They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 10

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 10

We didn’t leak it.

That was my decision, and he let me make it. Leaks get denied. Leaks get buried.

I wanted an audience.

The Table reconvened on Monday to hear the Bellandi blood claim – my sister’s demand for my life in

exchange for the heir I’d supposedly killed. My mother sat behind her in funeral gray. Matteo wore his black armband. Every family in Havenport packed the hall.

Camilla testified first, and God, she was magnificent. The trembling chin. The hand on the flat stomach. “I felt her hands between my shoulders. My own sister. And falling, all I could think was – protect the baby, protect the baby-”

Hej advocate turned to ours with a small bow. “Your witness.”

Our attorney stood.

“Mrs. Bellandi. What was the due date?”

“April…” A brave, wet smile. “April ninth.”

“Lovely. And when did you learn you were pregnant?”

“Six weeks ago. It was the happiest day of my-”

“Then can you explain,” he said, very gently, laying a certified document before the three old men, “why the St. Ambrose emergency intake at 8:02 that morning – one hour after your fall, four hours before your family sealed your subsequent records – shows a negative pregnancy test?”

Silence. The particular silence of two hundred people inhaling at once.

“That’s – there’s been a mistake, the lab-”

“The lab ran it twice. It’s protocol. Both results are attached. Additionally-” a second document, “-

the Palazzo’s service corridor camera, which the stairwell outage did not affect, shows you entering that stairwell alone at 7:38, waiting four minutes, dragging your own palms down the brick – here is the still frame and then lying down at the bottom of the stairs. Alone.”

He paused.

“The Table will note that Mrs. Varga appears on the Varga Building lobby cameras across the city for the

entirety of that window.”

My sister’s face did something I will remember with pleasure on my deathbed.

It just stopped. All of it. The trembling chin, the brave grief, twenty-five years of performance – gone, leaving behind the flat, calculating blankness that had always, always been underneath.

The hall erupted.

The Bellandi claim was struck. Camilla was stripped of the name and put out of the city with what she could carry. Matteo was already sliding toward the exit when federal agents met him at the door – the wire fraud charges my husband had been quietly feeding them for a month, finally ripe.

He was still wearing the armband when they cuffed him.

And my mother stood frozen in the aisle as I passed.

“Elena.” Her voice cracked. Her hand caught my sleeve. “Elena, I didn’t know. About the test – about your

father I didn’t know-”

–

I stopped.

And I found that I wasn’t angry. That was the strangest part. Anger would have meant hope.

“When I was seven I broke my arm at a recital and you left early because Camilla had a headache,” I said quietly. “When I was twenty-one I graduated top of my nursing class and we spent the dinner talking about Camilla’s new boyfriend. A month ago I stood in front of three hundred people with my brother’s gun at my head, and you told me not to embarrass you twice.”

“You didn’t know, Mama. That’s true. You never knew me at all. You never once looked.”

I lifted her hand off my sleeve, gently, and gave it back to her.

“I hope she was worth it,” I said. “You gave her both your daughters.”

I walked out of that hall into white sunlight with Nikolai’s hand at the small of my back, and for the first time since the ballroom I felt it – not vengeance, which is heavy. Lightness.

It was over. Every last one of them was finished

That night we ate on the terrace and laughed – actually laughed – and he put his hand on my barely-there bump, and my baby stopped being a secret and started being a beginning.

At 11:52 p.m., my phone rang. Unknown number.

I should have let it ring.

“Congratulations,” said Matteo. Out on bail. Somewhere loud – wind, engine noise. All the polish stripped

off him, down to something ragged.

“Matteo, don’t call this-”

“Ninety million,” he said, and laughed, high and wrong. “Frozen. My family disowned me. Camilla’s taking a deal and giving them my name. I have nothing, Elena. Do you know what a man with nothing is?”

The wind howled down the line.

“Thursdays,” he said. “The obstetrician on Fifth. Ten a.m. Black Range Rover. He rides with you as far as

the tower and then you’re alone.”

The line went dead.