my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 12

He didn’t make it to the door.

“Nikolai,” Damien said. “Take Cohen Sinclair to the north room.

Nobody touches him. I’ll come down when I’ve stopped wanting to.”

“NO-” my father twisted in the guards’ hands, and then he did the stupidest thing he has ever done. He looked at me and screamed, “IVY! Ivy, tell him! You’re my daughter-”

Damien’s hand shot out and closed around his throat.

The hall went dead silent.

“Say that word again,” Damien said quietly, “and I will end this without

ceremony.”

My father did not say that word again.

They took him out. Julian Marchetti was escorted to a chair and given a phone and told to call his father and explain, personally, why the Marchetti family’s next capo had put his hands on a Volkov woman’s dress in public.

I have never heard a man beg so politely.

And Sienna-Sienna had gone very still by the stairs, calculating right up to the last second.

“Ivy,” she said softly. “Sister.”

“Don’t.”

“I was jealous.” Tears, right on cue. “You had him. Julian. You had someone who chose you and I had nothing but a mother telling me I

was decoration. I know what I did was-”

“You told him to bite me,” I said.

She blinked.

“What?”

“Julian.” I looked at her steadily. “In the courtyard. You put your hand under his jacket and you whispered in his ear and then he tore my dress in front of forty people. You did that so a monster would kill me in public. You’ve been trying to end me since I was nine years old, and the only thing that ever stopped you was that I wouldn’t break.”

Sienna’s face went through three expressions and settled, finally, on

the real one.

“You still don’t get it,” she hissed. “You were the maid’s child and everyone loved you anyway. Lena. Julian. Your mother. Even the old Alpha. That’s what I couldn’t stand.”

“I know,” I said, “That’s what I finally understood tonight.”

Damien turned to her.

“You claimed to be the woman I marked,” he said. “Do you understand what that means in my world? You looked me in the face and stole

my wife’s night. If you were a man, we would not be talking.”

Sienna lifted her chin, still magnificent, still doomed.

“So what are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing,” Damien said.

She laughed, shakily. “Nothing?”

“Nothing at all.” He signaled, and Nikolai brought a slim folder. “I’m going to send this to every family in both territories. Your statement. The vial. The photograph of the man who paid Bratva’s crew to name you. Your father’s ledgers.” He set it down. “And then I’m going to let you keep living in a world where everyone has read it. You’ll marry no one. You’ll be invited nowhere. You’ll be exactly what you always told my wife she was.”

Sienna’s face collapsed.

“That’s worse than killing me.”

“Yes,” Damien said. “Nikolai, drive her home.”

They took her out screaming my name.

I stood in the middle of that enormous hall in a borrowed robe until the doors closed and the noise stopped and everything was quiet.

Then I sat down on the bottom step, because my legs simply stopped agreeing to hold me.

Damien sat down beside me. Not touching. Careful.

“There’s a woman in a quiet house in the north valley,” I said.

“There’s a car already on the road,” he said. “She’ll be here before breakfast. There’s a wing being made up. There’s a doctor. If she wants a house of her own instead, she’ll have that, with a garden and men on the gate and a car whenever she wants one.” He paused. “I’d

like her to like me. I’m told that’s difficult.”

I laughed. It came out wet.

“Ivy.” He turned my hand over in his and looked at the crescent scar. “About the child-”

My stomach dropped. “It’s yours. I know how it sounded, the doctor said nine weeks, but he misread his own-”

“I know,” Damien said. “I had him wake up and check twice. Five weeks. Thursday.” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “I wasn’t going to ask if it was mine. I was going to ask if you want it. Because you’re nineteen, and you’ve had one week that would break most people, and I have never in my life given a woman anything she got to

choose.”

I stared at him.

“You’d let me choose?”

“I’d let you choose everything from now on,” he said. “Including me.”

The fire popped in the next room. Somewhere out in the dark, a car engine faded down the mountain.

“Then I want it,” I said. “And I want him at the table when they bring my mother in. And I want to be asked what I think before decisions are made about my life, forever, for the rest of it, even the small ones.”

“Done.”

“And one more thing.”

“Name it.”

“I want you to say it again,” I said. “The thing you said in the

boathouse.”

Damien Volkov leaned in and put his mouth against my temple.

“Mine,” he said.

“Yours,” I said. “This time in the daylight.”