They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 05

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 05

I didn’t ask.

For eleven days I didn’t ask because for eleven days, the man I’d married out of vengeance was quietly, systematically ruining me in a completely different way.

Day two. Five a.m., morning sickness so violent I couldn’t get off the bathroom floor. I’d planned to hide it. One year, on paper, no complications. Then the door opened and Nikolai Varga – a man who had personally ended two crime families – sat down on the marble in a suit worth more than my car and held

my hair back without saying a single word.

Then he cancelled Belgrade. Belgrade waited.

Day four. I opened the kitchen and found it stocked with the only three things I could keep down. Salt

crackers. Green apples. My grandmother’s ginger tea, the specific brand, the one she used to import.

“I pay attention,” was all he said.

Day six. I found a nurse’s ID badge on my nightstand – St. Ambrose Hospital, my face, my maiden name, current. I’d surrendered my license two years ago when my father decided a Moretti daughter didn’t work

night shifts.

“You were four hundred hours from your nurse practitioner certification,” Nikolai said, not looking up from his coffee. “They’re holding your hours. Go finish it or don’t. It’s yours either way.”

I went to my room and cried for twenty minutes and told myself it was hormones.

Day eight. Nightmare. The ballroom, the speakers, my brother’s warm gun. I woke up screaming and he was in my doorway in under a minute with his gun in his hand and murder on his face, and when he saw there was no one there, he didn’t touch me. He just sat down in the chair by the window and stayed.

When I woke at dawn he was still there. Asleep sitting up. Tie loose. One hand resting on the blanket near

mine.

Near it. Not on it. Like he’d wanted to and hadn’t let himself.

“It’s paper,” I told my reflection that morning. “It’s a contract. Don’t you dare do this again.”

My reflection was not convinced.

Because here’s what nobody warns you about. Cruelty you survive. You build walls against cruelty; I’d been

Building mine since I was seven. But gentleness – gentleness from a man who owes you nothing, at five in the morning, on a bathroom floor – gentleness walks straight through every wall you own like it holds the deed to the building

Day nine. Two a.m., I found him asleep at his desk, and I did something dangerous.

I put a blanket over Nikolai Varga.

He caught my wrist before the wool even settled – the reflex of a man who learned young that sleeping deeply gets you killed. And for one unguarded second, before he was fully awake, he looked up at me and

said, rough and low and certain:

“You’re here.”

Not a question. Like a prayer being answered after a very long time.

Then his eyes cleared. The shutters slammed down. He let go of my wrist like it had burned him.

“Go to bed, Elena. You need rest.”

I lay awake until sunrise with my heart pounding and Matteo’s wine-soaked whisper on a loop.

The steel door. The third floor. Whose blood is still on the tile.

Day eleven. He flew to Belgrade.

And I stood in front of that door with the keypad code I’d watched the housekeeper enter, telling myself

had a right to know what I was living inside of.

The lock clicked green.

The room beyond wasn’t a vault. It wasn’t an office.

It was a back room. Cracked green tile. A humming fridge. A cheap steel table. A chair. The whole thing built inside a billionaire’s house like a museum exhibit – salvaged, reassembled, preserved.

And I knew it.

I knew it.

Because nine years ago it had been the storeroom behind Bianchi’s grocery on Calloway Street, and I had spent one entire night on that floor with my hands inside a stranger’s body, keeping him alive.

There was still a black stain on the tile..

On the wall above it hung a glass case. Inside the case, on velvet, was a St. Jude medal on a broken chain.

My St. Jude medal. My grandmother’s. I’d pressed it into a dying boy’s palm at sunrise and never seen it

again.

I turned around.

And the entire opposite wall was photographs.

Me. Me at twenty-one. Me graduating nursing school. Me buying coffee. Me last spring. Me laughing at a wedding I barely remembered attending.

Nine years of me.

Taken by a man I’d met eleven days ago.

–

Behind me, from the doorway, Nikolai’s voice came out of the dark low, and raw, and nine years tired.

“You weren’t supposed to see this.”

“Not yet.”