my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 02

“Do you know who that is?” one of them choked.

“Nobody move,” another hissed. “Nobody move—”

I couldn’t see him. That was the thing I would remember for the rest of my life. The power was out on the entire shoreline; there was no moon, no lamp, nothing but rain and black. He was a shape. A silhouette the size of a door.

“I’m going to count to three,” the shape said. “One.”

They ran.

Four grown men with rope and knives, and they ran like boys.

Then it was just me, and him, and the sound of the lake.

He came down the dock slowly, the way you approach something wounded. I should have run too. Every rational cell in my body screamed it. But my legs didn’t move, and when he stopped in front of me I realized I was shaking, and not entirely from fear.

He smelled like rain, cedar, and gunmetal.

“Are you hurt?” His voice was quieter now. Rougher.

“No.” A pause. “They were going to sell me.”

“They’re going to die.” He said it the way other people say it’s Tuesday. Then, softer: “You’re freezing.”

His coat came around my shoulders, still warm from his body, and I made a small, humiliating sound and burst into tears against a stranger’s chest.

He didn’t tell me to stop. He didn’t say the useless things. He put one hand on the back of my head and held me while the storm went on breaking around us, and for the first time in nineteen years, I was standing behind someone instead of in front of everything.

“Who did this to you?” he asked.

“My family,” I said. “Everyone. All of them.”

His arms tightened. And something in the air between us shifted, and pulled, and caught fire.

I don’t know which one of us moved first. I’ve replayed it a thousand times and I still don’t know.

I only know his mouth found mine in the dark like he’d been starving for years, that his hands framed my face like I was something worth breaking rules over, that I climbed into that kiss and forgot my own name.

“Tell me to stop,” he said against my throat, ragged.

“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t.”

We never saw each other’s faces.

He carried me inside the boathouse, out of the rain, onto a wool blanket that smelled like summer, and he took his time with me like I was the last good thing on earth. He learned me in the dark. He asked me, over and over, in a voice that shook, if this was what I wanted. He said beautiful into my collarbone like it was a prayer.

And near the end, when I was falling apart in his arms, he set his teeth against the curve of my shoulder—not hard enough to break skin, hard enough to mark, hard enough that I felt it in my bones—and growled one word:

“Mine.”

“Yours,” I said. And I meant it, God help me, I meant it with everything I had left.

Afterward, I lay against his chest and listened to his heart and thought: This is what it feels like to be chosen.

“Stay,” he murmured, half-asleep, his hand splayed across my back. “In the morning, I’ll tell you everything. And then I’m taking you out of here.”

“You don’t even know who I am.”

“I know exactly who you are.” His lips brushed my hair. “You’re the one I’ve been looking for.”

Then, in the dark, he found my hand. He pressed something into my palm—cold, heavy metal. A ring. A man’s ring, thick, engraved with a crest I couldn’t see.

“If you ever need me,” he said, “show anyone this ring. Anyone at all. And they’ll bring you straight to me.”

I fell asleep with it clenched in my fist.

I woke at 4 a.m. with the storm gone and my whole life crashing back down on me.

Because I remembered what I was.

I was the illegitimate daughter of Cohen Sinclair. I had been humiliated in front of the entire compound twelve hours ago. Men had come to the lake to take me, sent by someone, and no one had come looking. If I stayed, if he saw my face in daylight and heard my name, he would find out he’d spent the night with the most worthless girl in three counties.

Better to keep it perfect.

I dressed in the dark. I looked at the shape of him sleeping, and I touched his jaw once, gently, with two fingertips.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “For all of it.”

Then I unhooked my mother’s locket from my neck—the only thing I owned, jasmine oil worn into the silver—and set it on his chest.

And I ran home.

The house was already awake. My father’s voice boomed from the dining room, warm the way it never was for me.

“The Marchetti heir, Sienna! Do you understand what this does for us?”

I made it up the back stairs. I made it to my bathroom. I peeled off my ruined dress.

And I saw it in the mirror.

A dark bruise, deep purple, unmistakably a bite, sitting at the base of my throat where no scarf on earth would hide it.

Behind me, the door banged open.

“There you are,” Sienna said sweetly. “Daddy wants—”

She stopped.

Her eyes locked onto my neck. And her whole face lit up like Christmas morning.

“DADDY!” she screamed down the stairs. “COME SEE WHAT THE MAID’S BASTARD DID LAST NIGHT!”