my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 06

They married us in ninety minutes.

No church, no vows I’d choose, no witnesses that loved me. A judge from the north who wouldn’t look me in the eye. My father signing the treaty page with a flourish, like he’d achieved something. Delphine crying into a napkin for the cameras.

Damien said “I do” like a man reading a shipping manifest.

I said it like a woman jumping off a bridge.

There was no ring. He’d told them there wouldn’t be.

By eleven I was in the back of an armored car, watching the only home I’d ever hated disappear behind the trees.

He sat across from me with a folder open on his knee, reading. He hadn’t spoken in forty minutes.

Tell him.

The words sat on my tongue like a coal. I’m the one. The locket is mine. My mother’s oil is on it, jasmine, you smelled it on my neck. The ring is around my throat right now.

But every time I opened my mouth, I heard Sienna: You’ll be a wife in name, waiting for the day he stops needing a decoration.

And underneath that, quieter and uglier: He said he’d been looking for her all his life. What happens when he finds out she’s the bastard the

whole valley laughs at? What happens when the fantasy turns out to

be me?

A woman who has been unwanted for nineteen years does not gamble the one night she was ever adored.

So I said nothing.

The Volkov estate was a fortress made of glass and black stone, cut into a mountainside above the water. Men in the drive straightened

up as we passed. Lights came on ahead of us like the house was waking.

He walked me in himself.

“Rules,” he said, climbing the stairs. “You go anywhere in the house except my study and the east wing. You don’t leave the grounds without Nikolai. If anyone from your father’s territory comes to that gate, you tell me, not them. And if you’re hurt, or hungry, or frightened, you say so out loud. This house doesn’t punish women. Ever. Understood?”

I stopped on the stair.

“Say it again,”

He turned. “Which part?”

“The part about being hurt.”

Something moved behind his eyes.

“No one in my house will ever put their hands on you,” he said. “Including me.”

I looked at the floor so he wouldn’t see my face.

He opened a door on a bedroom bigger than my father’s entire wing -fire lit, bed turned down, a tray of food waiting.

“Yours,” he said. “Mine’s at the other end of the hall. It stays that way.”

“You could have said no,” I said. “To the marriage. You could have chosen literally anyone.”

“I could have.”

“Why me?”

He stood there, one hand on the doorframe, and for a moment the mask slipped so far I could see straight through it.

“Because when your sister bared your throat,” he said quietly, “and two hundred people looked at that bite like it was proof you were worthless-every single one of them saw a ruined girl.”

“And what did you see?”

“I saw my own teeth,” he said.

The room tilted.

“What?”

“Not yours.” He shook his head, and the mask slammed back down. “The shape of it. The angle. It’s how I-” He stopped. Laughed, low and humorless, at himself. “I’ve been three days without sleep and I’m reading meaning into bruises. Goodnight, Mrs. Volkov.”

“Damien.”

He stopped.

“Two nights ago,” I said, before I could stop myself. “At the lake. Was she-did she seem afraid of you?”

He was very still.

“She fell asleep on my chest,” he said. “Nobody’s done that since I was nine years old.”

Then he walked away.

I closed the door, locked it, slid down it, and cried without making any

sound at all.

Somewhere below, a car door slammed.

I got up and looked out the window.

There was a black sedan in the drive with a Sinclair plate.

And climbing out of the back, in a white coat, holding a small silver-wrapped box like an offering-

Sienna.

She looked up at my window. She knew exactly which one was mine.

And she smiled, and mouthed four words at me through the glass:

I found her, siste