my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 01

I was nineteen minutes late to lose my virginity.

The bedroom door was already open.

My fiancé was already naked.

So was my sister.

And she was smiling at me.

I stood frozen in the doorway of Julian Marchetti’s room with rain dripping off my coat and the lace I’d bought that morning still hidden underneath it. Sienna sat astride him, her blonde hair loose down her back, her eyes locked on mine like she’d been waiting all night for this exact moment.

“Mmm,” she moaned, deliberately, into Julian’s ear. “Just like that.”

Julian’s head turned. He saw me. His whole body went rigid.

“Ivy,” he breathed.

Guilt flooded his face. His hands never left my sister’s hips.

“Get off her.” My voice came out wrong. Small. “Julian. Get. Off. Her.”

“It’s not—” He dragged a hand down his jaw. “Ivy, it’s done. The families agreed this morning. Sienna and I are being announced Saturday.”

The floor tilted.

Announced. As in engaged. As in the ring I was wearing—the one he slid onto my finger in a boathouse eight months ago, the one I hid from everyone because I was the maid’s bastard and he was the Marchetti heir—meant nothing at all.

“You told me you’d fight for me,” I whispered.

“He did fight,” Sienna said, stretching like a cat. “He fought for about four seconds. Then Daddy offered him a seat at the table and me. Nobody trades a kingdom for a housemaid’s daughter, Ivy.”

“Sienna.” Julian’s jaw clenched. “Enough.”

“Why? She should hear it out loud.” My sister leaned forward, and her voice went silk-soft, the voice she’d used since we were nine years old. “You have no name. No blood. No family. Nobody in this house has ever wanted you, and nobody ever will.”

I looked at Julian. I gave him one last chance, one heartbeat long.

He looked away.

That was the moment something in my chest snapped clean off its hinges and floated away.

I twisted the ring off my finger, walked five steps into the room, and dropped it in his water glass.

Then I ran.

I ran out of the Marchetti compound, past the black cars and the men with earpieces, down the wet gravel road, into the tree line. Rain came sideways off the lake. Somewhere behind me the party music kept playing, cheerful and obscene.

I didn’t stop until I reached the only place in the world that had ever belonged to me: the old boathouse at the far end of Sinclair water, half-rotted, forgotten, mine.

I sat on the dock with my knees pulled to my chest and let myself cry exactly once.

The storm killed the lights at 11:40. I watched the whole shoreline go black in a wave—the compound, the guardhouse, the boat lamps—everything swallowed at once. No moon. No stars. Just black water and black sky and the sound of my own breathing.

Then I heard the engine.

Not a boat. A car. Doors slamming. Boots on gravel. Three, four sets.

“—said she came this way.”

“Little bastard girl. Nobody’s gonna report her missing, that’s the whole point.”

Ice slid down my spine. I stood up too fast and my heel scraped the dock.

Flashlight beams cut through the dark and pinned me like a moth.

“Well, hello, sweetheart.” The first man came out of the trees, tall, unshaven, a coil of rope in his fist. “Sergei’s gonna be very happy with us tonight.”

I backed up until the dock rail hit my spine. The lake was behind me. The men were in front of me. There was nowhere left.

“Don’t touch me,” I said. My voice shook so badly the words barely held together.

“She’s the one, yeah? The Sinclair girl nobody wants?”

“That’s the one. Grab her.”

A hand closed on my wrist.

And then a voice came out of the dark behind them—low, quiet, and somehow more terrifying than the storm.

“Take your hand off her.”

Every flashlight swung around.

And every single one of those men went white.