SOLD TO THE DEVIL

THE DEVIL SHE MARRIED

They gave me a room that was worth more than everything I had ever owned added together and multiplied.

I know that sounds like an exaggeration. It isn't. I stood in the center of it and I looked at the high ceiling and the long curtains and the bed with its white pressed sheets and I felt completely out of place in a way that was almost funny.

I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to think clearly.

Running was the first thing that came to mind. It always is. The window was tall and the night outside looked very dark, and even if I could have gotten it open, I was somewhere I didn't recognize, with no money, no phone, and no idea how far from anything I was. The drive from Dorian's house had taken long enough that I had lost track of direction entirely.

So I sat there instead.

A woman came in before the sun was properly up. She was efficient and brisk in the way of someone who has been given a job to do and intends to do it without unnecessary conversation. She moved through the room with a clipboard and a slightly rehearsed tone.

"You'll bathe here," she said. "These are your clothes for today. Hair and makeup will be handled at eight. The ceremony begins at ten."

"Wait." I stood up from the bed. "What ceremony? Who am I marrying? Nobody has told me anything."

She stopped at the door and looked at me for a moment. "Mr. Cassian Virelli."

Then she left, pulling the door softly closed behind her, leaving me alone with a name I had never heard and a feeling in my chest that was somewhere between dread and something I couldn't name yet.

I bathed because there was nothing else to do. I sat in the deep white tub and stared at the ceiling and let the hot water run over me and tried not to think too hard about what I was walking into. When I got out, I let the women who came in do my hair and my face because resisting them felt pointless and I was already so tired. They dressed me in a white gown that fit me so perfectly it was unsettling. Someone had taken my measurements, or guessed them with frightening accuracy, and the thought of that made something cold move across my skin.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.

She looked calm, the woman looking back at me. That was the thing that surprised me most. I had been slapped and taken from a house in the rain and driven somewhere I didn't know and told I was getting married in a few hours, and my face had somehow settled into something that looked almost composed..

I thought that might come in useful. A different woman came at half past nine to take me downstairs.

The room they led me into was small for a wedding. There were no rows of seats, no crowd of people watching, no flowers lining an aisle. A few suited men stood near the walls like furniture. Two older women sat near the front with the careful expressions of people who have learned not to show their opinions in public. The officiant stood at the front and looked like he was running through a very long mental list of places he would rather be.

I walked to the front and stood where I was supposed to stand and waited.

He didn't come.

Ten o'clock passed. Ten fifteen. I kept my hands still at my sides and fixed my eyes on a point on the wall and breathed slowly and did not let myself fidget. One of the suited men near the door shifted his weight. The older women exchanged a glance. The officiant cleared his throat.

Then the doors opened.

The footsteps I heard were unhurried. There was no apology in them, no hurry, no acknowledgment of the time at all. They moved at the pace of someone who has never once arrived anywhere and worried about whether people were waiting. I turned my head slowly.

Cassian Virelli was younger than I expected. That was the first thing that registered. He looked perhaps thirty, perhaps thirty-two, with dark hair and a jaw that was slightly sharp and a face that would have been genuinely handsome if the expression on it hadn't been quite so closed. He was dressed well, very well, in a way that looked slightly rushed, like he had done it all in under ten minutes and still managed to look like the most put-together person in the room.

He looked at me.

Something moved through his expression quickly. Not curiosity. Not attraction. Not even hostility. Just irritation, clean and direct, the kind that comes from being handed something you didn't ask for.

"This is what you chose for me?" he said.

He wasn't talking to me. He was looking past me toward the edge of the room where Alaric had appeared without any noise, the way Alaric seemed to do everything.

"She meets the requirement," Alaric said.

"She's a stranger."

"So is everyone, at first."

Cassian looked back at me. His eyes moved over my face and down and back up in a single sweep, efficient and completely impersonal. There was no cruelty in it. There was also no warmth, no recognition, nothing that said he saw me as anything other than a problem that had been placed in front of him.

I held his gaze. I don't know exactly why. Maybe because looking away felt like agreeing with the way he was looking at me. Maybe because I had been looked at like nothing for so long that I had stopped being willing to make it easier for people to do it.

Something shifted in his expression. Something very small and quick that I couldn't name before it was gone. He moved to stand beside me. The officiant began to speak.

The whole ceremony took less than fifteen minutes. Questions were asked. Answers were given. I said the words because there was nothing else to do with them. Cassian said his with the flat, clean efficiency of someone getting through a task they had already decided they would not enjoy. His voice was low and steady throughout.

When the time came to sign, he picked up the pen first, signed his name without pause, and handed it to me without turning his head.

I signed my name beneath his.

It was done.

The room emptied quickly after that. People moved and nodded and disappeared through various doors and within minutes it was just Cassian and me standing near the front, a few feet apart, in a room full of flowers that nobody had thought to make cheerful.

He turned his head toward me. Just slightly. Just enough. He leaned in a fraction, voice dropping beneath the last sounds of movement in the room.

"Don't expect anything from me," he said. "This marriage is a prison. And you're the prisoner."

He straightened and walked toward the door and was gone before I had time to say anything back, not that I had anything ready.

I stood there for a moment by myself.

Then I thought about Dorian's house. The slap. The rain. The way he had handed me over like something he had been storing and no longer needed. I thought about the six years I had spent being useful to someone who had never once looked at me like I mattered.

I picked up my bag from the chair beside me.

I followed my husband out of the room..