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

That was when she saw them.

Too late to retreat. Too late to do anything, really, except stand there in the hallway in a silk nightgown that left rather a lot of leg available for general public viewing, frozen mid-tip-toe like a woman caught playing a children’s game she was far too old for.

Viktor.

Marco.

Manuel.

All three standing in a loose triangle near the windows, each holding a glass of whiskey, which Sienna found deeply unreasonable given the hour, the sun was barely past breakfast, surely, and these men were standing around like it was a Tuesday in a different decade, drinking like men who had never once in their lives been told there was a wrong time for whiskey.

Three heads turned at once. Three conversations stopped at once. And then in perfect, synchronised, almost choreographed unison.

Three jaws dropped.

It was, Sienna would later admit to herself, an impressive display of simultaneous male incompetence.

Marco’s glass tilted dangerously in his hand. Manuel actually took half a step backward, as though the sight of her required additional distance to process properly. And Viktor.

Viktor’s face did the thing she had started, against every ounce of her own willpower, to recognise. The flicker before the control.

The half-second where the Mafia king of Philadelphia’s most feared family looked, very briefly, like a man who had simply forgotten every word he knew.

Then relief moved in behind it, quiet, real, the specific relief of a man who had carried an unconscious woman through gunfire and had spent the hours since wondering exactly how bad this was going to get.

She was awake. She was standing. She was, regrettably for his own composure, standing in a very small silk nightgown.

”Both of you,” Viktor said, ”turn around.”

It came out fast. Sharper than he probably intended. The voice of a man issuing an emergency order to troops who were, in this specific and humiliating instance, his own friend-in-arms and his accountant.

Marco and Manuel turned with the guilty speed of two men who had absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent not been admiring anything, and who were now extremely interested in a section of wall that had done nothing to deserve this much attention.

”We weren’t looking,” Marco said, to the wall.

”No one was looking,” Manuel agreed, also to the wall, with the conviction of a man reading from a script he had written badly and on short notice.

Sienna stood in the doorway, arms crossed now, eyebrows raised, watching two grown, heavily armed men stare at architecture rather than meet her eyes.

”Uh, huh,” she said.

Viktor was still looking at her.

Not at the wall. Not anywhere else. Directly at her, with an expression that had nothing performed about it relief, mostly, real and unguarded, the kind that arrived before a man remembered he was supposed to be composed about things.

”You’re awake,” he said.

As if she might argue the point.

Sienna pulled the hem of the nightgown down another inch, lifted her chin, and decided that whatever was happening in this hallway, the whiskey, the jaws, the wall staring. She was, despite everything, going to enjoy this exactly as much as it deserved.

”Clearly,” she said. ”Now, somebody wants to explain the outfit?” Three men. Three sudden, urgent, completely unconvincing interests in their respective whiskey glasses.

Nobody answered. Viktor crossed to her in two steps and settled his jacket around her shoulders before she could object, warm, heavy, carrying his scent in a way that made the gesture feel more intimate than it had any right to.

”Are you okay?” His eyes moved over her face, careful, cataloguing. ”Do you need to lie down? The doctor said you should take it easy. He wants you tested properly this time.” A pause. ”Are you sure you’re okay?”

The genuine worry in his voice landed somewhere she hadn’t braced for.

”I’m fine,” Sienna said. ”How long was I asleep?”

”Forty-eight hours.”

”And where exactly is this?” She glanced around the hallway, the carved wood, the stone, the unfamiliar light.

”My secret hideout,” Viktor said. ”Here in San Luca.”

”Secret, you say.” Sienna raised an eyebrow. ”And yet Don Amel found the other one without much trouble.”

”Don’t worry.” Something settled in his voice, low and certain. ”I always protect what’s mine.” He glanced at her, then added, ”Go put something on. I’ll make you something to eat.” Sienna rolled her eyes.

”I can make my own food.”

”Suit yourself, sweet wife.” Behind him, Marco and Manuel were suddenly, intensely fascinated by a spot on the floor.

Marco and Manuel hadn’t moved far from the whiskey, though the glasses had been mostly forgotten in favor of the conversation. ”I found the Chinese guy,” Manuel said. ”But we can’t find an interpreter.”

”Damn it.” Viktor’s jaw tightened. ”Bring him here, he has the information I need. Fly an interpreter in if you have to.”

”I’ll get him,” Marco said, already moving, already on his phone before he’d cleared the doorway.

Sienna came down a while later in a shirt and a pair of sweatpants she’d found in the drawer, far too big, the sleeves swallowing her hands, the whole outfit doing absolutely nothing for her figure and exactly everything for her comfort.

There had been other options in that drawer. Dresses. Silk things. The kind of clothes someone had clearly chosen with a great deal of thought and very little practicality.

She’d looked at them for exactly three seconds before reaching for the shirt instead.

Comfortable. Shapeless. And she told herself, with the firm logic of a woman making a decision and committing to it, the last thing she wanted in a house full of armed men was to give anyone a reason to look twice.

The house itself, she noted on her way down, was smaller than the mansion they had first been in. Cosier, almost, in a way that didn’t fit what she knew about the people who used it, old stone warmed by low lamps, the kind of beauty that came from age rather than money.

She walked into the main room without particularly trying to be quiet this time.