my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 05

Two hundred people held their breath.

“It’s not ” My tongue wouldn’t work. “It’s a bruise. I fell.”

“Don’t.” His voice never rose. That was the horrifying part. “Don’t lie to me in front of an audience. It costs me too much to let it pass.”

I made myself lift my chin.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s a bite. A man gave it to me the night before last.”

Behind him, my father made a strangled noise. Delphine grabbed his

arm.

Damien didn’t move.

“His name.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Try again.”

“I don’t know it.” My voice cracked open and everything in me came out with it. “The power was out. There was no moon. He was a shape in the dark. I never saw his face and he never said his name, and yes, I let him, and I’d let him again, because four men had just tried to put me in a van and he was the first person in my entire life who ever stood in front of me instead of behind me.” I was shaking. “So if

you’re going to kill me for it, do it here, in front of my father, and let him explain to your people why his bloodline wasn’t good enough to be worth a truce.”

Somewhere in the crowd, someone dropped a glass.

Damien Volkov looked at me for a very long time.

And then his eyes did something strange. They flicked-fast, involuntary-to my mouth. Then to the bite. Then back.

“The night before last,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Where.”

“A boathouse,” I said. “On the lake.”

Silence.

His hand came up. I flinched, hard, an instinct nineteen years in the making-and he stopped, three inches from my cheek, and something passed over his face that I could not read at all.

He took off his jacket instead and put it around my shoulders, covering my torn dress and my bruised throat, exactly the way another man had, forty-eight hours earlier, in the rain.

My knees almost gave out.

“Nikolai,” he said.

A silver-haired man appeared at his elbow.

“Every man in Sinclair territory who was at that lake on Thursday night,” Damien said. “I want them by morning. Alive. I have questions.”

“Yes, Alpha.”

Then Damien turned to face the courtyard, and his voice carried like a

struck bell.

“The contract stands. I take this woman as my wife tonight.”

Chaos. My father sagged with relief. Delphine actually clapped.

“But hear the terms,” Damien continued, “so no one embarrasses

themselves later. I will not touch her. I will not put a child in her. I will not wear a ring.” He paused. “Because there is a woman who belongs to me already. I claimed her two nights ago and she was gone before dawn, and I have been taking this valley apart looking for her ever since. When I find her, she will be the only woman in my house who matters. My wife will have my name, my protection, and my indifference. That is the whole of it.”

He looked around at the silent, terrified crowd.

“Anyone who wants to renegotiate can do it now.”

Nobody breathed.

“Good.”

He reached up-and hooked two fingers into the collar of his shirt, and drew out something on a chain around his neck.

A locket.

Small. Silver. Worn soft at the edges, with a hairline crack across the enamel where I’d dropped it on the kitchen tiles when I was twelve.

My mother’s locket.

“This is hers,” he said. “The woman who ran. Fifty thousand to

whoever brings me her name.”

The courtyard erupted in noise.

I didn’t hear any of it.

Because the entire world had narrowed to a small silver oval

swinging against a killer’s chest, and to a heavy man’s ring lying cold

between my breasts, and to five words falling through my skull like

stones down a well:

It was him.

It was him.

Oh God, it was him.

My knees buckled.

Damien Volkov caught me before I hit the ground, one arm under my back, my face against his shirt-cedar, rain, gunmetal-and I breathed him in and made a sound like a wounded animal.

“Easy,” he said, and for one second his voice was the voice from the boathouse, low and rough and gentle. “You’ve been beaten and you haven’t eaten. When did you last eat?”

I couldn’t answer. If I opened my mouth I would tell him everything.

And then I looked past his shoulder.

Sienna was staring at the locket. Staring at it with her lips parted and

her eyes bright and her mind moving fast, fast, fast.

And I watched my sister’s face light up with the most beautiful,

radiant idea she had ever had.