THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH
1406 Words
Sera's POV
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
Dorian's voice. Sharp and immediate.
I couldn't look at him.
I couldn't look at anything except the man by the window because the man by the window was the face I had been carrying behind my eyelids for seven years and he was *here* — real, breathing, ten feet away — and my legs were shaking and my hands were shaking and the wine was still spreading across the floor in a slow dark fan and none of it mattered.
None of it reached me.
The room was talking around me — Dorian's voice, Cole shifting, someone moving — all of it underwater, all of it far away, because I was looking at amber eyes and a jaw that time had sharpened and that stillness, that *terrible* stillness—
My mother at the tree line. Lyra's ribbon in the mud. My father's body, still half-shifted, positioned the way it was positioned because he had put himself between the rogues and his children.
And this man. Standing in the centre of it all.
"*Sera.*" Dorian again, harder.
I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I was shaking so visibly now that I could feel it in my jaw and I couldn't make it stop and my eyes were filling and I *hated* that, hated that he could see it, hated that the first time I stood in the same room as the man who had destroyed my life I was trembling like a child—
Nicklaus tilted his head.
Slightly. That small, unhurried movement that I would come to recognise. His amber eyes moved over my face — not quickly, not impatiently, but with the particular quality of a man who notices things and files them and never wastes the information.
"Have we met?"
The question landed in the room quietly.
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Cole's hand cracked against the back of my head.
The force snapped me forward and the room came rushing back — sharp edges, real light, the smell of wine and tension — and Cole's voice was in my ear, low and furious.
"Have you gone mad? Clean this up. Now."
His hand shoved me downward and I went to my knees and reached for the broken glass with hands that were still shaking, still visibly, uselessly shaking — and a shard caught my finger. Clean cut. Immediate blood.
I didn't stop.
The tears came without permission, dropping onto the stone beside my knuckles. Not from the cut. Not from Cole's hand. From the weight of seven years cracking open all at once because the man who started all of it was standing in the same room, breathing the same air, and had just asked me — with that calm, unhurried voice — have we met.
I kept my head down. I kept cleaning.
---
"If we could return to—" Dorian's voice, tightly controlled.
"Who is she."
Not loud. Just placed in the room with the precision of something that expects to land and does.
Cole answered immediately. "No one. She's no one, just a—"
"I wasn't speaking to you."
Four words. And something happened in the room when he said them — some pressure descended from nowhere — and Cole stopped mid-sentence as completely as if the words had been physically removed from his throat. I heard him draw breath. I heard him not use it.
I had never heard Cole go silent like that.
Dorian cleared his throat. "She is my sister."
"Your sister." A pause with texture in it. "You have your sister on her knees cleaning glass with her bare hands."
"That is pack business." Defensive at the edges now. "She receives what she deserves. I'd ask that we return to why you're actually here."
"What did she do."
"That is not—"
"I'm not negotiating with you right now." Same tone. Unhurried. Immovable. "What did she do."
The silence stretched. I felt my brother recalibrate inside it.
"She was responsible for the deaths of several pack members," Dorian said. "Including our parents."
I closed my eyes.
Seven years of hearing it and it still landed somewhere new every time.
"Weren't your parents killed by rogues?" Nicklaus asked. Even. Almost conversational. "That's what the reports say."
"They died because of her." Dorian's voice hardened. "If she had stayed out of the restricted eastern border they would never have gone in to rescue her. She led them to their deaths. So yes — she is responsible."
"She was a child."
"Old enough to know better." Final. Closed. "Sera. Get up. Replace the drinks and make yourself invisible. We will discuss your performance when my guests have gone."
I knew what discuss meant. I started to rise.
"Don't bother with the drinks."
My brother went still.
I stopped.
"Sit down, Dorian."
A beat of silence. Then the chair took Dorian's weight and I heard him try to recover the dignity of it and fail entirely.
"The contract as written," Nicklaus said, "is not something I'll sign. Your border management has failed three times in two years. Your Calloway figures are wrong — I know the actual number, so let's not waste time. Your pack cannot demonstrate the stability this agreement requires." A pause. "I don't sign things I expect to revisit in a year."
"There are additional assets—" Cole started.
Nicklaus looked at him.
Whatever that look contained, it emptied Cole of everything he'd been about to say. His mouth closed around the unfinished sentence. He studied the floor. The silver-haired woman near the wall had the small, private expression of someone watching something entirely predictable.
"There is one condition," Nicklaus said, returning to Dorian, "under which I sign tonight. All terms. No amendments."
"Name it."
"Her."
The word dropped into the room and the room went still around it.
I looked up.
He was already looking at me — those amber eyes steady and unreadable — and the cold that moved through me was absolute and total.
He knows. The thought arrived like ice. He recognised me. He wants to finish it.
"Your sister," Nicklaus said. "She comes with me. That's my condition."
"No."
The word tore out of me before I could stop it. Thin and shaking but there. I turned to Dorian and did something I hadn't done in years — something that cost more than I had.
I begged.
"Please. Don't let him take me. I'll work harder, I'll do anything — please, please don't send me with him—"
Cole's backhand caught me across the face.
My head snapped sideways. Blood flooded my mouth. The edges of my vision went white.
"You don't get to speak," Cole said quietly. "You don't get to have an opinion."
"The least you can do," Dorian said, his voice in that cold flat place that meant the decision was already made, "after every life you have taken — is this. You owe a debt you will never finish paying. Consider this a small instalment."
I couldn't tell them.
That was the thing sitting heaviest in my chest — the thing I had carried for seven years while they laid every wound on me. I could not tell them that the man across this room was the reason our parents were dead. My word was worth nothing here. And if they believed me and confronted him — I looked at Nicklaus, at what a single look had done to Cole — they would die. He would kill them without raising his voice.
I was not willing to have more blood on my hands.
Not even theirs.
I looked at the floor. At my bleeding finger. At the tear marks drying on the stone beside my knuckles.
And I said nothing.
The contract was signed before I drew a full breath.
I knelt on my father's floor with blood on my hands and terror so complete it had moved past feeling into something resembling numbness, and I understood with perfect clarity that I had just been handed to the man who had destroyed my life.
I didn't know why he wanted me.
I didn't know what he planned to do with me.
And then Nicklaus looked at me directly — those amber eyes finding mine with that same precision they found everything — and said quietly:
"Get up. You belong to me now."
- Writer
