They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 09

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 09

They held me for six hours in a basement chapel under a church that has buried four generations of my family.

Three old men at a folding table. The Table’s judgment.

Where were you between seven and eight this morning? Alone. Dressing. In a house my husband’s staff had been ordered to keep clear.

Can anyone confirm? No.

Did you have reason to harm your sister? One of them slid that morning’s headline across the table without a word.

Two hundred thousand people had watched my motive on their phones.

Camilla’s statement was a masterpiece. The service stairwell at the Palazzo, 7:40 a.m. My hands on her shoulders. My voice hissing you took everything, now I take something back. Her fall. Her miscarriage — a Bellandi heir, conceived in love, destroyed by her bitter, barren-hearted sister.

She’d even scraped her own palms.

My mother gave a statement too.

My own mother.

“Elena has been jealous of Camilla since they were children. Always.”

I sat on a wooden chair in a stone room, eight weeks pregnant, and somewhere around hour four the old voice started up in my skull: nobody will believe you, nobody has ever believed you, they will take your baby and give your life to her because they have always, always given your life to her

Then the door opened.

Nikolai came through it with four attorneys and an expression that made a sixty-year-old capo physically step back. He crossed that chapel, crouched down in front of my chair, and took both my freezing hands

his.

“Look at me.”

I looked at him.

“Nine years ago you told a dying man that nobody dies on your floor.” His voice was low and perfectly level. “Stay till morning, Elena, Can you do that for me?”

I took a breath. The first real one in six hours…

And something in my head went very, very clear.

“She wasn’t at the Palazzo to meet anyone,” I said slowly. “Camilla doesn’t get up before ten. She’s never used a service stairwell in her life – she doesn’t even know where they are unless somebody showed her.”

My pulse was climbing now, but for the right reasons. “She was there at 7:40 in the morning, in the one stairwell with a dead camera. She scouted it. Which means somewhere there’s a record of her scouting it.”

Something fierce and proud lit behind his eyes. “There’s my wife.”

“And get her medical records. The miscarriage. Every word of this lives or dies on that record.”

“The Bellandi family sealed them at noon,” said the lead attorney. “Family physician, private clinic,

notarized.”

“Of course they did.” I closed my eyes. Think.

Camilla at sixteen, faking mono for a month to skip finals – the pediatrician who wouldn’t lie for her, so my mother simply changed pediatricians. My sister has never in her life used a doctor she couldn’t manage. Which meant the clinic last night was chosen. Prepared. Coached.

Except.

Except her husband’s men didn’t drive her. She came in on a stretcher, screaming, in front of a hundred and fifty witnesses, and paramedics don’t ask you where you’d prefer to go.

Paramedics take you to the nearest emergency room.

My eyes flew open.

“St. Ambrose.”

Nikolai went still.

“The Palazzo’s nearest ER is St. Ambrose. It’s not her clinic, it’s not my mother’s network, it’s a public

trauma center and they run standard bloodwork on every woman of childbearing age who comes through The door before anyone can tell them not to.” I was gripping his hands now. “Nikolai. The first hour of intake.

Before the Bellandi lawyers arrived. Before anything was sealed.”

The chapel was absolutely silent.

Nikolai stood up, pulled out his phone, and said five words to whoever answered.

“St. Ambrose. First-hour intake. Everything.”

They released me at 9 p.m. — pending the Table’s review, which meant they had nothing and knew it.

He put me into the car like something breakable. I was half asleep against his shoulder, wrung out to the soul, when his phone buzzed.

He read it. Went completely rigid.

“What?” I sat up. “Is it bad?”

He turned the screen toward me.

A photograph of a single intake sheet. Stamped ST. AMBROSE EMERGENCY – 8:02 A.M. One line highlighted in yellow.

I read it.

I read it again.

And I started to laugh – wild, shaking, tears pouring down my face – because printed on that first-hour, pre-lawyer, un-coached, unsealable record were five words:

Serum hCG: negative. Patient not pregnant.

“Nikolai,” I breathed. “There was never a baby.”

“There was never a baby.”