10. The Suite Lie
Chapter ten
The Suite Lie
Sienna POV
The girl at the front desk pulls up my reservation and her smile goes just slightly too polished.
"You're in the Presidential Suite," she says. "Room 4012. Your — Mr. Knox is already checked in."
I look at her. "I have my own room."
"You're both listed under the same reservation." She slides the key card across the marble like this is completely normal. "Delia Vance's office made the arrangements this morning."
Of course she did.
I take the card. I find the elevator. I ride it to the fortieth floor reminding myself that Delia is a professional with a strategy and a budget and absolutely zero interest in my personal boundaries.
The suite is ridiculous.
Floor-to-ceiling windows, city lights smeared across the glass like something out of a travel magazine, cream leather sofas I'm almost afraid to sit on, a marble kitchen counter with a coffee press I already know I'm going to use, and a king-sized bed visible through each open bedroom door that makes a point I don't appreciate.
Two bedrooms off a shared living space. One kitchen.
One couch. One very large window that looks out over the city like a postcard nobody asked for.
I set my bag down and walk to the window. Forty floors up, the city moves the way cities do at night. Restless and indifferent and kind of beautiful because of it.
"Not bad," I say.
"It'll do." Atticus drops his bag without looking at the view. He's already scanning the room. Checking exits, probably. Or threat-assessing the throw pillows.
I find the folded notecard on the kitchen counter.
Practice being a couple. There will be media tomorrow. — D
I read it twice. Then I set it down and look at Atticus.
He's already read it over my shoulder.
"So." I pull out a barstool and sit. "What do I love about you?"
He looks at me the way he looks at the ice before a game. Like he's already three moves ahead and none of them are good for me. "We could start with my obvious charm."
"Hard pass. Try again."
The right corner of his mouth lifts. Just barely. The kind of almost-smile that means he finds you funny but isn't ready to admit it.
"Sit down," he says. "Let's get this over with."
He takes the couch. I take the coffee table, cross-legged, facing him, close enough that our knees nearly touch. The city glows behind him through all that glass, and the lamp on the end table throws warm light across the thin scar that cuts through his left brow and I make a point of not noticing.
"How'd we meet?" I start.
"The bar. You were working. I came in with Mason."
"When?"
"Six months ago."
"We agreed on eight."
He tilts his head. "Fine. Eight months ago."
"What was I wearing?"
A pause. His eyes move over me. Not slowly, not like that. Just the way he looks at everything: assessing, cataloguing. "Red. Something red."
I wasn't expecting that to land the way it does.
"Good," I say. "What did you think when you saw me?"
Silence.
"Atticus. It's a drill. What did you think?"
His voice comes out even. "That you were the sharpest thing in the room and you knew it."
I keep my face neutral. "Okay. And I thought you were—"
"Difficult."
"I was going to say intense."
"Same thing."
"It's really not." I tuck my hair behind my ear. "When did we start dating?"
"Three months ago."
"What changed?"
Another pause. Longer this time. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at me with those dark eyes that never quite give you the whole picture.
"You stopped letting me get away with things," he says.
It's so close to the truth that I forget it's a line.
"Good," I say, quieter than I mean to. "That's good. Use that one."
We run it three times.
By the second pass, the answers stop feeling like scripts. They start feeling like something we excavated. Real details wrapped in constructed timelines, true things wearing fictional clothes.
What do you love about her?
The way she holds a room without realizing she's doing it. The fact that she pushes back. That she sees through people and doesn't make them feel bad about it.
I'd written none of those answers. He produced them on his own and delivered them flat and certain, the way he says most things, like the truth isn't complicated if you just say it.
What do you love about him?
I tell the room that Atticus Knox is the kind of person who shows up. Not loudly. Not with fanfare. He just shows up. When it matters. And you realize later he was always paying attention.
He doesn't react when I say it.
But his eyes drop for half a second. Like the words landed somewhere he wasn't expecting.
By the third run-through, we're not drilling anymore. We're just talking. The scripts dissolve somewhere around the question what does your future look like? and neither of us picks them back up.
The city keeps glowing.
Neither of us mentions it.
I give up on sleep at eleven-fifty.
My bedroom is perfect. King bed, blackout curtains, sheets so soft they swallow you whole. I lie on top of all of it in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about the look on Atticus's face when I said he shows up.
The slight, involuntary stillness. Like I'd named something he didn't know had a name.
I get up. Pull on the oversized shirt I sleep in, a pair of shorts, and pad out to the kitchen.
The suite is dark except for the city coming through the windows. Forty floors of light and motion and nobody up here but me. I go straight to the coffee press and start working through it on muscle memory alone. Grind. Measure. Boil. The ritual of it settles something in my chest.
I don't hear him.
That's the thing about Atticus Knox. He moves like a man who learned early that silence was safer.
No warning, no announcement. One second I'm alone and the next I'm not, and I know without turning around because the air shifts.
Because something in my body registers him the way it registers a change in weather. Before it's visible, in the pressure.
I keep my eyes on the coffee press.
"Couldn't sleep," I say.
"No." His voice is low. Sleep-rough at the edges in a way it isn't during the day.
I don't turn around.
He doesn't move.
The city does all its moving for us. Taxis below, a siren somewhere east, a plane blinking red across the dark.
I watch the water start to heat and I am acutely aware of him.
The warmth coming off his body. The specific quiet of a man who isn't fidgeting, isn't filling the silence, is just there.
Solid and still and close enough that if I took one step back I'd find out exactly how close.
I don't take the step.
Three feet, maybe. Maybe less. It feels like nothing and everything at the same time.
His reflection appears in the window glass.
I hadn't planned on that. He's in a t-shirt and grey sweats and his hair is unguarded in the way it only gets when he thinks no one's looking. He's watching me in the glass. He knows I can see him. He doesn't look away.
Neither do I.
"The answers you gave tonight," I say. My voice comes out steadier than it has any right to. "The ones about what you love about me."
Silence.
"Did you mean them?"
The water starts to steam. I focus on it like it matters.
"Does it help," he says, careful and quiet, "if I say it doesn't matter?"
"No."
Another silence. Longer.
"Then yes." The word drops into the quiet between us. Just that. Nothing else attached.
I pour the water. Watch it bloom dark through the press. My hands are completely still and I'm proud of them for that.
"The things you said about me," he says. "Showing up."
"That was the script."
"Sienna."
I close my eyes for one second. Open them. "Fine. Not entirely."
His reflection doesn't move. But something in it changes. A loosening around his eyes, a breath that shifts his shoulders just slightly, like he'd been holding something and just set it down.
"This is a terrible idea," I say.
"Yes."
"Mason would lose his mind."
"I know."
"We have rules."
"I know."
"Atticus."
"I know." Lower this time. Almost soft.
I turn around.
He's closer than three feet. I don't know when that happened.
The city light cuts across his throat, his collarbone, the tattoos that run down his forearms and the muscle beneath them. He's looking at me with that expression he only ever lets out at night, when all his guards are doing shift change and something real slips through.
And I feel it. The pull of him. Low and insistent and inconvenient as hell.
I want to close the distance. That's the honest truth I'm standing inside right now. I want to set my mug down and take the one step it would cost me and find out what he does when I do. Whether he catches me or steps back. Whether that control he wears like armor would finally crack.
I think it would.
That's the dangerous part.
My grip tightens around the mug. The ceramic is warm. I focus on that. The warmth. The weight. The very boring, very grounding reality of a cup of coffee and the rules I agreed to and Mason's face if he ever found out.
It works. Barely.
"I'm going to drink my coffee," I say.
"Okay."
"And you're going to go back to your room."
A low sound in his throat. Not quite a laugh. "You giving me orders now?"
"I'm managing a liability."
"Which one of us is the liability?"
"Currently?" I pick up my mug. "Both."
His eyes drop to my mouth.
One second. Two.
Then he straightens. I watch him rebuild the wall in real time, brick by brick, all that careful control sliding back into place. He says, "Goodnight, Sienna," and turns toward the hallway.
I watch him go.
I drink my coffee.
My hands are shaking.
The fire alarm goes off at one-fourteen a.m.
It doesn't ease into it. It detonates. One second silence, next second every speaker in the building screaming at once, strobe lights in the hallway cutting under the door. I'm on my feet before I'm awake, heart already in my throat, grabbing my phone by reflex.
Atticus is in my doorway in under ten seconds. Fully alert, like he was never actually asleep. He has my room key in his hand.
"Stairwell," he says. "Now."
"I need shoes—"
"You need to move."
He's right. I follow him into the hallway where staff are pounding on doors, voices carrying over the alarm. "Evacuation, please move toward the stairwell, this is not a drill." Guests pour out in various states of undress. Someone is crying. Someone is arguing with a staff member about their dog.
Atticus puts his hand on my lower back and steers us through the crowd like he already mapped the exit three days ago. We hit the stairwell and move.
Thirty-seven floors.
By floor twenty I'm breathing hard. He isn't. He checks behind us twice without being obvious about it. Or maybe he's obvious to me now, the way you start to read a person's habits once you've been watching them long enough.
We come out into the lobby with the rest of the hotel and push through the main doors onto the sidewalk.
The cold hits first.
Then the lights.
Flashbulbs. A cluster of them, right there, waiting. Like they had a tip, like someone knew exactly which door to stand in front of and exactly when to be there. A voice calls Atticus's name. Then mine.
Atticus pulls me into his side without a word. His arm comes around me and his body blocks the angle of half the cameras and he drops his head toward mine and says, quiet and entirely calm: "Don't stop walking."
"I see them."
"I know you do. Keep moving."
A microphone gets too close. A question about the hazing. A worse question about me. Something I don't catch fully but catch enough of to feel it land like a hand against a bruise.
Atticus's grip on my shoulder tightens. Not roughly. Just completely.
Another voice, from somewhere in the cluster: "Sienna, are you a distraction from the investigation? Is that all this is?"
I keep walking.
Atticus's mouth is close to my ear, his voice meant only for me: "You don't have to answer that."
"I know," I say.
But I'm thinking about the suite upstairs. The coffee press. The city in the window glass. His reflection watching mine.
Are you a distraction?
The honest answer is the one I'm least willing to say out loud.
He is absolutely, inconveniently, ruinously not.