They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 06

They Sold Me. The Devil Married Me Chapter 06

“Not yet?”

I spun around. He was still in his travel coat, still holding his bag, looking at the tile like it was an open

wound.

“What does yet mean, Nikolai? What is this room? How long-” my voice cracked open, “-how long have you known me?”

For one second I saw it. The truth rising in his eyes, enormous, terrifying.

Then he did the worst possible thing.

He shut it down.

“It’s late,” he said. Flat. Final. “You shouldn’t have come in here.”

“Are you serious-”

“The doctor said no stress in the first trimester.” He reached past me and closed the case, turning the light off over nine years of my own face. “Go to bed, Elena.”

“Don’t you dare handle me. I married you blind, on a clock, because you were the only person in my life who told me the truth. So tell me now. Who am I to you?”

He stopped in the doorway, his back to me, shoulders rigid.

“You’re my wife,” he said. “For eleven more months.”

He might as well have hit me.

I walked out. He didn’t stop me.

We lived like polite strangers for six days. Breakfast in silence. Hallways timed to avoid each other. And every gentle thing he’d done got reread in a new and sinister light – he knew me, he studied me, he was waiting outside those gates – until I couldn’t tell anymore whether I’d been rescued or collected.

Then Thursday night, passing his study, I heard my name.

His voice. Low. On the phone.

I know what eavesdroppers deserve. I stopped anyway.

-no. She doesn’t know anything.” A pause. “Elena isn’t the point. She was never the point. She’s the instrument. Once the Tabfe vote closes and Moretti signs the harbor over, the arrangement ends and I move to the last piece.”

The instrument.

The arrangement.

The exact vocabulary Matteo had used about me over a glass of champagne in my mother’s dining room.

I don’t remember getting to my room. I remember sliding down the door to the floor with both hands over my mouth, learning that a heart can break twice in one month, and the second time is quieter.

Asset, said my father’s voice. Arrangement, said Matteo’s. Instrument, said the man whose hand I’d started reaching for in my sleep.

Fine.

Fine.

I’d survived being an asset. I’d survive being an instrument. I’d take his name and his protection for exactly the contract term, feel nothing, want nothing, and walk out in eleven months with my baby and my grandmother’s harbor and my heart in a lead box where no man would ever-

My phone lit up.

Forty-one notifications. Sixty. Ninety, climbing while I watched.

My friend Renata – my only friend, the one who’d texted me every single day since the ballroom – was

calling.

She didn’t say hello.

“Lena. Honey. Do not open your phone. Promise me. Okay, you’re opening your phone.”

I was opening my phone.

The city news alert had my name in it.

EXCLUSIVE: Camilla Bellandi breaks her silence – “The baby my sister is carrying is my husband’s. Nikolai Varga has been deceived. And I have the original tape.”

Below it: a grainy photo of Matteo entering my old apartment building. Time-stamped three weeks before the engagement party. Recaptioned into filth.

And below that, the part that stopped my heart:

Sources confirm the Table has been convened. An emergency sit-down has been called for 9 A.M.

tomorrow at the Varga Building. Subject: the Moretti woman.

In our world, that isn’t a press conference.

That’s a sentencing.

I called him.

Straight to voicemail.

I called his second, Gavrel. “Mrs. Varga,” he said, smooth and horrifying, “we’d advise you not to make any

statements before tomorrow.”

Before tomorrow. Where, sources said, my husband would be handing me over.

The man who flew home from Belgrade in eleven hours because I opened a door had gone completely, perfectly silent.