my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 13

My mother arrived at 6:40 in the morning.

She got out of the car in a coat that wasn’t hers, holding a paper bag with everything she owned in it, and she stopped dead in the drive when she saw the man standing beside me on the steps.

Damien took two steps down, put his hands behind his back so he’d look smaller-God, he actually did that-and said, “Ma’am. My name is Damien. Your daughter is my wife. I owe you an apology for the way that happened and about nineteen years of debts I intend to start paying today.”

My mother looked him up and down.

“You’re the Butcher,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you hit her?”

“No,” he said. “And I’ve spent two hours this morning talking with the men in my house about what we do to anyone who does. Would you like to hear the answer?”

“No,” my mother said. “I’d like to sit down and look at my daughter for a while.”

She stayed nine hours in the sun room without once letting go of my

hand, and by dinner Damien had drawn her a floor plan of a cottage. on the east ridge with a greenhouse on it, and she was arguing with

him about the size of the kitchen.

Later, he found me in the hall watching her through the glass.

“She’s terrifying,” he said.

“She’s the strongest person I know.”

“Second strongest.” He handed me a glass of something warm and hideously healthy. “Drink that. The doctor’s orders, and she has an opinion about my authority.”

There were still ugly things. There always are.

Sergei Bratva’s routes through Sinclair land closed inside eleven days, and it was not gentle, and I stopped asking for details after the third night.

My father’s fate was decided in a room I wasn’t in-by the Marchetti family, not by us, because Damien insisted the reckoning belonged to his own people. He was stripped, dishonored, and sent north with nothing. I’m told he lasted the winter. I’m told he asked for me twice.

I didn’t go.

Julian Marchetti wrote me four letters. In the third one he said he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. In the fourth one he asked if I’d put in a word with my husband about his position.

I put them all in the fire, and I didn’t cry, and that’s when I knew I was healed.

And Sienna-Sienna moved into a small apartment in the valley town with her mother, and every family in two territories received a copy of that folder, and every door that had ever been open to her closed politely in her face.

She came to the gate once, in November.

I went down.

She looked terrible. No coat that mattered. No audience.

“You could fix this,” she said. “One word from you.”

“I know.”

She waited.

“I’m not going to,” I said. “Not because I want you to suffer. Because I finally believe I’m allowed to say no to you.”

Sienna started to cry-real tears this time, unbeautiful ones.

“I was going to be somebody,” she whispered.

“You were somebody,” I said. “That was always the problem. You just couldn’t stand that I was too.”

I told the men to give her money for the winter, because I’m my mother’s daughter and not my father’s, and then I walked back up the hill and never opened that gate again.

That night I stood in front of the mirror in our bedroom in nothing but one of Damien’s shirts, and I looked at the faded mark on my throat-

almost gone now, just a shadow.

Damien came in behind me and saw where I was looking.

“It’s fading,” I said.

“I noticed.”

“You could fix that.”

He went very, very still.

Our eyes met in the mirror.

“Say it out loud,” he said, in a voice gone rough as gravel. “In daylight, you said. So say it.”

I pulled my hair off my shoulder and tipped my head to the side.

“Damien Volkov,” I said. “Put your name back on me.”

He crossed the room.

And this time there was no storm, no blackout, no rope in the trees

and no stranger in the dark. This time there was firelight, and my whole name in his mouth, and his hands shaking as he unbuttoned his own shirt off my shoulders.

And when he set his teeth against that same curve of my throat,

I watched my own face in the mirror-the maid’s bastard, the girl nobody wanted, the one they locked in a room to wait for death-and I did not look away from her once.