Chapter 27
SIENNA
I wake up slowly, and at first I don’t understand why everything hurts.
Not the normal post-surgery pain. I already know that pain now. It sits low and deep in my body, heavy and hot and wrong, but familiar enough that I can place it.
This is different.
My shoulders ache. My wrists burn. My mouth is dry. My head feels thick, like someone has packed it with wet cotton and left me somewhere too cold.
I try to move, but my hands don’t come with me. Panic cuts through the fog at once.
I blink hard, forcing my eyes open, and the room swims into shape around me.
Not a hospital room.
Concrete floor. Bare walls. A long metal table against one side.
Old shelves with paint cans and torn cardboard boxes stacked unevenly.
A single bulb hangs from the ceiling, throwing hard yellow light over everything and leaving the corners dim.
It smells of dust, damp wood, old oil, and something chemical underneath, sharp enough to make my stomach turn.
A storage room. Or a workshop.
Somewhere forgotten.
I’m in a chair, my wrists tied behind my back, rope or plastic biting into skin already tender from the IV tape they pulled off me. My ankles are tied too. Not tightly enough to stop blood, but tight enough that when I jerk against it, pain shoots through my legs and up into my belly.
My belly.
My daughter.
The thought hits so hard I nearly stop breathing.
“No,” I whisper.
I look down.
I’m still in the hospital gown under a coat someone has thrown over me. My abdomen is sore, bandaged beneath the fabric, and every breath pulls at the incision. I remember the NICU. Her tiny hand around my finger. Alina in the corridor. The nurse wheeling me back.
Then nothing.
Oh God. Someone took me from the hospital.
I pull at the restraints again, harder this time, and a sharp pain tears across my lower body. I gasp, teeth clenched, my vision going white around the edges for a second.
“Don’t do that.”
The voice comes from the doorway.
I go completely still.
A figure stands there, half in shadow. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Dressed in dark clothes. His head is covered, face hidden by some kind of black cloth or mask pulled low enough that I can’t see anything useful. Only the shape of him. The way he holds himself.
The voice is wrong. Low. Rough. Distorted somehow. Maybe through fabric. Maybe on purpose.
But there’s something in it. A rhythm I almost recognize.
My throat tightens. “What’s going on?”
He steps inside and closes the door behind him. The click of the latch sounds too final.
I try to keep my breathing even, but fear is already climbing through me too fast. My body is weak from surgery. My daughter is in the hospital without me. Viktor doesn’t know where I am. Or maybe he does. Maybe that’s why I’m here.
The man walks toward the table and sets something down. A phone, maybe. I can’t see clearly from this angle.
“What do you want?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer immediately. Instead he turns toward me, head slightly tilted, as if he’s studying the damage before deciding what to do with it.
“You should have stayed out of it,” he says.
That voice again.
My skin prickles. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No,” he says. “You never do.”
The words are bitter. Too intimate. Too familiar in a way that doesn’t make sense.
I tug at the bindings again, smaller this time, testing them. The rope at my wrists shifts but doesn’t loosen. My left thumb can move a little. Not enough.
He notices. “Don’t.”
I stop.
Not because he told me to. Because he takes another step closer, and something in his body makes every instinct in me scream.
“Please,” I say, hating the crack in my voice. “I just had surgery. My baby is in the NICU. I need to go back.”
At the word baby, his shoulders shift.
He comes closer. Too close now.
I can see the dark fabric over his face move slightly with his breathing. I still can’t see his eyes properly. The light is behind him, and the mask hides too much.
My pulse is pounding in my ears. “If this is about Viktor—”
“It is always about Viktor.”
The way he says it makes my blood run cold.
“He’ll come for me,” I say.
“I know.”
Those two words terrify me more than anything else he has said.
This isn’t random.
This is bait.
I jerk against the chair again, panic finally breaking through common sense. The legs scrape hard against the concrete. Pain flares through my abdomen, sharp enough that I cry out, but I don’t stop. I twist my wrist, trying to find slack, trying to pull one hand free, trying anything.
He’s on me in two steps. His hand grips my shoulder and shoves me back against the chair. Pain explodes through my middle.
I cry out, louder this time, unable to stop it.
“Stop fighting,” he says. His voice is too close to my ear.
I twist away from him on instinct, one hand slipping free and flying up toward his face. My nails catch the fabric near his neck. He grabs my wrist, but not fast enough. I rake my fingers upward with everything I have, and the cloth tears loose.
For one stunned second, the world narrows to the mask coming away in my hand.
Then I see his face, and all the breath leaves my body.
“Maksim?”
He stands over me, breathing hard, the torn cloth hanging from one side of his face, his hair disheveled, eyes bright with something that scares the crap out of me.
Bare. Furious. Almost broken.
I stare at him, unable to make the pieces fit.
“No,” I whisper.
Because it can’t be him.
It can’t.
He was there. He helped me. He held the room together when my body was falling apart.
“Maksim,” I say again, because maybe saying his name will turn him back into the man I thought he was. “What are you doing?”
His jaw tightens. For one moment, something like regret crosses his face.
Then it’s gone.
He bends, picks up the torn mask from my lap, and lets it drop to the floor.
“You weren’t supposed to wake up yet,” he says.
My stomach turns as he ties up my hand again, tighter this time. I pull at the restraints, but my body is shaking too hard now to make the movement useful.
“You took me from the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looks away.
“Maksim.”
He turns back to me, and the man I know is there for half a second, buried under something darker.
I stare at him. None of this makes sense.
My head is still foggy, but one thing is becoming clear with horrible speed. This isn’t only about the shooting. It isn’t only about Viktor’s enemies or Mikhail or Camille or the wedding.
This is personal.
“You called him,” I say slowly. “You wanted him to come alone.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Maksim exhales through his nose and looks around the room as if the answer is somewhere on the shelves, in the dust, in the old metal tools and paint cans and broken boxes.
When he looks back at me, his eyes are colder. “Viktor needs to die if I want to get what I truly desire.”
My throat closes.
I think of Alina in the corridor. The way she looked shaken when Maksim arrived. The strange softness between them. The old familiarity. The way he knew how to speak to her without asking.
Oh God.
“You and Alina,” I whisper.
His face changes.
There it is. The truth, or part of it.
My heart pounds harder. “You love her.”
He steps toward me again. “Don’t.”
But I can’t stop now. Fear and shock have made my thoughts move too quickly.
“You love her,” I say. “And she still loves Viktor.”
His hand closes around the back of the chair, hard enough that the wood creaks. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”
“I understand enough.”
“No,” he says, and now his voice finally cracks. “You understand nothing.”
The anger in him fills the room. I shrink back despite myself, and the movement hurts my incision badly enough that I have to bite down on a sound.
He sees it. For one second, the doctor in him reacts. His gaze drops to my abdomen. Concern flashes there before he smothers it.
That gives me something.
Not hope exactly, but a weakness.
“You’re a doctor,” I say, breathing through the pain. “You know I shouldn’t be here. You know I need to be monitored. I’m bleeding. I just had surgery.”
“I know.”
“Then take me back.”
He laughs once, softly, and it’s the worst sound I’ve heard from him yet.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“No,” he says. “I passed that point a long time ago.”
The room seems colder now.
My body is starting to tremble from pain and fear and whatever drugs are still wearing off. I pull against the bindings again, more desperately, but the rope only bites deeper. My fingers feel numb at the tips. My ankles burn.
Maksim watches me struggle, and for a moment he looks almost sorry.
Almost.
Then he says, “Save your strength.”
“Don’t tell me that like you care.”
“I do care.”
“You kidnapped me.”
His eyes close briefly. When he opens them, the regret is gone.
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
A sound escapes me then, half laugh, half sob, because the horror of it finally catches up. The calm admission. The plainness. The fact that Maksim, of all people, is standing in front of me with my blood probably still under his fingernails from saving my life hours ago.
“You helped deliver my baby,” I say.
His face tightens.
“And now you’re using me to hurt her father.”
“Viktor has taken enough from other people.”
“He didn’t take me from anyone.”
Maksim looks at me. Something in that look makes me wish I hadn’t said it.
“No,” he says quietly. “You gave yourself to him. That’s worse.”
I struggle harder the second he turns away from me.
The restraints bite into my wrists, but I don’t stop.
Pain is better than helplessness. Pain is at least something I can understand.
The chair scrapes against the concrete, loud in the stale little room, and my breath comes too fast as I twist my hands, trying to find any slack, any weakness, any chance.
“Maksim,” I say, forcing my voice not to break. “Please.”