All Chapters of My Sister's Husband Sex Doll. Now I Am His Demoness. : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The hands that held me weren't cold like the people from the estate attack. They were warm, human, and that was somehow worse, because it meant whoever had grabbed me had chosen this, standing in the dark beneath a chapel doing something no coercion could excuse away."Let go of me," I said."Not yet," a voice said behind me, low, deliberate, carrying an accent I couldn't place. When he shifted his grip, I caught sight of his forearm in the candlelight, marked with a thin white scar that ran the length of it, old and precise, like something had been cut out of him on purpose a long time ago.Seraphine lit a second candle from the first, and the room around us came into shape slowly, stone walls lined floor to ceiling with shelves, not of books, but of small carved boxes, hundreds of them, each one marked with a symbol I half recognized from Lucifer's bedroom wall."What is this place," I said."A repository." Seraphine's voice had gone flat, businesslike, nothing left of the woman who

I didn't move."Lucifer.""Amanda. Please. Not here." His voice had lost every trace of the calm control I'd learned to expect from him. He crossed the room fast, closing his hand around mine like he meant to pull me physically toward the stairs whether I agreed or not.I planted my feet. "You don't get to decide what I'm allowed to see anymore. We already had this conversation."Something in his face cracked, just slightly."This isn't the same," he said."Then tell me why."He didn't answer. Which was its own kind of answer.I turned toward the shelf where Mira had found the box that freed me, and my eyes went to the row beside it, dozens more like it, each one carved with a symbol close to my own mark but not quite matching it."Those aren't records of the bloodlines," I said slowly. "Those are people."Kael's jaw tightened. Mira looked away."Not people," Lucifer said quietly. "Not anymore. Seals. Signatures the faction stripped instead of destroying. Insurance.""How many.""I do

Seraphine drove for two hours before she let herself cry.She hadn't planned that. She'd planned everything else, every word she'd say in that chapel, every calculation about what handing Amanda the parchment would buy her, but she hadn't planned for her hands to start shaking on the wheel somewhere past the city limits, hadn't planned for the sound that came out of her, ugly and involuntary, the first time she'd let herself make it in six years.She pulled onto the shoulder of an empty road and sat there until it passed.I gave it away. The thought kept circling back no matter how many times she pushed it out. The one thing that was worth anything to them, and I put it in her hands like it was nothing.It hadn't been nothing. She knew exactly what she'd given up. Without the original binding, the faction's leverage against her personal debt was gone, which meant the protection they'd extended her for six years as a courtesy to a paying account was gone with it. She had walked out of

Seraphine was waiting in the same room where I'd first understood what she'd done to me, the study just off the main hall where my mother kept the good tea service for company that never came. She'd changed clothes since the chapel, and there was nothing in her posture that suggested a woman who'd spent the night deciding to betray anyone. She looked, if anything, exhausted in a way that read as genuine.That was the part that worried me most."You came back," I said, standing in the doorway."I told you I would." She didn't get up. "I didn't say when."Lucifer moved past me into the room first, positioning himself, I noticed, between Seraphine and the window, and I understood without him saying it that he hadn't stopped thinking about the faction since we'd left the chapel."Where did you go," he said."Nowhere that matters." Seraphine's eyes flicked to him, and six years of a marriage that had never been what either of them wanted passed between them in a single look I couldn't read

I didn't sleep that night. I lay in the dark of my old bedroom, the one I'd grown up in, listening to the house settle around me and turning Seraphine's non-answer over until it wore smooth from handling.It was real. The braiding. The garden. All of it.Maybe it had been. People were allowed to hold two things at once, weren't they. A woman could genuinely enjoy braiding her sister's hair on a Tuesday afternoon and still hand a household schedule to men who wanted that sister dead by Friday. I understood that in theory. Understanding it in theory didn't make it easier to sit with at two in the morning, staring at a ceiling I used to stare at as a girl who thought the worst thing that could happen to her was being forgotten.I got up before dawn and went to find Kael.He was already awake, sitting on an overturned crate near the stables cleaning his sword with the kind of methodical attention men give to tasks that let them think about something else entirely."You didn't sleep either