The Mafia King of Philadelphia: From witness to his doted wife

The saleswoman had the energy of someone who had been waiting her whole career for exactly this kind of client, a man who wore authority like a second skin, standing with his hands in his pockets radiating the specific gravity of someone accustomed to being obeyed, asking her to help his fiancée find a dress.

Sienna was steered into a dressing room with the gentle but inexorable force of someone who knew their job.

A zip she couldn’t reach and therefore, presumably, couldn’t escape through. The mathematics of bridal fashion, she was discovering, were deeply inconvenient.

She came out in the third one.

She knew it was the negative reaction, knew it with the cold, practical part of her brain that was still cataloguing exit routes and traffic patterns, but when she stepped in front of the mirror, she stopped thinking about running for approximately four seconds.

The dress was ridiculous, completely ridiculous. The veil alone probably cost more than her insurance. She looked like the cover of something.

She looked like a woman stepping into a life that had been designed specifically to receive her.

She looked, God, help her, like a bride.

”The mafia king of West Philadelphia.” The saleswoman appeared at her shoulder in the mirror, adjusting the veil with the reverent hands of a true believer.

Her voice dropped to the conspiratorial register of someone sharing scripture. ”You truly are a lucky woman.”

Sienna looked at her reflection.

”Oh,” she said. ”Yeah.”

”Any woman in this city,” the saleswoman continued, smoothing a fold near the hip, her eyes shining with the particular excitement of someone who had never personally experienced a kidnapping, ”would do anything to be part of the Kessler family. When my boss told me that the mafia king was coming to our shop today with his bride-to-be, my heart nearly stopped. If I’m this thrilled just to catch a glimpse of him, I can only imagine how you must feel about marrying him.”

Sienna considered the mirror, looked at the veil, then the seven days and the locked door and the way Viktor’s voice sounded when he made promises he clearly intended to keep.

”If waking up every morning,” she said pleasantly, ”wondering whether your husband is going to kill someone before breakfast is your thing ...” she met the woman’s eyes in the reflection, ”then yes. He is an absolute Prince Charming.”

The saleswoman opened her mouth. Then she saw Viktor coming. She closed it. Found somewhere else to be. Immediately.

He crossed the room without hurry, the way he did everything, and came to stand behind her. Sienna watched him appear in the mirror dark jacket, gray eyes, the composed, unreadable face of a man who was looking at her in white and filing something away.

His finger traced the line of her shoulder. Bare skin above the neckline, light as a question. ”Not this one.”

Sienna blinked. ”Go back. Try another.” He moved toward the chairs along the wall and sat down with the ease of someone settling in for a long evening. ”We have time.”

”I’d rather,” Sienna said, still facing the mirror, voice perfectly even, ”wear a body bag.”

A pause. ”It can be arranged.” Viktor looked at her with an expression of complete sincerity. ”But I prefer you in white.”

She turned away from the mirror before he could see what her face was doing. And that was when she saw it.

Left side of the dressing room corridor. Past the second curtain. A door, not a dressing room, not a supply closet, the particular solid anonymity of a door that led somewhere else. Street-level, if the angle was right. If the light underneath it meant what she thought it meant.

Her pulse made one hard, deliberate knock against her ribs. There.

She smoothed the front of the dress. Turned back with an expression she’d borrowed from a woman far more composed than she currently felt.

”You know what?” Bright. Almost easy. ”Let’s try one more. And then we’re done for good.” Viktor looked at her for a moment with those gray, lighthouse-sweep eyes.

”Good idea,” he said. She walked back toward the dressing room.

The zip ran from the middle of her back to somewhere between her shoulder blades, and it had been engineered, she was now convinced, by someone with a grudge against solitude.

She reached back. Couldn’t get the angle. Tried again. The fabric pulled. She contorted herself into a shape that solved nothing and created several new problems.

Come on. She looked at the door. Measured the distance. Fifteen feet, maybe less. She just needed to be out of this dress first, change back into the white dress from this morning, which at least had a zip she understood, and then she could...

”Hey.” She kept her voice low. Neutral. ”Is anyone out there? I need a little help with the...”

The curtain moved, it was not the saleswoman.

Viktor filled the doorframe of the small dressing space with the absolute effortlessness of a man who had never once in his life been somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, because every room he entered immediately reclassified itself as his.

Sienna went still. ”What are you...” She stepped back. Hit the wall. The dressing room was approximately the size of a generous thought. ”What did you do with the saleswoman?”

”Sent her away.” He said it the way you’d report the weather. Matter-of-fact. Inevitable. His eyes moved to the zip at her back with the calm focus of someone completing a task. ”No one touches you but me.”

His hand found the zipper. ”Don’t...” She turned swiftly, and every surface in this room felt too close and too warm. His hands found her shoulders gently and turned her back to face the mirror. And there they were.

Mirror-caught. Both of them. Her in the white dress with the veil askew and her jaw set and her eyes refusing to show a single thing she was actually feeling.

Him behind her, dark against her white, one hand still at her shoulder, his face in the reflection doing that thing it did that shuttered, unreadable, present thing that made her feel like a book he’d decided he was going to finish.

Neither of them spoke. The door to the left sat fifteen feet away. It might as well have been fifteen miles.