🌸CHAPTER 1🌸
1792 Words
🌸 Sera's POV
The morning her life ended, it smelled like cinnamon.
Sera Calloway had a habit of humming when she baked. Nothing with words, just... sound. Something low and aimless that filled the small kitchen the way sunlight filled a room — without trying, without meaning to. She was doing it that morning too, rolling dough on the flour-dusted counter while the old radio on the shelf crackled through a song she didn't know the name of. Outside the window the sky was pale and grey, the kind of grey that couldn't decide if it wanted to rain or not. Mrs. Harlow next door was already pulling back her curtains. A dog was barking somewhere down the street.
It was ordinary. Completely, perfectly ordinary.
Which was maybe why, when her father appeared in the doorway at half past seven — still in yesterday's clothes, eyes hollowed out in a way she had no word for — Sera's hands stopped on the dough before he even spoke. Something animal in her went very, very still.
"Papa." Her voice came out soft. "You didn't sleep."
George Calloway was the kind of man who laughed at his own jokes. Who always smelled faintly of sawdust and coffee, who called her habibti even though they weren't Arab and her mother had always teased him for it. The man standing in the doorway looked like someone had taken her father and left only the outline of him. The eyes were the same colour. Everything else was wrong.
He sat at the kitchen table because she told him to. He wrapped both hands around the glass of water she pressed into them and he stared at it for a long moment. And then he started talking.
It took her a while to understand what he was saying. Not because his words were unclear — they were terribly, terribly clear — but because her mind kept sliding off them. Like trying to grip something wet. Debt. That word she caught. Years. She caught that one too. No choice, no choice, I had no choice Sera—
And then a name.
One she had never heard before. One that meant absolutely nothing to her, sitting there in her flour-dusted apron with cinnamon still warm in the air. A name her father said the way you might say the word earthquake, or diagnosis.
Sebastian Drave.
✦ ✦ ✦
"I don't understand," she said, when he finally stopped talking. Her voice sounded very calm. She was a little surprised by that. "You borrowed money from him."
"Yes."
"How much?"
Her father closed his eyes.
"Papa." Quieter now. "How much?"
The number he said made the kitchen tilt. Just slightly. Like a ship adjusting on water. Sera pressed one hand flat against the counter to keep herself upright and nodded slowly, the way you nod when you are trying to buy yourself a few seconds to understand something your brain refuses to process.
"And you can't pay it back," she said.
"I tried. Sera, I tried for three years—"
"So what happens now."
It didn't come out as a question. And underneath the flour and the cinnamon and the ordinary morning that had cracked quietly open — she already knew. She had already understood, somewhere in her chest before the words reached her head. She just needed him to say it out loud so she could stop waiting for it.
George Calloway looked at his daughter and he said it.
The glass of water slipped from his hands when she walked out of the kitchen. She heard it shatter against the floor behind her. She didn't go back.
✦ ✦ ✦
The car would come for her at noon. She had four hours.
She spent the first two sitting on the back step, staring at her mother's garden. Nina Calloway had planted it years ago, before the illness made her hands too weak for dirt and seeds. The roses had gone a little wild. Sera had never had the heart to cut them back too aggressively — it felt like touching something that belonged to someone else.
She sat with them now. Just sat.
The third hour she spent beside her mother's bed. Nina was sleeping, the way she always slept these days — deeply, like sleep was its own kind of country she'd moved to. Sera held her hand. Watched her breathe. Memorised the particular sound of it, the rise and fall, the small catch before the exhale. She didn't know why she was memorising it. She just was.
The fourth hour was Lily.
Her sister found her in the hallway, seventeen years old and sharp as anything, and grabbed her arm immediately. Lily had always been able to tell. Even when they were children — when something was wrong with Sera, Lily knew.
"Tell me what's happening," Lily said. Not asked. Demanded.
"Everything's fine."
"Sera—"
"Look after Mama." She pulled her sister into a hug. Held on longer than she should have. Felt Lily stiffen with alarm, felt her start to speak again. Held on tighter. "Just look after Mama. Promise me."
"I promise." Lily's voice had gone strange and careful. "But Sera, you're scaring me—"
"Good." She let go. Stepped back. Smoothed Lily's hair away from her face the way she'd done since Lily was four. "Being scared keeps you careful."
She left before her sister could ask again.
✦ ✦ ✦
The car arrived at five past twelve.
Black. Long. Windows so dark they swallowed everything — the pale sky, the garden, the street, her. The driver didn't introduce himself. Didn't look at her, really. He just opened the rear door and stood beside it, waiting with the particular stillness of someone who had done this many times before and found nothing remarkable about it.
Sera stood on the front step for a moment.
She had packed one bag. Small, practical. The kind of bag you pack for a meeting that will be resolved quickly, a misunderstanding that sensible people will sort out with words and reason and good faith — because that is what she told herself this was. She had to tell herself something.
She picked up the bag. She walked to the car.
She did not look back at the house. She knew, with the particular certainty of someone who understood their own limits very well, that if she looked back she would not be able to keep walking.
The door closed behind her. The city began to move past the dark windows, streets she knew giving way to streets she didn't, familiar neighbourhoods thinning out into something wider and colder and entirely unfamiliar. She watched it all go by and kept her hands folded in her lap and her breathing slow and told herself this was a misunderstanding.
She almost believed it.
Almost.
The car turned through a set of iron gates — tall, black, with the kind of weight to them that said nothing leaves here without permission — and continued up a drive that seemed to go on far longer than drives had any right to. When it finally stopped, Sera looked up through the window and felt the last of her composure do something complicated in her chest.
The house was not a house.
It was vast and dark and utterly silent, the kind of building that didn't need to announce itself because its existence alone was announcement enough. Every window was lit from within, and yet somehow it looked cold. Like light that had forgotten how to be warm.
The driver opened her door.
Sera stepped out. The autumn air hit her — sharp, clean, carrying the faint smell of something green and damp from somewhere she couldn't see. She stood on the gravel and looked up at the building and thought, with the strange clarity that sometimes comes in moments of complete terror —
I don't think this is a misunderstanding.
The front doors opened before she could take a step toward them. A man stood in the entrance — tall, dark suit, face perfectly neutral. He looked at her the way you look at something that has arrived on schedule.
"Miss Calloway," he said. His voice was even. "He's expecting you."
She wanted to ask who he was, as if she didn't already know. She wanted to ask if she could go home. She wanted to say there had been a mistake, that her father couldn't possibly have done what he said he had done, that there were rules in the world against this kind of thing and surely someone would enforce them.
She said none of it.
She picked up her bag. She walked through the doors. And somewhere behind her, she heard them close — heavy, final, the sound of a full stop at the end of a sentence she hadn't known she was living.
The life she had known was over.
She just didn't know yet what came next.
🌸 END OF CHAPTER ONE 🌸
And just like that... Sera's world has been pulled right from under her feet. 💔
From the warmth of her little kitchen smelling like cinnamon, to the back seat of a black car taking her somewhere she never asked to go — our girl has no idea what's waiting for her behind those iron gates. 🥀
She packed one bag. She didn't look back at the house. And honestly? That detail alone broke my heart a little while writing it.
But this is only the beginning.
What did you think of the first chapter? 👀
🌸 Did you feel the moment Sera realised this wasn't a misunderstanding?
🌸 What are your first impressions of Sera as a character?
🌸 The goodbye with Lily — did it hurt as much as I intended? 😭
🌸 What do you think waits for her inside that mansion?
🌸 Who do you think will be the first person to show her kindness?
🌸 And most importantly...
Do you think a girl like Sera can survive a man like Sebastian Drave? 👀
💭 Drop all your theories in the comments! I genuinely love reading them and who knows... maybe some of you will guess right. 😏🌸
🌸 Please vote if you enjoyed the chapter — it means more than you know!
🌸 Comment your favourite moment and your predictions!
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🌸 Share with a friend who loves dark romance! 🖤
Thank you so much for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍
See you in Chapter Two...
Where we step inside the mind of the devil himself. And trust me... it's nothing like you're expecting. 🥀
- Writer
