Chapter 16 #2
That almost breaks me. Not because it’s tender, but because it’s so ordinary. So unfairly ordinary after everything else. As if he can stand outside my door and speak in that low, steady voice and not know what it does to me.
I know if I opened it, he would look at my face once and know.
He would see I’ve been crying again. He would see I’m shaken.
He would come in anyway. He would put his hands on me, and I would let him, because wanting him has stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a condition of my body.
I press one hand low over my stomach. The baby shifts, slow and heavy.
That steadies me more than anything else has tonight.
No. This has to stop somewhere.
“I’m fine,” I say, and hate myself for using those words again when they mean nothing at all.
“No, you’re not.” His answer comes without hesitation.
I bite the inside of my cheek and keep my voice level with effort. “I mean it, Viktor.”
“So do I.”
He tries the handle again, not hard, just enough to remind me how thin the barrier is between us. A lock. A door. A decision I’m making with my whole body fighting me on it.
My breath catches.
He hears that too, and his voice changes. Softer now. More dangerous because of it.
“Open the door.”
I almost do. God help me, I almost do.
I can feel how badly I want him in the room.
Can feel my body already leaning toward the sound of him, toward the thought of him stepping in and shutting the door and pulling me into him until I stop trembling.
I want to be held by him. I want to be kissed by him.
I want to forget every stupid, frightening, impossible thing outside this room and drown in the one thing that has felt good and whole and consuming.
But wanting is no longer enough. Maybe it never was.
“No,” I whisper.
This time the word shakes.
There’s a pause on the other side of the door. Long enough that I wonder if he’s finally going to leave. Long enough that a fresh kind of ache opens in my chest at the thought of it.
Then he says, very quietly, “Look at me and say it.”
My eyes sting. “I can’t.”
That is the most honest thing I’ve said all night.
Silence again.
I know he understands what I mean. Not that I can’t say no. That I can’t look at him and keep saying it. Can’t open the door and still pretend this is about discipline instead of need.
When he speaks again, the roughness is back in his voice. “Sienna.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Please don’t.”
“What happened?”
I think of Camille’s phone. The photo. The threat. I think of Anna and Yuri and poison and Ethan staring at my hand over my stomach. I think of how quickly everything around Viktor turns dangerous, even when he isn’t the one trying to hurt me.
And underneath all of that is the simplest fear of all.
If I keep letting him in, I won’t know how to stop.
“It’s too much,” I say.
I hear him shift outside the door. Not leaving. Just readjusting, maybe leaning closer. Waiting the way he does when he wants the truth and knows better than to demand it yet.
“What is?”
I rest my palm more firmly over my stomach and finally say the only part I can bear to give him. “It’s better for the baby if I stay away.”
The words hurt coming out.
Not because I don’t mean them.
Because I do.
That’s what makes them hurt.
Nothing on the other side of the door moves for a second. Then I hear his breath leave him, slow and rough. When he speaks, his voice is different. Quieter. Not defeated. Not exactly. But checked, as if he’s run into a wall and knows better than to push harder just yet.
“You think I would hurt you.”
I press my lips together. “That’s not what I said.”
“No,” he says. “It’s what you meant.”
I open my mouth, close it again.
Because the truth is messier than that. I don’t think he would hurt me carelessly. I think wanting him might. I think staying this close to his life might. I think there are dangers around him I still can’t see clearly enough to name, and one of them has already put a woman in the hospital.
I want him too much to trust myself with him.
And that may be the most dangerous part of all.
“I need you to go,” I say.
The silence that follows is worse than argument.
Then, finally, he says, “All right.”
It doesn’t sound like surrender. It sounds like a man stepping back from something he intends to return to later.
I hear his hand leave the door. Still, I don’t move. I stand there listening, waiting for footsteps, waiting for the sound of him going.
I wait until the silence settles for real before I move away from the door. My whole body feels hollowed out with want. My throat aches. My skin aches. I have never in my life wanted to open a door more badly than I did in the last five minutes.
And still I didn’t.
I don’t know whether that means I’m strong or just scared.
Probably both.
I climb back into bed alone and curl around the ache of him, one hand between my breasts, the other low over my belly.
For a long time, sleep doesn’t come. All I can think about is the sound of his voice through the wood. The way he said my name. The way I almost let him in.
And the sick, aching truth that part of me still wishes I had.