my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 03

My father hit me before he asked a single question.

The back of his hand caught my cheekbone and put me on the tile floor beside the tub. I heard my stepmother, Delphine, gasp from the doorway—not in horror. In delight.

“Cohen, look at her neck.”

He crouched down and took my jaw in his hand and turned my head to the light like he was inspecting a horse.

“Who,” he said, “put his mouth on my daughter?”

My daughter. He’d never once called me that except when I’d damaged him.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” He squeezed until my teeth ground together. “You spread your legs for a man in the woods and you don’t know his name?”

“There was a blackout.” My voice came out thin. “I never saw his face.”

“She’s lying,” Sienna said, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed. “She did it to spite Julian. She’s been throwing herself at him for years, and the second he chose me, she went and got herself used like a—”

“Sienna,” Delphine cooed, “don’t say such things in front of your father.”

Sienna smiled at me. “Sorry. Like her mother.”

The second kick landed in my ribs.

I curled up on the cold floor with my arms over my head, the way I’d learned to at eleven years old, and I thought about my mother.

Her name was Rosalind. She was twenty-two and cleaning the Sinclair kitchens when Cohen Sinclair drank too much at a christening. When she started showing, he told the family she’d seduced him for money. They sent her to the “quiet house” in the north valley—the place this family sends women who become inconvenient—and they kept me, because his boss ordered him to, and he never forgave either of us for it.

I’d seen her nine times in nineteen years.

“Get up,” my father said finally, breathing hard.

I got up.

He stared at my throat for a long moment, and I watched something change behind his eyes. The rage cooled. Something worse replaced it. Calculation.

“You know what tonight is,” he said.

I did. Everyone in both territories knew what tonight was.

Every generation, the Volkovs and the Marchettis sign the truce in blood or in blood-relation—and it has been three generations since a Volkov took a wife from our side. Tonight, at the Alliance Gala, Damien Volkov would stand in our ballroom and choose a woman to marry.

Damien Volkov. The Butcher of the Vale.

The stories about him weren’t rumors; they were arithmetic. Six families had moved against him in eight years. Six families no longer existed. They said he’d walked into the Kozlov compound alone and walked out alone, and that no one ever found what was left. They said he didn’t drink, didn’t laugh, didn’t sleep.

And our own boss, old Alberto Marchetti, was seventy-nine and failing.

“You’ll be at that gala,” my father said. “You’ll find a man who will take you off my hands tonight. Any man. I don’t care if he’s a bookkeeper with a limp.”

I stared at him.

“And if no one wants me?”

He wiped my blood off his knuckles with a hand towel, folded it neatly, and set it on the sink.

“Then I’ll have a problem,” he said. “And I solve problems, Ivy. Ask your mother.”

The world went very quiet and very cold.

“You’d kill me.”

“I’d correct an error.” He straightened his cuffs. “You’ve cost this family standing since the day you were born. If you can’t be an asset by midnight, you’ll be a burial. Wear something with a high collar.”

He walked out.

Delphine followed him, humming.

Sienna stayed.

She came and stood over me while I sat on the bathroom floor with my ribs screaming, and she tucked my hair behind my ear with a tenderness that made my skin crawl.

“Poor Ivy,” she whispered. “Do you know the worst part? Nobody at that gala will touch you. They all know what you are. So you’ll stand there for four hours in a pretty dress, and then Daddy will take you for a drive.”

She smiled.

“Unless,” she said, “somebody speaks up for you.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t.” She stood, brushed off her skirt, and walked to the door. “I just want to be the one who watches.”

She stepped out into the hall.

And then I heard the sound that turned my blood to ice water—a key, sliding into my bedroom lock, and turning.

“Sienna!” I threw myself against the door. “SIENNA!”

Her voice came through the wood, warm and amused.

“Rest up, sister. Trust me. You’re going to need it.”

Then footsteps, fading, and silence.

And in the pocket of my robe, cold against my hip, sat a heavy man’s ring engraved with a crest I still hadn’t dared to look at in the light.