding, or anything that feels wrong, you tell someone immediately. I don’t care if it’s in the middle of the vows.”
Sienna nods.
“No,” he says. “Use words. I’m a doctor, not a priest.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Good.”
He glances at me then, and the glance contains about fifteen years of private language.
You are overreacting.
You are not overreacting enough.
This is a mess.
This woman matters to you.
You are making that obvious.
I ignore all of it.
“Should she go to the hospital?” I ask.
Sienna turns to me at once. “No.”
Maksim lifts a hand before I can answer. “Not unless something changes. Right now she needs rest, water, and as little stress as this house is capable of producing.”
“That rules out the whole estate,” Sienna mutters.
Maksim’s mouth twitches. “Yes. I noticed. I’m going to the hospital. If the girl survives the transport, I’ll call.”
“If,” Sienna repeats.
He doesn’t soften it. “She’s critical.”
The room goes quiet again.
I walk him to the door. He pauses with his hand on the knob and looks at me properly for the first time since he came in. “Five minutes,” he says.
I nod.
He glances back at Sienna. “Rest if you can. And if anything changes, you tell someone immediately.”
“I will,” she says.
He gives her a brief nod and steps into the hall. I follow him out, pulling the door mostly closed behind me.
The corridor is quieter than before. Staff are moving at the far end in low, urgent bursts, but no one is close enough to hear us.
Maksim folds his arms and looks at me the way only old friends can, with too much knowledge and not enough patience. “Well,” he says, “that was interesting.”
I say nothing.
He waits a beat, then asks, “Is the child yours?”
I look down the hall instead of at him. He notices that too, of course.
After a moment I say, “No.”
Maksim lifts a brow. “No?”
“No.”
He studies my face for a second longer, then lets out a quiet breath through his nose. “Remarkable,” he says.
“What is?”
“That apparently your dried-up old balls still have enough fight in them to worry you.”
I turn my head and look at him.
He shrugs. “I was under the impression men your age were mostly decorative.”
“I’m touched by your faith in me.”
“I have no faith in you. Only eyes.”
Despite myself, I almost smile.
Almost.
“Call me when you know something,” I tell him.
“I will.” He starts away, then stops and looks back over his shoulder. “And Viktor?”
“Yes?”
“If the baby is not yours, then stop looking like you want it to be.”
Then he walks away before I can decide whether to insult him for that or thank him.
By the time I get downstairs, Yuri has taken over the study.
It’s the only room in the house with enough privacy and enough screens to make it useful.
The estate’s security feed is spread across two monitors on the desk, black-and-white angles from the lawn, the terrace, the service path, the side hall, the breakfast tables before and after the collapse.
He stands with one hand on the back of a chair, watching the footage roll forward and back in clipped increments, his expression as unreadable as the screens.
I close the door behind me. “What do we have?”
“Not enough yet.”
“Anything?”
He rewinds a section of footage and lets it play again.
A server crossing the terrace with a tray of champagne.
Guests shifting in and out of frame. White tablecloths.
Too much distance. Too many angles obscured by floral arrangements and people who had no idea they were standing inside a crime scene.
“Not yet,” he says. “The lawn cameras are decorative. Whoever placed them cared more about symmetry than sight lines.” He clicks to another angle. Side terrace this time. A partial view of the bar station. Staff entering and leaving.
“We’ll need all staff movements from an hour before breakfast,” I say. “And everyone who handled service.”
Yuri nods. “Already started.”
Good.
Yuri pauses the footage. “There.” He points at a server crossing from the bar station with a tray of champagne. “One pass to the family table. Then another to the bridesmaids.”
He rewinds a few seconds and lets it play again.
I watch my own hand refuse the offered glass. Watch the tray move on. Watch the bridesmaid take one without looking, still smiling at something someone beside her says. So Sienna was right. The glass was meant for me.
The door opens behind me and someone enters. I know who it is before she speaks.
“Viktor.”
Alina.
I turn to look at her. Concern sits visibly on her face, but I’m in no mood to be charitable about its proportions.
She has changed since breakfast. Not clothes, not hair, not any of the visible things. Just her expression. Less social composure now, more urgency. She closes the door behind her and looks from me to Yuri to the monitors. “I heard you were in here,” she says. “What’s happening?”
“Work,” I say.
She ignores the dismissal. “A girl nearly died at our son’s wedding breakfast.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re standing in a locked room watching cameras.”
“That is generally how one learns things.”
Her mouth tightens. “This is not the time.”
I feel my patience thin another degree. “This,” I say, “is exactly the time.”
She sucks in a breath.
She still hasn’t left so I turn to look at her. “What do you need, Alina?”
Her brows draw together. “Need? I’m trying to understand what’s going on.”
“So am I.”
She looks at the screens again. “You really think someone did this on purpose.”
“Yes.”
That stills her for half a second. Then she says, “God.”
I turn back to the monitors. “If you came here to be horrified, you’ve done it. Leave.”
Her head snaps toward me. “Excuse me?”
I don’t look at her. “You heard me.”
“Don’t speak to me like I’m some guest wandering in from the lawn. Our son is downstairs. His wedding is imploding. A girl is in the hospital. I’m allowed to ask what kind of danger we’re dealing with.”
Now I look at her. “And I’m telling you that asking is not the same as helping.”
She goes still. Angry now. “You’re impossible when you get like this.”
I continue, because now I’m annoyed enough to be precise. “I said from the beginning there were too many people, too much opportunity for nonsense. Your son wanted a spectacle. Camille wanted an audience. Here we are.”
Alina’s mouth tightens. “Is it my fault you have so many enemies?”
Yuri stills behind the desk.
I turn fully toward her. “No,” I say. “But if you want to discuss my enemies, now’s not the best time.”
For a moment she says nothing. The concern is still there, but now it’s mixed with the old anger she and I know too well, the kind we used to dress up as strategy when we were married because it sounded better than resentment.
“I’m trying to protect Ethan,” she says.
“And I’m trying to handle the situation that threatens him.” My voice stays even. “Leave this to us.”
She folds her arms. “That sounds very noble when you say it like that.”
“It’s not noble. It is practical.”
Alina’s eyes narrow slightly. “And Sienna?”
I look at her. “What about her?”
“You carried her upstairs.”
“She nearly went down.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
I let out a breath. “I didn’t choose the planner, Alina.”
“No,” she says. “But you seem very interested in her for someone who didn’t.”
I give a short laugh, more tired than amused. “You’re reading too much into it.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
She studies my face for a moment. “You don’t usually involve yourself.”
“I involved myself because Camille put her hands on her in a hallway full of staff.”
“And because?”
“There is no because.”
Alina holds my gaze a second longer, clearly unconvinced. “Fine.”
But from the look on her face, she doesn’t believe a word of it.