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

The grounds were different in the morning.

Still enormous. Still watched. But the night’s tension had metabolised into something more routine, guards in their daytime positions, the measured pace of a household settling into its rhythms. Viktor was somewhere inside.

She could feel the absence of him the way you felt the absence of weather that had been threatening all week.

She moved slowly. Deliberately. Stopping occasionally to look at nothing in particular, the way a woman with a sprained ankle might stop to rest and look at the garden.

She was not looking at the garden.

She was looking at the wall. The climbing plant. The approximate location of the small door, which she now knew existed, which she now knew she had missed by twelve feet in the dark, which she had been thinking about since the moment she saw it.

In daylight, it would be different. In daylight, she could.

”Sienna!”

The voice came from across the grounds, bright and unbothered, carrying the way voices carried when their owner had never felt the need to modulate their enthusiasm for the benefit of a situation.

She turned.

And there, crossing the lawn toward her with his long hair and his easy stride and the expression of a man who had found exactly what he was looking for and was extremely pleased about it.

Marcel Kessler.

Oh no, Sienna thought. She arranged her face.

What on earth is he doing here?

He raised a hand in greeting, grinning, the morning apparently agreeing with him entirely, the night’s events apparently filed somewhere under excellent stories for later rather than anything requiring recovery.

”You’re alive!” he announced, as if this were remarkable and also personally gratifying to him.

Sienna looked at him.

Then at the wall.

Then at Marcel, who was now close enough that the wall was no longer a productive thing to look at.

She sighed.

”What are you doing here?” she said.

”I live here,” Marcel said.

A pause.

”Temporarily,” he added. ”Mostly. It’s complicated.” He looked at the crutches. Then at her face. Then at the crutches again, with the expression of a man doing arithmetic. ”How’s the ankle?”

Sienna said nothing.

Marcel’s grin widened very slightly.

”Right,” he said. ”So. Breakfast?”

”I already had breakfast,” Sienna said.

”Shame.” Marcel fell into step beside her, entirely uninvited, hands in his pockets, the morning apparently his personal property. ”Because yesterday was quite a show.” He glanced at her sideways.

”You and your husband left before the real finale, though. The part that was, interestingly, meant for the two of you.”

Sienna looked at him.

”If you sit with me while I eat,” Marcel said, with the easy confidence of a man who had always been told yes often enough that no was an interesting novelty rather than a deterrent, ”I might tell you all about it.”

Sienna opened her mouth.

And then, despite everything, despite the ankle and the crutches and the wall she’d been mapping and the night she’d just survived and the general understanding that nothing in this house was safe and nobody in it was her friend.

She laughed.

She couldn’t help it. Something about him, the boyishness of it, the absolute unbothered quality, standing in the grounds of a mafia fortress at nine in the morning trying to negotiate breakfast company like they were colleagues at an office, it came out before she could catch it.

A real laugh. Short, but real. Marcel looked delighted. ”Was that...”

”Don’t,” Sienna said.

”That was a laugh. You actually,”

”Don’t.”

He was already smiling the smile of a man filing something away for later when the air changed.

She felt it first.

The particular shift in atmosphere that she had learned, in the past weeks, to read the way sailors read the horizon, something coming, something fast, something that had already made its decision before it arrived.

Then she heard the footsteps. Then Marcel’s collar was in Viktor’s fist.

The gun appeared at Marcel’s temple in one seamless, practiced motion, the movement of a man for whom this was not a dramatic gesture but a conversational one.

”What the fuck.”

Viktor’s voice came out at a register she had not heard before. Not the cold quiet of last night. Not the controlled fury of the gala. This was something rawer, something that had bypassed the machinery of his control entirely and come out the other side.

”Didn’t I tell you?”

Sienna went very still.

Marcel, to his considerable credit, had not moved. The gun was at his head, and Viktor’s fist was in his collar, and he stood there with the specific calm of someone who had been in this position with this particular person before and had developed a strategy for it.

”Relax,” Marcel said. ”I didn’t touch your wife.” It was the wrong thing to say.

Viktor’s grip tightened. The anger in his face didn’t increase it couldn’t. There was nowhere further for it to go, but something behind his eyes sharpened into something colder, more specific.

”I warned you to stay the fuck away from this side of the house.”

The words came out separately. Weighted. Each one is its own sentence.

”And now,” his eyes moved briefly, involuntarily, to Sienna’s face, to where the laugh had been, the real one, the one she hadn’t been able to stop, and something moved through his jaw, something quick and complicated and gone before she could name it.

”You will pay the price.” He turned without releasing Marcel’s collar.

”To the dungeon,” he said to the men behind him. ”Take him.”

The men moved.

Marcel went with them, not fighting, not struggling, just being walked away across the grounds with the air of a man who had calculated that this particular situation would resolve itself and he could afford to wait it out. As they reached the corner of the house, he turned his head and found Sienna’s eyes across the distance.

He shrugged.

Cheerfully. The shrug of a man who had been dragged to dungeons before and had opinions about which ones had decent ventilation.

Then he was gone.

”What did he do?”