my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 09

They didn’t take me to the basement.

They took me to the study-the one room I’d been forbidden-and Damien was standing behind the desk with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his knuckles split open.

Sienna was already in the chair by the fire, hands folded, serene.

“Sit,” Damien said.

I sat.

“Four men,” he said. “Sergei Bratva’s crew. They picked up a girl’s trail at the Sinclair boathouse Thursday night and were about to load her when I came out of the trees.” He flexed his hand. “It took ninety minutes to get anything useful out of them, because two of them had already been paid by someone to forget.”

He set a photograph on the desk and turned it toward us.

Sienna. Taken outside a café. Her face circled in red marker.

“They were shown this,” he said. “Yesterday. By a man with a Sinclair car and an envelope of cash. And they were told that if anyone asked,

this was the woman at the lake.”

Sienna’s serenity did not so much as flicker.

“Then they’re liars,” she said calmly. “Or my father is protecting me. He’d do anything to stop Julian’s family finding out.”

“Convenient.”

“True.”

Damien turned to me.

“And you?” he said. “You went white in my hall when she made her claim. You’ve flinched every time that locket has come out. My wife is hiding something, and I’m long past being patient.”

The fire cracked.

Now. I felt the ring against my breastbone, warm from my skin.

“Ask me anything about that night,” I said.

“Fine.” His pale eyes locked on mine. “What did he give you?”

The room went silent.

Sienna’s head turned, very slightly.

“What?” I said.

“Before he slept,” Damien said, “he put something in her hand. Something no one else in this world has seen, because he never told a living soul he’d done it, and if she was there, she has it.” He leaned

forward on his fists. “So. What did he give you, Ivy?”

Two seconds.

That was all I had.

And in those two seconds I saw my mother’s face in the sun room, and I heard a debt was owed and you were what he had, and I understood with a sick lurch that if I produced the Volkov seal right now, in this room, with Sienna watching, my sister would go straight to my father-and my father would go straight to Sergei Bratva- and there was a woman in a quiet house in the north valley with four hours of guards and no walls.

“He gave me his coat,” I said.

Damien’s jaw tightened.

“Wrong,” he said quietly.

Sienna exhaled.

“A ring,” she said. “He gave me a ring.”

I stopped breathing.

“Describe it.”

“Heavy. Old. A man’s ring.” Sienna’s voice was perfectly steady. “I panicked in the morning. I was engaged. I threw it in the lake.”

Damien looked at her for a long, long moment.

“You threw it in the lake.”

“I was frightened.”

He turned away toward the window, and I watched his shoulders lock, and I knew-God, I knew-that she had guessed, that she had gambled, and that she had landed close enough.

“Nikolai,” he said. “Divers on the boathouse shoal at first light.”

“Alpha.”

“And put her in the east wing.” He didn’t look at Sienna. “Not as a guest. As a possibility.”

Sienna rose, dipped her head like a queen accepting a room, and glided past me. As she passed my chair, her hand brushed my shoulder, and she breathed one word into my hair, warm and delighted:

“Checkmate.”

The door shut.

I stood up on legs that didn’t feel like mine.

“Damien-”

“Don’t.” He was still facing the window. “Whatever it is, don’t. I’ve had four men’s blood on my hands tonight and I’m holding on by my fingernails.”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Then tell me tomorrow.”

“It can’t wait until-”

I turned toward him too fast.

The room tipped. The edges of my vision went grey and grainy, and the last thing I felt was the rug coming up to meet me, and a chair going over, and a man’s voice-not cold, not controlled, ripped open- shouting my name from very far away.

I woke in my own bed with a doctor’s hand on my wrist and Damien Volkov standing at the foot of the bed like a statue of a war.

And the doctor said, cheerfully, to the room:

“Congratulations, Alpha. Your wife is nine weeks-”

He stopped.

Because he’d looked up. Because he’d seen Damien’s face.

Because everyone in that room knew Damien Volkov had sworn in

front of two hundred witnesses that he would never once touch me.