The Devil claimed her

Chapter 1: The Price of Love The espresso machine hissed for the fourth time in an hour, and Elena Rossi's feet screamed in protest inside shoes that had given up cushioning months ago. Two more hours. Then she could sleep for four hours before the library shift, then class, and then the hospital gift shop, where she restocked flowers for people who could afford to die comfortably. She wiped down the counter for the second time, though she didn't need it, and counted the minutes on the clock above the pastry case the way other people counted sheep. Her manager had already told her twice to smile more for the late crowd, as if exhaustion were a scheduling problem instead of a permanent condition. Elena smiled anyway, because the alternative was crying in front of a customer who only wanted oat milk, and let herself hold onto the thought that kept her upright most nights: Marco. Her brother had texted her twice already tonight. A photo of his physics notes, covered in doodles instead of equations. Look what I made instead of studying, don't kill me. Then, ten minutes later: Jk I actually studied. Love you, Lena. She typed back a laughing emoji and tucked the phone into her apron before her manager could notice. Eighteen years old and already the only bright thing in her life. Their parents had been gone since she was fourteen — a car that skidded off a coastal road in weather that hadn't warranted the speed they were going, according to a police report that never quite made sense to her, not that anyone had time to question it twice. Since then, it had been the two of them, a rented apartment above a shuttered bakery, and Elena's stubborn refusal to let her brother grow up feeling like an orphan. She was still thinking about him when she got home a little after midnight and found the door already open. Not open like she'd forgotten to lock it. Open like it had been kicked. "Marco?" The apartment was dark except for the flicker of the muted television, and for one suspended second Elena thought maybe he'd fallen asleep watching something and left the door unlatched. Then she saw the coffee table on its side. The lamp in pieces. And her brother was on the floor, curled around his ribs, a man's boot planted on his outstretched hand. "Marco!" She was across the room before she'd decided to move, and someone's arm caught her around the waist and threw her back like she weighed nothing. "Ah, ah." The voice belonged to a thick-necked man in an expensive coat that didn't fit his face. "Let's not make this messier than it has to be, sweetheart." "What do you want? Money? I don't have Marco, are you?" "Twenty-eight thousand," the man said, almost bored, like he was reading off a grocery list. "Plus interest. Your brother thought a loan from Kesler's people came with a payment plan. It doesn't." Elena's stomach dropped off the floor. She knew that name. Everyone on their side of the city knew that name, the way you knew which streets not to walk down after dark. "He's eighteen," she said, her voice shaking. "He didn't know what he was signing. Please, I'll pay it back, I'll get a second job, a third, don't—" "With what?" The boot on Marco's hand pressed down until his brother made a sound that wasn't quite a scream, more like the air being forced out of him. "You make coffee for tourists. You'll be paying this off when you're eighty." "Stop! Please, God, stop, I'll do anything—" The man tilted his head, and something in his expression shifted, curious now instead of bored, like she'd finally said something worth his attention. "Anything," he repeated. He crouched to look at Marco once more, a warning, not a mercy, then straightened and walked to her instead, close enough that she could smell cigarettes and cologne that cost more than her rent. "Funny you should say that." He reached into his coat and produced a slim black envelope, sealed in wax, and held it out between two fingers like it might be diseased. "Someone with considerably deeper pockets than mine had already taken an interest in your brother's little debt. Bought it to clean Kesler's books this morning." Elena stared at the envelope without taking it. "Who?" "Open it and find out." Her hands were shaking so badly it took her three tries to break the seal. Inside was a single-embossed card, the kind used for weddings, edged in gold. Her own name was printed on it in an elegant script. Beside it, a name she'd only ever heard in the same hushed, frightened tone people used for storms and diagnoses. Elena Isabella Rossi & Lucian De Luca. The card felt too heavy for paper, like it carried the weight of everything printed on it. Somewhere in the city, she thought wildly, there were florists arranging centerpieces for weddings that people actually wanted, brides picking out shoes instead of being handed an invitation like a subpoena. "That's a mistake," she whispered. "I don't know him. I've never met him." "He knows you." The man's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Or he will, by tomorrow night. The debt's gone, sweetheart. Congratulations. You're getting married." "I won't do it." "Then Marco didn't walk again." He said it so gently, so reasonably, that it took her a full second to understand he meant it. "Mr. De Luca was very specific about the terms. You show up. You sign. Your brother lives, whole, healthy, university paid for all of it. Or you don't show up, and I promise you, what happens to him tonight will look like a hug compared to what happens next." The room tilted. Marco made a small, broken sound from the floor, and it was that sound, not the threat, not the envelope, not the name that made grown men lower their voices that decided everything. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'll do it. Just leave him alone. Please." The man studied her for a moment longer, then straightened his coat and stepped out of her brother's hand as casually as he might step off a curb. "Smart girl. Someone will be in touch." He paused at the door, glancing back at her with something almost like pity. "For what it's worth, I wouldn't wish this on anyone. But you didn't have a debt tonight, princess. You had a buyer." Then he was gone, and the door hung crooked on its hinges, and the apartment was silent except for Marco's ragged breathing and the muted television still flickering blue light across the wreckage of their coffee table. "Lena." Marco's voice cracked as she dropped to her knees beside him, gathering his battered hand in both of hers, checking his ribs, his face, the blood at his hairline. "Lena, what did you just agree to?" "Nothing. Everything's fine. I'm going to get you some ice—" "Don't." He caught her wrist before she could stand, and for a moment he looked less like her little brother and more like the boy who'd sat beside her at their parents' funeral, too young to understand why the world had cracked open beneath them. "I heard him. I heard the name. Elena, that man is—" "I know who he is." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "It doesn't matter. You're not dying over twenty-eight thousand dollars because some loan shark thought a teenager was an easy mark. I'm not losing you either." "So instead, I get to watch you marry a monster?" She didn't answer that, because she didn't have an answer that wouldn't break them both. She got him ice. She got him onto the couch, checked that nothing in his hand was broken beyond a bruise so deep it had gone purple-black, and told him three separate lies about how everything would be fine, how she'd find a way out, how nobody was actually going to make her marry a stranger with blood on his hands. She was still holding his ice pack in place, still rehearsing the fourth lie, when headlights swept across the water-stained ceiling of their apartment, and a car door closed outside with the quiet, expensive click of something that had never needed to be closed twice. Elena went to the window. The car below was long and black and utterly silent, the kind of car that didn't belong on their street, didn't belong near their building, didn't belong anywhere within a mile of the life she and Marco had scraped together out of double shifts and secondhand furniture. No driver stepped out. No footsteps announced themselves on the stairs. The car simply waited. And somehow, without a single word passing between them, Elena understood with total certainty that it was waiting for her. She looked down at the wedding invitation still crushed in her fist, gold leaf catching the streetlight, and thought that it looked less like a proposal and more like a death sentence dressed up in expensive paper. Downstairs, a car door opened on its own, someone unseen, someone patient, someone who already knew she would come. The Devil had sent for his bride.