Chapter 20
SIENNA
I keep moving because if I stop, I’ll fall apart in the middle of the house.
That is the only thought keeping me together.
My clipboard is in my hand. My face is set. My voice works when people ask me questions. From the outside, I probably look fine. Tired, maybe. Busy. A planner having a difficult morning.
Inside, I feel wrecked.
I can still see Viktor’s face before he walked away from me.
Tears come, silent and humiliating, slipping out before I can stop them. I wipe at them, furious with myself for this, for him, for the timing of all of it. I hate that it hurts this much.
I press a hand to my face and take a slow breath.
That’s when I feel it.
A firm little movement low in my belly. Then another.
I go still.
The baby.
For one second everything else falls away. The wedding. Viktor. Ethan. Camille. All of it. It’s just me and that small, insistent kick from inside, like a reminder to come back to myself.
“Okay,” I whisper, not sure whether I’m talking to the baby or to myself. I rest my hand there and feel another shift. It steadies me more than anything else has this morning.
Then a dull discomfort pulls across my lower abdomen. Not pain exactly. Just tightness. Pressure.
I frown and wait a second, but it passes almost as quickly as it comes.
Too much stress, I tell myself.
Too much standing. Too little sleep.
I don’t have time to spiral over every ache. So I wipe my face properly, fix what I can of my makeup in the reflection of the chapel glass, and head for the bridal suite. Camille still hasn’t come down, and if someone doesn’t drag her into the day soon, the whole schedule starts slipping again.
When I knock, her voice comes through the door. “What?”
“It’s me.”
A pause.
Then, “Come in.”
I open the door and step into the room.
Camille is seated at the vanity in a silk robe, already halfway through hair but not makeup, one leg crossed over the other, expression cool enough to frost glass. Two bridesmaids are in the sitting area behind her with coffee cups and low voices, both of them going quiet when I walk in.
Camille doesn’t turn right away. She looks at me through the mirror.
“You’re late,” I say.
“I’m the bride.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s why you’re late.”
One of the bridesmaids gives a nervous little laugh and then stops when Camille glances back at her.
Camille turns in her chair slowly. “If you’re here to tell me how important timing is, spare me.”
“I’m here to tell you the photographer is already asking questions, the musicians are in place, and if you want this day to happen the way you planned it, you need to come downstairs in ten minutes.”
She studies my face, probably looking for weakness, tears, some sign that last night or yesterday or any of the rest of it still has me off-balance.
I give her nothing.
She stands and walks past me toward the dressing area without another word.
Cold. Dismissive. As if the blackmail, the threats, the shove in the hallway, all of it belongs to some separate world she can step out of whenever she chooses.
I turn to pick up the backup timeline from the dresser where someone left it.
And then I see it.
For one second, I think my mind is playing tricks on me.
A handgun.
Small. Dark. Resting half under a folded wrap in the open top drawer of the dresser, like it was put there in a hurry or hidden badly or both.
My whole body goes cold.
I don’t react. I can’t. Not if I want to get out of this room without every nerve in my face giving me away.
So I pick up the paper I came for, close the drawer gently with my free hand as if I noticed nothing unusual at all, and turn back toward the room.
Camille is still in the dressing area, speaking to one of the bridesmaids about earrings.
No one is looking at me.
Good.
I force my legs to move normally and say, “Ten minutes.”
Camille doesn’t even turn. “Fine.”
I leave the room and close the door behind me. Then I stand in the hallway for one second, heart pounding so hard it feels like it might shake my whole body.
What the hell was that?
I look down the corridor, then back at the closed door.
Something is going on here. Something much bigger than wedding drama and family politics and drunken scenes in hallways. And I don’t understand any of it.
I make myself keep walking. That’s the only way not to panic.
Down the stairs, through the side hall, past the powder room where two of the bridesmaids are laughing too loudly, out through the service doors and into the back part of the house where the caterers have set up.
The kitchen staff are already deep into the next phase of the day. Breakfast cleared. Lunch prep underway. Silverware being reset. Glasses counted. Someone arguing about ice. Someone else carrying a tray of pastries past my shoulder.
I find the catering supervisor near the plating table. He sees me and immediately looks guilty, which tells me yesterday has been replaying in his head all night too.
“Morning,” I say.
He gives me a tired nod. “Morning.”
“I need to ask you something about yesterday.”
His face tightens. “All right.”
“I’m not here to blame you,” I say, because he looks like he’s bracing for exactly that. “I just need details.”
That relaxes him a little.
“Fine,” he says. “What details?”
“The champagne. I need to know who brought it in.”
He thinks for a second. “It wasn’t part of the original breakfast flow. It was specially requested.”
“By who?”
“The groom’s family.”
My grip tightens on the clipboard. “Do you have a name?”
“Yes,” he says, then frowns. “I don’t remember it now, though.”
I wait.
He rubs at his temple, trying to pull it back. “I think it was the groom’s aunt.”
I look at him. “Are you sure?”
He nods once, uncertainly. “I think so.”
“She wasn’t here yesterday morning,” I say.
That stops him. For a second he just stares at me.
“Really?” he says.
“Yes,” I say, thinking about my encounter with Anna yesterday. She had arrived. Or had she? Maybe she was intentionally missing from the ceremony.
He looks away, searching his memory again, and now I can see the confidence draining out of it. “Then maybe I’m making a mistake,” he says. “It was definitely a woman, though.”
“That narrows it down to half the house,” I say.
That gets the faintest nervous smile out of him. “She was with the groom’s side,” he says. “That much I’m sure of. Or at least she acted like she was. She said the family wanted champagne added in after the first coffee service.”
“And no one questioned it?”
He gives me a look. “At a wedding like this?”
Fair. People with the right voice and the right clothes don’t need to sneak. They just give instructions and expect the room to move around them.
I glance toward the lawn through the service doors, then back at him. “If you saw her again, would you know her?”
He hesitates. “Maybe,” he says. “Not by name. By face, I think.”
That’s something.
I nod once. “All right. Don’t mention this to anyone else yet.”
“Actually, someone already came asking about it last night.”
“Who?” I ask, frowning.
“Didn’t catch his name, a tall, bald guy.”
Yuri, I think. So, they are still investigating whatever happened yesterday. So that means Viktor’s life is in danger.
I wince, vanishing the thought before it can take over. But why am I so upset? He’s a hardened criminal, a pakhan, as they call him. He’s a bad person. And yet.
Another thought occurs to me. If the chef told Yuri what he told me, then Yuri has the same description I do. A well-dressed older woman from the groom’s side. Someone confident enough to give instructions and be obeyed.
He wouldn’t doubt Anna. Not the way I do.
Or maybe doubt isn’t even the right word. It’s not that I think she did it. It’s that she was hiding something from the moment I saw her again. On the plane she warned me away from Viktor. Then yesterday she pretended not to know me at all until I forced the issue.
That wasn’t nothing.
And Viktor didn’t seem to know she’d been on the same flight with us.
I think back to his face in the hallway when he found us together.
The surprise when he realized I knew his sister.
The way he asked when she had arrived, like he was only just learning she was here.
If he had known she’d seen me on that plane, known she’d spoken to me after I came out of his cabin, he would have said something.
Maybe not everything, not all at once, but something.
He didn’t. Which means Anna kept that to herself.
Why? I don’t know.
That’s the part that gets under my skin.
I reach the end of the corridor and stop for a moment, looking out through the open service doors toward the lawn. From here I can see chairs, flowers, guests beginning to drift into place. And at the edges of all of it, Viktor’s men, trying not to look like they’re watching.
But why would she want to hurt her own brother?
As if thinking of Anna is enough to bring her into view, I spot her a few seconds later. She’s at the far end of the side corridor, moving quickly toward the rear exit with one hand to her ear. On the phone.
I slow at once and step closer to the wall without really thinking about it. She doesn’t see me. Or if she does, she gives no sign. Her voice is too low for me to catch the words, but her pace tells me enough. She’s not wandering. She’s going somewhere.
I should let it go.
I don’t.
I follow, keeping enough distance not to be obvious, my clipboard still tucked against my side like that somehow makes this less ridiculous. Anna slips through the back door and out toward the side garden, still speaking into the phone. I stop just inside the doorway and watch through the gap.
She ends the call. Then she looks up, and a second later someone steps out from behind the hedges.
A man.
I can’t make out his face properly from here.
He’s too far away and the angle is wrong, one shoulder turned toward me, the morning light catching only part of him.
Tall. Dark suit. Broad through the shoulders.
Familiar in the way all these men around Viktor seem familiar now, built from the same world of quiet menace and expensive clothes.
Anna goes straight to him. And he hugs her.
Not formally. Not like two people greeting each other at a wedding. Closer than that.
What the hell?
Anna steps back first and says something I can’t hear. The man answers. His head turns slightly, and for one second I think I might finally catch his face, but then he shifts and the angle is gone again.
I stay where I am, barely breathing, staring through the doorway like if I look hard enough everything will finally make sense to me.
It doesn’t.
All I know is this:
Anna is hiding something.
She just slipped away from the house.
And now she’s with a man she clearly did not want anyone to see her meeting.