Chapter 285: Promise

"Go and be safe. I will find you when it is all done. I promise you, Katty. I promise." She lifted Sienna’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. Her eyes were bright with tears she would not let fall. "I have waited twenty years. I can wait one more night."

Sienna opened her mouth. She could not find a single word. There was no time.

Far down the corridor, a door banged. Boots rang on stone, many of them, fast and angry. Somebody shouted a name. A voice answered, closer.

"Viktor," Helena said. He knew what she was asking. He did not like it. Everything in him pushed back against it, hot and wordless. But he had been raised in this world, and he knew what it looked like when a woman had made up her mind.

He put his arm around Sienna’s shoulders. "Sienna. We have to go."

"No."

"We have to."

"Mother..." He did not wait. He turned and pulled her away, gently, without letting go of her hand, and she stumbled after him. She looked back over her shoulder. Helena stood where she had been, small and upright, with her palm pressed against her mouth. Beside her, Carina stood with her head bowed.

Then the corridor bent, and the two women were gone.

They went fast. The stone walls blurred past. Sienna had stopped crying, or she had never started. Her face was blank and stiff. She followed the line on the tablet with her eyes, and her feet followed Viktor’s.

They turned a corner. Something moved on the floor. Viktor’s gun came up, and he stopped so hard that Sienna ran into his side. In the angle of the wall, half hidden by a tall flowerpot, a figure was curled up on the stone. It was a small shape in a gray uniform, with its knees drawn to its chest and its face hidden in its arms.

"Please," it was whispering. "Please. Please. Please." Sienna looked down.

She knew that gray dress. She knew the thin shoulders and the cropped hair, and the shape of the hands pressed over the ears. Viktor knew her too.

It was his stepmother. It was Elena. She had escaped the main hall. She must have run when the doors locked, in the dark, with nowhere to go, and had fallen here, shaking, and waited for someone to find her. Maybe the Don’s men. Maybe Kalisto’s.

She lifted her head.

Her face was gray and streaked with tears. She saw Viktor, and her mouth opened, and for a moment she did not even seem to know him.

"Please," she said again. It was a small, cracked sound. "Please."

Viktor looked at her.

He did not forget. He could not. He saw every cruel thing she had done, every cold word and every smile. He saw the way she had once looked at his wife across a dinner table, and he saw the cell and the red light and the chain on her ankle.

I should leave her here. The thought was clear and quiet and fair. Nobody in the world would have blamed him.

But something else moved in him, slow and stubborn, older than anger. He thought of the soft look on Sienna’s face when she had said killing them will not change anything.

He held out his hand. "Come on," he said. "Walk." Elena stared at it. "I said walk." His voice was rough. "Get up. We are leaving."

Slowly, as if she could not believe it, she put her fingers in his. He pulled her to her feet. She was lighter than she looked.

Sienna said nothing. She looked at Viktor, and he looked at her, and she gave him one small nod. She did not argue. She did not ask. She only turned back to the tablet and lifted it again, and the white line shone in front of her face.

The three of them walked. They moved as fast as they could, through a narrow door and down a flight of stairs that smelled of dust and old soap. The walls here were rough. The lamps were dim and yellow, and the passage wound back on itself like a snail shell. Elena stumbled once, and Viktor caught her arm without a word.

Sienna led the way. The blueprint pulsed in her hands. Her eyes were fixed on it, and every few steps they tried to blur. The line wavered, doubled, floated away from the screen. She blinked hard. She swallowed. She dug her nails into her palm until the pain cleared her head.

Not yet. Just a little longer. Her heart was running wild again. She could feel it in her throat and in her wrists. It beat in uneven bursts, hard, then soft, then hard, and every beat shook her whole body.

She did not slow down. Left at the pantry, she told herself. Down three steps. The door with the small cross.

—-

The grand hall had stopped being a ballroom.

White linen lay torn across the floor, red with wine and worse. Chairs were overturned. A crystal chandelier swung from one chain, throwing broken light across the walls. Glass crunched under every step. Somewhere a woman was sobbing, and nobody went to her.

It had started quietly.

Kalisto had planned for it. Half the men in dark suits at the long table were not guests at all. They had walked in through the front doors with the rest, kissed the ladies’ hands, and drunk the Don’s wine. Their guns had been sewn into their jackets, under the arm. When the signal came, it was only a nod, and the party turned into a slaughter in the time it takes to lift a glass.

When the Don arrived with his men, the shooting got worse. It was not a fight anymore. It was a storm.

Carina and Helena came through the side door when it was nearly over.

The noise had died down to a few cracks and groans. Smoke hung under the ceiling in a gray sheet. The bodies lay where they had fallen, in black suits and white suits, their faces turned to the floor. And in all that wreck, only two men were still standing.

The two old legends.

"Accept defeat, Konstantin."

Kalisto’s voice came from behind the overturned head table. It was a little breathless but still calm, still smooth, like a man speaking from an armchair.

"You cannot get out of here. Every door is mine." A pause. "Shemmel already has Katalia. And Helena will go to whoever has Katalia. She always does." Behind a fallen table near the stairs, the Don said nothing.

"Your ruin has come. All of this is going to be mine." For a moment, there was silence. A drop of wine fell from a broken glass and splashed on the marble. Then Konstantin laughed.

It was soft and almost fond, the laugh of a man who has been proven right about something small.

"I have always known you were vile, Kalisto," he said. "But to dream of having my daughter, and my wife as well, in your hands." He sighed. "You were always greedy. Even as a boy."

At the far end of the hall, in the shadow of a pillar, Carina and Helena crouched side by side. Carina had her gun in both hands. Helena’s fingers were pressed against the cold stone. Neither of them breathed loudly.

Shemmel has Katalia.

Helena’s chest tightened. She did not believe it. She had seen her daughter’s face a few minutes ago, gray with dust and fury, and she knew who held whom. But the words still cut.

Carina’s eyes moved along the room, hunting for an opening.