my sister stole my fiancé so I married the devil Chapter 14

Our daughter was born on the first clear night of April, in a room full of candles, with my mother holding one of my hands and my husband holding the other, saying my name over and over like it was the only prayer he’d ever learned.

We named her Rosalind.

Damien held her for eleven straight hours. Nikolai has photographs. The Alpha of the north, who once emptied a compound alone, sat in a chair by a window until dawn with a seven-pound infant on his chest and would not let anyone take her, not for food, not for a phone call,

not for a war.

“She fell asleep on me,” he said hoarsely, when I finally woke.

“I know the feeling,” I said.

Two months later we married again.

Not the ninety-minute treaty in a hall of terrified strangers. A real one, in the garden, with a hundred people who had chosen to be there. Lena was my maid of honor and cried so hard she couldn’t get through the reading. My mother walked me down the aisle, in green, with dirt still under her fingernails from her greenhouse, and when the officiant asked who gave this woman, she said:

“Nobody. She’s not a thing to be given. But she’d like to stay, so make it worth her while.”

Damien wore his signet on his right hand and a plain gold band on his

left.

And when he lifted my veil, he said, quietly enough that only I could

hear it:

“I looked for you for four days and I thought it was the longest search of my life. It wasn’t. It was twenty-nine years.”

I put my hands on his face.

“Then stop looking,” I said.

Sometimes, on summer nights, we walk down to the water.

The old boathouse is still there. He bought the whole shoreline the week after Rosalind was born, and he had it rebuilt exactly as it was -same warped door, same wool blanket, same crooked window that lets the rain in when the wind comes off the lake.

People think it’s strange. A fortress on the ridge and a rotting boathouse he won’t let anyone touch.

They don’t know.

Only two people in the world know what happened in that room on the night the lights went out-the night I lost everything I’d been told to want, and walked into the dark, and found the one thing nobody could take away from me.

Last week I stood on that dock with my daughter on my hip, watching my husband skip stones like a boy, and Nikolai came down the path with his phone in his hand and his face grim.

“Alpha,” he said. “It’s about Sergei Bratva.”

Damien didn’t turn around.

“I told you,” he said. “No business at the lake.”

“He’s not dead,” Nikolai said. “And he’s been asking questions about your wife’s mother. About a marriage record from twenty years ago.”

Damien turned around slowly.

And I looked down at the locket around my neck-the one with the crack in the enamel, the one my mother gave me, the one she’d never once told me who’d paid for it.

A church record. A marriage record.

My father had come to that quiet house two weeks before the lake, my mother said, and he’d wanted every paper with the Sinclair name

on it.

Not to prove I was his.

To prove I wasn’t.

“Ivy,” my husband said, coming toward me fast, his hand already out.

“Give me the locket.”

I closed my fingers around it.

“Damien,” I said, “who am I?”