They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 02

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 02

I didn’t take the card.

I walked. Four miles, in heels, in that dress, because some stupid, childish, seven-year-old part of me still believed that when the doors closed and the guests went home, my mother would come find me.

She didn’t.

So at two in the morning I climbed the wall of my own family’s compound — I knew where the cameras blinked, I’d been sneaking out over that wall since I was fifteen — and I let myself into the kitchen.

And I heard laughter.

Not the tense laughter of a family in crisis. Not the hushed voices of people whose daughter had just been declared a rat.

Champagne laughter.

I pushed open the dining room door.

They were celebrating.

My father at the head of the table. My mother, flushed and radiant. My aunt. My brother, drinking. And at my father’s right hand — the seat that had been mine since I was born — sat Camilla.

Wearing my grandmother’s ring.

Matteo’s hand was on her thigh.

“Lena!” My mother’s smile didn’t even flicker. “God, you’re still in that dress. Sit down, you look ill.”

“You,” I said. “You just—there’s a gun mark on my temple, look at it, look at it—”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“You were my maid of honor,” I said to my sister.

Camilla tilted her head. Twenty-five years of that head-tilt. “And you,” she said sweetly, “were in the way.”

I went for her.

I don’t remember deciding. I remember my brother’s arms locking around my ribs, my mother’s nails in my wrist, and Camilla shrieking and folding into Matteo’s chest like a bird with a broken wing — like I was the animal, like I was the danger in that room.

“She’s hysterical!” my mother snapped.

“I’M HYSTERICAL?” It tore out of me raw. “They faked my voice! Papa put a gun to my head! And you’re drinking champagne—”

“Lower. Your. Voice.”

My father didn’t shout. He never shouts.

“The Bellandi alliance is worth the harbor and forty years of peace,” he said. “That alliance requires a Moretti daughter. Camilla secured it. You lost it. Which girl wears the ring is irrelevant to me.” He straightened his cuffs. “That’s the whole story.”

Twenty-seven years. Straight A’s. Nursing school at night so I could still run his books by day. Never once asked him for anything.

That’s the whole story.

Matteo spoke for the first time. He wasn’t ashamed. He was bored.

“Elena. We’ll have your things sent somewhere. Let’s keep it civilized.”

“Three years,” I said. “Three years of dinners and rings and let’s push the wedding to spring, baby—”

“Never’s a strong word,” he said, swirling his glass. “I considered it. Your sister offered a better arrangement.”

Arrangement.

Something in my brain caught on that word like a hook in cloth. Cold. Wrong. But before I could pull it loose, my mother had me by the elbow, steering me toward the door the way a waitress removes a dropped plate.

“Mama.” I searched her face. One flicker. One crack. “I’m your daughter too.”

She hesitated.

For one second I let myself hope.

“Then act like it,” she said. “The betrothal dinner is Friday. Smile. Wear something nice. Don’t embarrass us twice.”

The door shut in my face.

I stood in the driveway of the house I grew up in, wearing an engagement dress and a bruise, with nowhere on this earth to go.

My hand drifted to my stomach.

“Okay,” I whispered to the only family I had left. “Okay. It’s just us. I’ve got you.”

My phone buzzed. Unknown number.

【Miss Moretti. The offer expires at midnight.】

【Before you delete this, my employer suggests one question.】

【Why did they need you branded a rat TONIGHT — when they could have quietly broken the engagement a year ago?】

I stopped breathing.

Because that was it. That was the hook in the cloth.

Arrangement, Matteo had said. Asset, my father had said.

None of this was passion. None of it was even cruelty for its own sake.

It was scheduled.

A second message. An address on the harbor. A time: 11 p.m.

Then one more line that lifted every hair on my arms:

【Come alone. And Miss Moretti — congratulations on the baby.】

Nobody knew about the baby.

Nobody.