Her face changes at once, not in some guilty dramatic way, just genuine surprise and then offense. “No.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you not to be stupid.” Her voice drops. “But here we are.”
Before I can say anything, a voice behind us cuts through the hallway.
“What are you doing up so late?”
Viktor.
I turn.
He’s coming toward us from the far end of the corridor, jacket gone, shirt sleeves rolled, his face tired and alert at the same time. His eyes go first to me, then to the woman in front of me, and for one second I watch confusion give way to recognition.
He slows. Then he says, to me, “You know my sister?”
13
VIKTOR
I’msurprised to find Sienna with my sister.
That surprise lasts only a second. Long enough to feel it, not long enough to show much of it. But it’s there. Enough that I stop in the hallway and look from one woman to the other, trying to understand what, exactly, I’ve walked into.
Sienna looks caught between anger and disbelief. Anna looks like herself: composed, self-possessed, already halfway to pretending the conversation was less important than it was.
That alone tells me it was important.
“What are you doing up so late?” I ask Sienna, because it’s the simplest question available and because her face still looks too tired for more of this.
Then I turn to Anna. “You know my sister?”
Sienna’s face changes at that.
Whatever had shocked her was already there before I arrived, but my saying the wordsistermakes it worse. She looks at Anna,then at me, and for one brief second, I can almost see her mind rearranging something.
Anna notices it too. “She recognized me,” she says quickly.
It’s too quick.
Sienna doesn’t speak. She just keeps looking at Anna, and then at me, and I dislike how blindsided she seems.
I turn to my sister. “When did you get here?”
“This afternoon.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me.”
She lifts one shoulder. “You seemed occupied.”
That is not an answer, but it sounds enough like one that I let it pass for the moment.
My attention goes back to Sienna. She still looks unsettled. Not frightened exactly. More like she has just discovered there’s some part of the story everyone but her has already read.
Anna, seeing where my attention has gone, changes the subject almost at once.
“I only stopped because I heard there had been trouble,” she says. “Clearly I picked a bad time.”