Chapter 18 #3
Alina turns her head and gives me a look so cold it almost makes me step back.
I take it without comment. There’s no time to be offended on principle. Not when Ethan is swaying in the corridor like he might either pick another fight or fold where he stands.
So I move closer and reach for his arm. “Come on,” I say quietly. “Let’s just get you upstairs.”
He doesn’t resist. Not really. He lets me take his arm, but his eyes aren’t on me. They’re fixed somewhere past my shoulder.
I turn my head.
Viktor is at the far end of the hall. The air in the corridor changes the second he steps into it. Not louder. Just heavier. More deliberate. He looks from Ethan to Alina to me, taking in the scene in a single sweep.
“What’s going on?”
“He’s drunk,” Alina says.
Viktor glances at her, then back at Ethan.
Ethan is still looking at him. Not with embarrassment. Not even with anger now. Something looser. More reckless. The kind of stare people get when drink burns through the last of their judgment and leaves only whatever was waiting underneath.
Viktor sees it. “So,” he says, very evenly, “we’re doing this here.”
Ethan gives a short laugh that makes my skin crawl. “Why do you keep looking at her?”
I want the floor to open.
The whole day has already been one long descent into humiliation and secrets and near disasters, and somehow this is still worse.
Viktor doesn’t react right away.
That scares me more than if he had.
He just looks at Ethan, then at me for one brief, unreadable second, and then back again. Alina has gone very still beside us. I can feel it without looking at her. The whole corridor feels balanced on one terrible, tottering moment.
“Ethan,” I say, low and urgent, “stop.”
He doesn’t. He actually straightens a little, as if whatever miserable courage he has left has chosen this moment to make itself useful.
“I have something to tell you,” he says.
My hand tightens on his arm. “Don’t.”
He shakes me off with more force than I expect.
And then he says it.
“Sienna was my girlfriend,” he says, looking at Viktor, not me. “And now she’s pregnant with my child.”
For a second I can’t breathe.
I don’t even think. My whole body just goes hot with disbelief and fury and something close to panic.
Not because I’m ashamed. Because of how calculated it feels, even drunk.
How ugly. How deliberate. He’s not confused anymore.
He’s choosing this. Choosing to throw it at Viktor like a weapon and see what breaks first.
“No,” I say. My voice sounds thin next to the weight of what he’s just done, but I force it steady. “That is not true.”
Ethan laughs again, softer now, uglier. “Come on.”
Viktor hasn’t moved. He’s just standing there, expression unreadable, eyes on Ethan, and I have no idea what he’s thinking because he’s giving away absolutely nothing.
Alina turns to me then, sharp and searching and wounded all at once, as if the last ten minutes haven’t already done enough damage.
“Ethan,” she says, and for the first time her voice really cracks, “you are drunk.”
He ignores her. “Tell him,” he says to me. “Go on.”
I stare at him, and something in me goes cold. Because it’s not enough for him to lie. He wants to force me into the shape of his lie too.
“I already told you it isn’t yours,” I say.
“Did you?” he says. “Or did you just say what was convenient?”
The insult in that barely registers next to everything else.
Viktor finally speaks. “One more word,” he says, looking at Ethan, “and I will decide this conversation is over for you.” His tone is quiet.
Ethan hears it. We all do. Still, some stupid, drunken part of him is too far gone to stop.
“It makes sense,” he says. “Doesn’t it? Timing, history, all of it. We were in Spain. We broke up for a stupid reason.”
“Spain,” Viktor says quietly. I know exactly what he’s thinking. We met on the flight from Spain to Los Angeles.
Viktor’s eyes flick to me then.
Just once.
Not enough for anyone else to make much of it, maybe. More than enough for me. There’s something in that look I can’t read, because he’s keeping it buried under too much control.
Alina steps in before Ethan can go on. “That’s enough,” she says. Her hand closes around Ethan’s arm with surprising force. “You are coming with me.”
He tries to pull away. “No.”
“Yes,” she says. “Now.”
He looks at Viktor again, then at me, and for one second I think he might keep going. Say something even worse. But maybe even drunk he still knows when he’s gone too far, or maybe Alina’s grip says something his mind is too blurred to ignore.
Either way, he stops talking.
Viktor still hasn’t taken his eyes off him.
And suddenly I understand with perfect clarity how badly this could still go if one more wrong word gets said.
So before Ethan can find one, I step back and say the first practical thing I can think of. “He needs to lie down.”
It sounds absurd after what just happened, and yet somehow that absurdity helps. It gives the moment something ordinary to lean on. A task. A next step. Something other than the lie still hanging in the air.
Alina nods once, tight and furious and pale. “Yes,” she says. “He does.”
She starts steering Ethan down the hall, not gently, and this time he goes. Not because he’s calm, but because the moment has shifted beyond him and he finally knows it.
As they move away, Ethan looks back once.
At me. Then at Viktor.
I don’t know what he thinks he’s done. I only know the damage of it is not in the words themselves. It’s in the fact that they were spoken at all.
I’m still standing there, hands shaking now that I’m no longer holding on to anyone, and I can feel Viktor across from me like a second pulse in the room.
Things just keep getting worse. That’s the only coherent thought I have.
I don’t know whether to speak first or stay still or apologize for something that wasn’t mine to say and wasn’t true anyway.
In the end, all I manage is, “He’s lying.” My voice sounds smaller than I want it to.
Viktor looks at me, then turns and walks away without another word.
For a second I just stand there.
Then I go after him. “Viktor.”
He doesn’t stop.
The corridor feels too long all at once, the carpets swallowing my footsteps, the lamps throwing too much light on everything I don’t want seen. I catch up to him just before the turn near the back staircase and reach for his arm. “Viktor, wait.”
He stops then. When he turns, his face is controlled in a way that scares me more than anger would have. Not cold exactly. Worse. Shut down. All that attention of his turned inward instead of toward me.
“You lied to me,” he says.
The words land low and heavy.
I shake my head at once. “No.”
His mouth tightens. “You told me Ethan meant nothing.”
“He doesn’t.”
He looks at me for a long second, and the hurt in his face is quiet enough to be worse than shouting. “You didn’t tell me the truth.”
I swallow. That part is true. Not the part Ethan said. But the part underneath it. I didn’t tell Viktor that Ethan was my ex. I let that stay hidden because I knew exactly how ugly it was, how tangled it would make everything, how impossible it would feel once it was spoken out loud.
“I didn’t tell you everything,” I say. “That’s not the same thing.”
His laugh is short and joyless. “That’s a very convenient distinction.”
“It matters.”
“To you, maybe.”
“It matters to me because Ethan doesn’t matter,” I say, and my voice shakes despite everything I do to keep it steady. “Not like that. Not anymore. He didn’t tell the truth back there.”
Viktor takes one step toward me. “Then why hide it?”
I open my mouth and close it again, because there are too many answers and none of them sound good enough.
Because I was ashamed. Because I didn’t want him looking at me and seeing Ethan first. Because I knew exactly how disgusting it would sound once he realized I’d been with both father and son, even if one of those things belonged to the past and the other did not.
Because I wanted one part of this not to feel ruined before it even had a chance.
He sees the hesitation and something in him gives way. He closes the distance between us and grips my arms. Not brutally, but hard enough that I feel it.
“Sienna.”
I flinch before I can stop myself.
He lets go at once. The shift in his face is immediate. Anger drops out of it, replaced by something more awful because it’s more human. Regret. He looks down at where his hands were on me, then back up.
“Did I hurt you?”
The answer should be simple. No. Not really. Not more than the day already has.
But the truth is that everything feels tender right now. My body. My nerves. My patience. The place in me that still wants him no matter how careful I’m trying to be.
“A little,” I say softly.
He steps back at once, as if giving me room can undo it.
For a moment neither of us speaks.
Then I say, “He didn’t mean anything.”
Viktor looks at me, not cold now, just tired and deeply wounded in a way I hadn’t expected to see from him. “That isn’t what I said.”
I stare at him.
He exhales slowly. “I said you didn’t tell me the truth.”
There it is.
Not jealousy, exactly. Or not only that.
Something else.
The fact that I kept a piece of myself back while taking everything else from him. My body. My fear. My nights. My trust in broken pieces.
And he has a right to feel that.
“I know,” I say.
He looks away down the dark hall for a second, then back at me. “Do you?”
“Yes.” The word comes out small.
Because now that I’m standing here looking at him, I do know. I know exactly why this hurts him. Not because Ethan matters now. Because he mattered once, and I let Viktor walk blind into that without warning him. I let him hear it from a drunken man in a hallway.
If our places were reversed, I would hate that too.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want this to become about him,” I say.
Viktor’s eyes come back to mine. His face changes just a little.
So I keep going, because there’s no point stopping halfway now.
“He was my boyfriend. He hurt me. He made me feel small for a long time, and by the time it ended there wasn’t much left to explain except embarrassment. Then I ended up here, and suddenly he was the groom, and you were…” I stop, shake my head once. “Well.”
“Did you know who I was when we met? Was it a twisted form of revenge?”
My eyes widen. “What? No. I had no idea. Ethan never told me anything about either of his parents, or the rest of his family. I was a secret.”
He still doesn’t say anything.
“I didn’t want you hearing about me from him,” I say.
Something moves in his face at that. Small. Deep. Hard to name.
“He doesn’t get to tell my story,” I say. “Not to you.”
For the first time since I ran after him, some of the tension leaves his shoulders.
Not much.
Enough.
He lifts a hand then, slower this time, giving me every chance to stop him, and touches just above my elbow where he held me. His thumb brushes the spot once, carefully, as if apologizing again without words.
“I don’t like being lied to,” he says.
“I know.”
“I like it even less when it concerns you. But you still chose not to tell me who he was.”
I look at him helplessly. “I didn’t want him to matter.”
“And instead you made him matter more.”
I close my eyes for a second. Because again, he’s right.
When I open them, he’s still looking at me with that same wounded, shut-down expression, and now I know what this is starting to feel like.
Whatever was between us, it’s over for good.
“I need distance from this,” he says.
From this.
From me.
I can feel my throat tightening, but I refuse to cry in front of him. Not now. Not when he already looks like he regrets enough.
“So that’s it,” I say.
His face shifts, only slightly. “For tonight.”
But I already know the truth.
I fold my arms across myself, suddenly cold. He looks at me for one more second, then reaches out as if to touch me.
I flinch before he can, and he stops immediately.
His hand falls back to his side.
“I’ll see you at the wedding,” he says, glancing down at my belly once. “Go.”
I stare at him for a second longer, stupidly hoping he’ll take it back. That he’ll step toward me. That he’ll say my name in that low voice and undo all of this.
He doesn’t.
So I nod once because there’s nothing else left to do. I turn around and walk away before he can see how badly that one sentence hurt.
I don’t look back. Because if I do, I know I’ll run to him.
And he already let me go.