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

”Boss.” Marcus’s hand closed around his wrist. Not pulling, not yet, just there, a weight, a reminder. ”Let him check on her.”

The doctor’s chest was heaving, his hands raised, not fighting, just waiting. Viktor held on one more second than he needed to. Then he opened his fingers.

”Save her,” he said, and stepped back to let him pass.

The doctor didn’t waste time being afraid. He crossed to the bed, dropped his bag, and went to work with hands that had gone steady the second there was a patient in front of him instead of a man twice his size gripping his throat.

A penlight across her eyes first one, then the other, watching the pupils contract and release. Two fingers at her wrist, counting silently, eyes on his watch. He peeled back an eyelid, then the other, murmuring something to himself that wasn’t meant for the room.

Viktor stood over his shoulder the entire time, close enough that the doctor had to lean around him to reach her arm for a blood pressure cuff.

”Well?”

”Give me a second.”

”You’ve had fifteen minutes and a second.”

The doctor didn’t look up, just kept working, fingers pressing gently at the hinge of her jaw, tilting her head, watching the rhythm of her breathing with a stethoscope now pressed under her collarbone. Finally he sat back on his heels.

”She’s fine.” A beat, like he could feel how far short that was going to land. ”She took a sleeping pill. A strong one, strong enough to knock most people flat for the better part of a day. That’s all this is.”

”What sleeping pill?” Viktor’s voice cracked across the room like something breaking. ”This makes no sense. Sienna doesn’t take pills. She doesn’t sleep like this, she doesn’t sleep at all, she,” He stopped himself, jaw working, and when he spoke again it came out lower, harder, each word placed like a blow.

”Check her again. She has a heart condition. Maybe this maybe it’s not safe for her. Maybe it’s doing something to her right now while you’re sitting there telling me she’s fine.”

The doctor swallowed, glanced once at Marcus like he might find rescue there, found none, and turned back to Sienna. He took the blood pressure again.

Checked the monitor readout a second time, then a third, as though the numbers might change if he stared at them long enough.

”Her heart rate’s steady. Blood pressure’s a little low, but that’s consistent with the sedative, not with, not with anything cardiac.” He chose the next words carefully, the way a man chooses his footing on ice.

”Right now she just looks worried. That’s honestly the word for it worried, not dangerous. These pills, they usually wear off in about eight hours. If she’s still like this past that mark, still not waking up, that’s when we’d need to be concerned.”

Viktor looked down at her. At the stillness of her, the terrible peace of her face that didn’t belong to the Sienna he knew, who was never that quiet, never that unguarded.

”Eight hours.” He said it like a sentence being handed down.

”That’s the general window, yes.”

”Okay.” Viktor didn’t move from the bedside. Didn’t even look at the doctor when he said it just stared at Sienna’s face like looking away might cost him something. ”You stay. You keep checking her. Every fifteen minutes, you check her again.”

The doctor’s mouth opened. There was a surgery, half-finished, a patient somewhere under lights with an incision that couldn’t wait eight hours, let alone however long this was going to take. The words were right there, ready to come out. Viktor’s eyes lifted to his, and whatever the doctor saw in them made the sentence die before it started.

He wiped a hand across his forehead, smearing the sweat there instead of clearing it, and nodded.

”Of course,” he said. ”I’ll stay.”

The corridor outside Sienna’s room was too quiet for what Viktor was carrying inside him. He pulled the door shut behind him with a care that felt almost obscene given the way his hands wanted to close around something and crush it.

Marcus was waiting a few feet off, phone still in hand, watching him with the particular stillness of a man who’d learned exactly how much space Viktor needed in moments like this.

”What do you have?” Viktor asked. His voice had leveled out, and that was somehow more unsettling than the shouting had been.

”Not much yet. But enough.” Marcus flipped his phone around, screen dark, just a prop for his hands. ”It was in her drink, at the university. Somebody got close enough to slip it into the glass before she ever picked it up. Whoever did it knew she’d be driving home alone after.”

Viktor was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, it came out almost admiring, in the way a man might admire a blade right before it went into him.

”I’ll admit,” he said, ”they were clever. Slip something into her drink. Let her get behind the wheel herself. An accident, nothing more a tired woman, a bad turn, a guardrail. Nothing that traces back to them. Nothing that traces back to anyone.” His eyes lifted to the far wall, unfocused, already somewhere else.

”But I’m going to give them a kind of justice they’ll wish they’d never been born to receive.”

Marcus didn’t answer that. There wasn’t an answer that would help.

Viktor moved down the hall with the gate guards falling into step before he’d even said a word, as the air itself told them to.

He stopped in the security office, and one by one he had them recount it every minute of Sienna’s day, who she stood near, who touched her glass, who refilled it, who walked her out.

The men stumbled over each other trying to get the details right, watching his face for the moment it would tip over into something worse than waiting.

”Bring me that professor she saw,” Viktor said when they’d finished. Flat. Final. ”The one from the university. Today.”