Page 80 of Devil's Vows

The man my brothers have sold me to killed his first wife. I fist my hands in my pockets, letting my nails cut into my palms. The man I’m falling for, who is so kind, caring, and human, who loves his daughters to bits, and who has shown me nothing but compassion,killed his first wife.

He is the devil himself. And I’ve been promised in marriageto him by my brothers, who don’t know him from a stranger on the street.

“How do you know?” I whisper, feeling sick to my stomach. “How can you be sure?”

For a long moment, Milana says nothing as we just watch the girls where they’re playing on the jungle gym.

“Because they got the police to classify it as a suicide, not an overdose, sending a message to the Chertnikov Bratva she was in bed with.” She reaches for my arm and gives it a soft squeeze. “Darya was a traitor, Gabi. It was him or her. She would have died either way. But that’s not really what triggered him. Ivan found her one day with drug paraphernalia, used needles and shit on the nightstand, pills scattered on the sheets, totally out of it while the girls were playing in the room after their afternoon nap, clambering on the bed. He went mental. It was the start of the countdown.”

I’m stone cold at the visual she’s painting. With Darya using while pregnant, the girls were already born into addiction, and that’s going to affect them for life, but she didn’t care to keep them alive, either.

Quiet tears stream down my cheeks as they heat up in anger—for Ivan, for the choices he’s been forced to make. And I get it. My rage manifests as tears because I can’t scream at the world.

“You’re going to have to work on your definition of good and evil in this new world, if you’re to make sense of it at all,” Milana says as she lets go of my arm, interpreting my tears all wrong. “I bet if they were your girls?—”

She lets the question hang.

I wipe at my cheeks with rough hands. They already feel like mine, and if I get married to Ivan, they will be mine. Pills and needles on the nightstand. Their mom high, not fazed at all that one of her girls could swallow the drugs and die.

I would have gone mental, too.

Marrying Ivan is a fantasy that intrudes upon my mind more and more each minute now the thought has found fertile ground. What would I say if he asked me?

He won’t take no for an answer.

Can I be married to a murderer? Is he really evil, killing his wife to protect his daughters, and in a way she probably didn’t see coming? That isn’t cruel or ruthless, but it is calculating.

I can’t fool anybody here. I’m from the same stock, and I bet if I look into my brothers’ lives, I’ll see a trail of bodies they’ve left behind.I’veleft a trail of bodies behind, even though I have not a speck of blood on my hands. What does that make me?

I drag in a shudder of a breath and swipe at my nose with a sniff. “At least he made it enjoyable for her, you know. One last hit.”

Milana breaks out in a dark chuckle. “Now you’re starting to sound like a true Mafia princess. You’ll still swing the full one-eighty, trust me. This life rots you one way or the other. It’s the way of our world.”

41

GABI

When Ivan gets home from work, he seeks us out in the garden.

“How’re you feeling?” he asks as he touches my elbow in a gesture that’s gentle but possessive.

Despite everything I learned about Darya—more like Milana’s interpretation of events; she has no proof—I still want to lean into him.

This whole situation has messed with my head, but I understand I can’t turn cold on him or push him away in disgust. We share and live by the same principle: children should be protected at all costs, never harmed. If this is the way Darya was when they were little, how would she have damaged the girls as they grew up? With no care for her children, selling them off to the highest bidder, trafficking them, like I was trafficked, would be par for the course.

There’s another question I fail to understand. How could Darya be like that when she belonged tothisman? Everything I’ve experienced with him only leaves me begging for more.

What would it be like to belong to him? To have him touch me like this, freely, to be at liberty to rely on him, to talk to himand open up like I did the other night, belonging to him not only in body as a wife, but in soul, with my heart in his hands?

It would be everything. By the sounds of it, Darya threw it all back in his face.

“I’m fine,” I say, shooting him a soft smile. “They’re good, too.”

We both watch Milana as she helps Katya walk the balance beam, out of earshot. The cooler fall air has brushed her cheeks with a healthy glow, and she laughs as Katya jumps into her arms at the end of the beam and she swings her in a circle with joy.

“She hasn’t laughed like this in months. I thought I’d lost her forever.” His hand slips from my elbow to mine and gives my fingers a squeeze.

Somehow, the gesture is a preciousthank youfrom a man who is too broken to say the words.This—making a difference, helping him, being here for him as he was for me—is going to be my undoing.