my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 10

Nine weeks was wrong.

I found out later the doctor misread the chart in his own handwriting;

I was nine days past a positive test, barely five weeks along.

But nobody in that room did math.

They did arithmetic of a different kind, and it went like this: the Alpha’s new wife, who arrived wearing another man’s teeth, was pregnant with another man’s child.

The doctor left very quickly.

Damien didn’t move for a full minute.

“Out,” he said at last. Nikolai and the two guards evaporated.

Then it was just us and the fire.

“Say something,” I whispered.

“What would you like me to say?” His voice was so quiet it terrified me, “I married you eleven hours ago. I stood in front of your father, your sister, and every family in two territories and I gave you my name. Do you know what that name costs? Do you know what I burned to make it worth something?”

“Damien-”

“There are four hundred people who eat because they’re under Volkov protection.” He finally looked at me and his eyes were the palest, deadest things I have ever seen. “And by Sunday every one of them will hear that the Alpha’s untouched wife is carrying. They’ll hear it from your sister first.”

I sat up. “Then let me tell you the truth-”

“The truth.” He laughed. It was awful. “The truth is that some man in the dark got everything I’ve been tearing this valley apart to find, and then I married the woman he left it in.”

“That’s not ”

“His name, Ivy.”

“You don’t want his name.”

“His name.” He crossed the room in three strides and gripped the bedpost so hard the wood groaned. “Give it to me and I swear on my mother’s grave, I will end him quickly, I will claim that child as mine in front of every family in the north, and you will never lack for anything as long as you live. That’s the best offer I have ever made another human being. Take it.”

And I looked up at the father of my child, begging me to let him. murder himself.

And I started to laugh, and then I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop doing either.

“You can’t kill him,” I said.

“Watch me.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

And I nearly said it.

I had the chain in my fist under the blanket. One pull and it would have been over.

And then, from downstairs, we both heard it: the gate alarm, then car doors, then a voice I would have known at the bottom of the ocean, booming through the great hall like he owned it.

“Where is she? WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?”

My father.

Damien’s head turned slowly toward the door.

“Nobody knows,” he said softly. “Nobody in this house knows about the pregnancy yet except one doctor, two guards, and Nikolai.”

“Then how-”

“They don’t,” he said. “He’s here for something else.”

He was right.

My father was standing in the great hall in his good coat, red-faced, with two of his men behind him and Julian Marchetti at his shoulder.

Sienna was already at the bottom of the stairs, playing frightened.

“Alpha Volkov.” My father spread his hands. “I’ve come to correct a mistake, respectfully. There has been a-confusion of daughters.”

“Has there.”

“My Sienna is the woman you’re seeking. She’s told me everything.” He put his hand on Sienna’s shoulder like a proud father in a photograph. “And Ivy-Ivy is not what she seems. She’s illegitimate, she’s a liar, she has a history of claiming things that aren’t hers-”

“She’s also my wife,” Damien said.

“A wife who was already ruined when I handed her to you.” My father’s voice sharpened. “I offer a solution. Annul it. Take Sienna. Return Ivy to me, and this family will consider the matter closed. Quietly. Tonight.”

I gripped the banister at the top of the stairs.

Because I finally understood what return her to me meant. It meant a car. It meant the north road. It meant a debt to Sergei Bratva, still

unpaid.

Damien turned his head and looked up the staircase at me.

And I don’t know what he saw on my face.

But I watched his expression change-slowly, completely, the way ice changes when it starts to break.

“Cohen,” he said pleasantly, walking toward my father. “Would you

like to know what your daughter’s face did just now when you offered

to take her home?”

“I-what?”

“She was afraid,” Damien said. “Not sad. Not ashamed. Afraid. And

I’ve spent my whole life around frightened people, so I’ve become something of an expert.” He stopped a foot away. “Which makes me wonder why four of Sergei Bratva’s men were at your boathouse on Thursday night with rope, expecting a girl nobody would report

missing.”

The color went out of my father’s face so fast it was like watching a light switch.

“Nikolai,” Damien said. “Close the gates.”