The sheet came down.
The room came back.
And then everything that had been suspended in the dark under that linen — every fact, every sequence of events, the entire architecture of the last two hours — arrived in Vivian's body simultaneously, the way cold water arrives when you've stepped off a ledge you didn't see.
She got off the floor.
Not gracefully. There was nothing graceful left in her. Her knees had been on wood long enough that they'd gone partially numb and the blood rushing back made her stumble sideways, one hand hitting the mattress, and she righted herself with the particular furious coordination of a woman who was absolutely not going to fall in front of this man.
"What," she said.
Viktor looked at her.
"What have I 'done.'"
