BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 2🌸

🌸 Sebastian's POV

The morning he acquired Sera Calloway, he was in the middle of signing a man's death warrant.

Not literally. Not the kind of document that said death warrant at the top in neat official letters — Sebastian Drave had never been that careless with paper. But the document in front of him was a termination of contract, and in his world, those two things meant the same thing. He signed his name at the bottom in the clean, precise strokes that had always looked more like a brand than a signature, capped the pen, and slid it across the desk to Roman without looking up.

Roman took it without a word and left the room. He always did. It was one of the things Sebastian valued most about him — the man understood that silence was sometimes the most professional response available.

The office was quiet after he left.

Sebastian leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then he stood, straightened his jacket, and walked to the window.

Forty floors above the city. He had bought this building seven years ago, the three surrounding it since, and he sometimes stood here at his window and looked down at the streets below and thought of nothing in particular. Just looked. The city from up here had a certain quality he appreciated — small, ordered, entirely without consequence. Everything below moved according to patterns. Patterns he understood. Patterns he had, in many cases, designed himself.

He was not a complicated man, at his core.

He understood power. He understood leverage. He understood that the world operated not on laws or morality or any of the pretty constructions people built to make themselves feel safe, but on a far simpler principle —

Who has something the other person needs.

George Calloway had needed money. Sebastian had provided it. Three years of patience, three years of watching the man drown incrementally, three years of waiting to see if he would surface on his own or simply sink — and the answer, as Sebastian had known it would be from the very beginning, was sink.

The restructured terms had been Marco's suggestion, initially. Sebastian had heard it, considered it for approximately four seconds, and agreed. Clean. Logical. Final. He hadn't asked for photographs or details or any of the information Marco had offered with the careful neutrality of a man who knew better than to editorialize. It was a transaction. The girl was collateral made flesh. Nothing more, nothing less.

That was what he had told himself.

He was still telling himself that when Roman's voice came through the intercom.

"Mr. Drave. She's here."

Sebastian did not respond immediately. He stood at the window a moment longer, watching a line of cars inch through the street forty floors below, and then he turned away from the glass.

"Send Elias to receive her," he said. "I'll be down in ten minutes."

He took fifteen.

He heard her before he saw her.

Not her voice — she wasn't speaking. It was the sound of her footsteps on the marble of the entrance hall, soft and slightly uncertain, the particular rhythm of someone trying very hard to walk with more confidence than they felt. He recognised it because he had spent years learning to read the sounds people made when they thought no one was listening. Those sounds were almost always more honest than anything that came out of their mouths.

He stood at the top of the staircase and looked down.

She was smaller than he'd expected. He didn't know why he'd expected anything — he hadn't tried to. She stood in the entrance hall with a single bag over one shoulder and her hands folded in front of her, looking around the space with wide dark eyes that took everything in very carefully. She was pale. She had flour on her left wrist, a small dusting of white against her skin that she either hadn't noticed or hadn't had the presence of mind to wipe off. Her hair was pulled back simply. She wore the kind of clothes that said she had dressed for a meeting she expected to talk her way out of.

Elias said something to her in a low voice. Sebastian watched her nod. Watched her hands tighten slightly around the strap of her bag.

She was frightened. That was obvious. But she was holding it together with a particular kind of stillness that he hadn't anticipated — not the frozen stillness of someone in shock, but something quieter than that. More deliberate. Like she had made a decision somewhere between wherever she had come from and here, a decision about how she was going to carry herself, and she was keeping to it by sheer will.

Interesting.

He descended the stairs.

He watched the moment she became aware of him — it moved through her like a ripple through still water, starting somewhere in her spine and travelling upward until her chin lifted and her eyes found him on the staircase. He was used to the way people looked at him. The particular combination of recognition and recalibration that happened in someone's face when they encountered him for the first time in person — the way the idea of Sebastian Drave, which they had constructed in their head from rumour and reputation, collided with the actual physical reality of him. Six foot four. Shoulders that filled a doorway. Eyes the colour of deep water in winter, pale and cold and utterly without warmth.

People usually looked away quickly.

She didn't.

She held his gaze as he descended the last few steps and crossed the entrance hall toward her, and he noted it — catalogued it in the same quiet way he catalogued everything that deviated from expectation. She was terrified. Her hands were white-knuckled around that bag strap. But she looked at him and she didn't look away, and that was... unexpected.

He stopped in front of her.

She came up to his chest. He looked down at her and she looked up at him and the entrance hall was very quiet around them, Elias having had the sense to step back, and Sebastian regarded her the way he regarded every new variable that entered his life — with patience, with precision, and with the complete absence of sentiment.

"Miss Calloway," he said.

Her throat moved. "Mr. Drave."

Her voice was steadier than it had any right to be. He noted that too.

"Do you know why you're here," he said. It wasn't a question.

Something moved through her eyes — something complicated and quickly controlled. "My father explained it to me," she said. "This morning."

"And?"

She held his gaze for another moment. He watched her consider half a dozen responses — he could almost see them moving across her face before she discarded each one — and then she said simply, quietly, "And I'm here."

Three words. Not defiance. Not submission. Just statement. Just fact. I'm here.

Sebastian looked at her for a long moment.

Then he turned away.

"Roman," he said, and Roman materialised from the corridor to the left with the silent precision that was his particular talent. "Show her to the east wing. The arrangement we discussed."

"Yes, sir."

"She is not to leave the property without my explicit permission." He was already walking away. Already done. "She is not to be mistreated. She is not to be left without what she needs."

He said it to Roman. He did not say it to her. He did not look back at her.

He was halfway down the corridor when he heard her voice — still quiet, still that particular brand of steady that had no business existing in a girl who had arrived here with flour on her wrist and one small bag — say something to Roman. A question, from the lift of it. He didn't catch the words.

He didn't try to.

She was a transaction. A variable. A restructured term in a debt agreement that had been managed cleanly and efficiently, as all his arrangements were.

He had no interest in her.

He told himself that twice more before he reached his office.

Then he sat behind his desk, opened the next file, and did not think about the way she had looked at him — steady and terrified and refusing to look away — for almost forty five minutes.

Which, by his own standards, was already longer than it should have been.

🌸 END OF CHAPTER TWO 🌸

And there he is. Sebastian Drave. In the flesh. 🖤

Cold. Precise. A man who signs death warrants before breakfast and calls a human being a transaction without blinking. And yet... forty five minutes. He didn't think about her for forty five whole minutes. 👀

For a man like Sebastian, that's practically an eternity.

What did you think of this chapter? 💭

🌸 First impressions of Sebastian — what is going through your head right now?

🌸 Did you notice the small details he picked up about Sera without meaning to?

🌸 She didn't look away. What do you think that moment meant for him?

🌸 He said she is not to be mistreated — why do you think he said that?

🌸 And the big question...

Is Sebastian Drave a monster? Or is he something far more dangerous than that? 👀

💭 Drop your theories in the comments! I live for them. 🌸

🌸 Vote if this chapter gave you chills!

🌸 Comment your favourite line — mine is obvious but I want to know yours!

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🌸 Share with your dark romance girlies 🖤

Thank you so much for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Three...

Where Sera wakes up inside the cage. And begins to understand, for the first time, exactly how gilded it is. 🥀