my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 11

The gates closed with a sound like a coffin lid.

My father tried, God help him, to bluff.

“You’re taking the word of rogues over a Marchetti capo—”

“I’m taking the word of four men who had no reason to lie by the end,” Damien said, “and the word of a shipping ledger my people pulled out of your warehouse six weeks ago, and the word of my own eyes when I walked into your courtyard and saw a nineteen-year-old girl flinch away from her father’s hand.” He tipped his head. “Do you know what happens in my house to men who sell women, Cohen?”

Julian took a step back toward the door.

“Sit down, Marchetti,” Damien said, without looking. Julian sat.

And Sienna-my brilliant, beautiful sister-did what she has always done when a ship starts sinking.

She started throwing people off it.

“Father,” she gasped, “what did you do?”

“Sienna-”

“You told me she went for a walk!” Sienna spun toward Damien, tears already flowing. “Alpha, I swear to you, I knew nothing, I would never

“You knew,” I said.

Everyone looked up.

I came down the stairs slowly, in a borrowed robe, with my hair loose and my face bare and my heart going like a hammer.

“You knew,” I said, “because on Thursday afternoon you took the oil out of my drawer. And there was no reason on earth to do that unless you already knew I wouldn’t be coming back to that room.”

Sienna’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“Say it isn’t my oil,” I said. “Say it in front of him. Say the vial you handed him isn’t the one with the chipped stopper my mother dropped when I was twelve.”

“You-”

“Say my mother’s locket isn’t mine.” My voice broke wide open. “Say the crack in the enamel isn’t from the kitchen tiles at the north house. Say you can describe the inside of it. Say what’s engraved in it,

Sienna.”

Silence.

Damien reached up and pulled the chain out of his collar.

He opened the locket.

He read what was inside, and his hand-the hand that had put four men in a basement without shaking-began, very slightly, to tremble.

“For my Ivy,” he read aloud. “From the only person who chose you. Mama.”

The great hall was so quiet I could hear the fire in the next room.

Damien lifted his head.

“Ivy,” he said. And my name in his mouth was not an accusation anymore. It was a plea.

“He gave me his coat first,” I said. “Then he gave me his ring.”

I pulled the chain over my head.

The signet swung, heavy and gold, catching the light.

I heard Nikolai say something in Russian. I heard my father make a strangled noise. I heard Sienna whisper, “No-”

“You said, if you ever need me, show anyone this ring and they’ll bring you straight to me.” I was shaking so badly I could barely hold it. “And then you said-” my voice failed, and I made it work anyway, “-you said stay, and in the morning you’d tell me everything, and then you’d take me out of here.”

Damien crossed the hall.

He did not take the ring.

He took my wrist, and he pushed back the sleeve of the robe, and he turned my arm over-looking for something. And he found it: a small, crescent-shaped scar on the inside of my forearm, where I’d caught myself on a nail in that boathouse at eleven years old.

He’d traced it in the dark. I remembered his thumb on it. I

remembered him asking what it was and me saying nothing, an old house, and him kissing it anyway.

He made a sound I will never forget as long as I live.

“You were in my house for four days,” he said hoarsely. “Four days. I sat at a table with you. I told you to sleep. You were three doors

away.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you were looking for a woman who felt like a miracle,” I said, “and I was afraid of what your face would do when you found out she was the girl the whole valley calls the maid’s bastard.”

Damien Volkov, the Butcher of the Vale, went down on one knee on the floor of his own great hall in front of two hundred years of family

enemies.

“Look at my face now,” he said.

I looked.

There were tears on it.

“Now put it on me,” he said, and held out his hand.

And I slid his ring back onto his finger with both of mine, and he pressed his forehead against my stomach and held on like a drowning man.

Then he stood up.

And when he turned around, he was not crying anymore, and my

father took one look at him and ran for the door.