BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 4🌸

🖤 Sebastian's POV

He found himself thinking about her hands.

Not intentionally. Not in any way he would have permitted had he caught it happening in time. It crept in the way unwanted things always did — sideways, in the margins of other thoughts, while he was doing something else entirely. He would be reading a contract and then, without warning, he would be thinking about the way her hands had been pressed flat against the wall behind her. White-knuckled. Shaking. Like she was trying to hold the wall up or perhaps like the wall was the only thing holding her up and she couldn't decide which.

He put the contract down.

Picked up his coffee. Stood at the window.

The city below moved the way it always moved — patterns he understood, variables he controlled, a chessboard he had long since stopped playing and simply started owning. He looked at it and thought about the quarterly projections Marco had walked him through this morning and the Petrov situation that needed resolving by Friday and the three outstanding matters on his desk that required his signature before noon.

He thought about all of those things.

And then he thought about the sound she had made in the corridor.

That small, strangled, entirely involuntary sound when the door had opened and she'd found him standing there. He had heard people make sounds like that before — in rooms very different from a corridor, under circumstances very different from an accidental wrong turn. Fear had a particular acoustic quality he had long since learned to identify and categorise and file away without sentiment.

The sound she had made had been different.

He couldn't explain how, precisely. It had been fear — unambiguously, unmistakably fear. But there had been something underneath it that he hadn't been able to place immediately, something that sat in the back of his mind now like a splinter he couldn't quite reach. He turned it over once, examined it, and then deliberately set it aside.

He had work to do.

Roman found him at noon.

This was not unusual. Roman's internal clock operated with a precision that Sebastian had long since stopped finding remarkable — the man appeared when he was needed and disappeared when he wasn't and never once required direction about which was which. He knocked twice, entered, and set a folder on the corner of the desk without being asked.

"The Marchetti shipment," he said. "Confirmed for Thursday."

"Good." Sebastian didn't look up from the document he was signing. "And the Silas situation?"

A brief pause. The kind Roman only permitted himself when something required careful framing.

Sebastian looked up.

"He missed the morning check-in," Roman said. His voice was even. "Second time this month."

Sebastian regarded him for a moment. "Find out why."

"Already working on it."

"Work faster." He capped the pen. Leaned back. "What else."

Roman's eyes moved — barely, just a fraction — toward the ceiling in the direction of the east wing. It was the smallest possible gesture and it communicated everything it needed to.

Sebastian looked at him steadily. "Say it."

"The girl had breakfast alone," Roman said. "Lena says she barely touched it. Sat at the table for forty minutes and then went back to her room."

"That's not a report I asked for."

"No," Roman agreed. "It isn't."

The silence between them had the particular quality of long familiarity — two men who had known each other long enough that entire conversations could happen in what wasn't said. Sebastian held his gaze for a moment, then looked back at his desk.

"She's adjusting," he said. "It takes time."

"It takes more than time," Roman said quietly, "when the person doing the adjusting doesn't understand what they're adjusting to."

Sebastian said nothing.

Roman picked up his folder and left.

He didn't intend to go to the east dining room.

He had eaten at his desk — he did most days, had done for years, found the formality of a dining table without purpose a particular waste of time he resented. He had eaten and worked and managed three phone calls and reviewed the Petrov file and by four in the afternoon had accomplished what most men would consider a full day's work before they'd finished their morning coffee.

He was walking to the east study — a different room, a different set of documents, nothing to do with the east dining room at all — when he passed the corridor that connected to it and heard, through the slightly open door, the sound of two voices.

One was Lena's. Low, warm, comfortable in the way of someone who has made peace with their surroundings.

The other was quieter. Softer. With a particular careful quality, like someone choosing words from a language they were still learning.

He stopped walking.

He told himself he stopped because he heard his name.

"— is he always like that?" Sera's voice. Just slightly above a whisper.

"Like what?" Lena.

A pause. He could almost hear her searching for the word. "Like a — like a wall. That's angry. A very large, very angry wall."

Something shifted in the corridor. It took him a moment to identify it as the absence of what he'd expected — which was his own irritation. He had expected irritation. What arrived instead was something else entirely, something that sat strangely in his chest and that he had absolutely no interest in examining.

"He's not angry," Lena said. He could hear the careful diplomacy in her voice — the particular tone of someone navigating between truth and tact and trying to find the road where they overlapped. "He's just — he's Mr. Drave."

"That's not an answer."

"No," Lena agreed. "It isn't."

A small silence.

"He's very tall," Sera said finally, in the tone of someone making a factual observation about a natural disaster. "I didn't — I knew he was tall but I didn't — does the ceiling feel lower to him? It must. He must walk into every room and think, well, at least I'm not the smallest thing here—"

Lena made a sound that was unmistakably suppressed laughter.

"And the way he looks at you." Sera's voice had dropped slightly, taken on a quality that was almost — almost — something other than fear. Indignation, perhaps. The faintest edge of it, like someone discovering they have a spine and being somewhat surprised by the fact. "Like you're a — a calculation. Something he's adding up. It's very—" a pause, "—it's very grumpy, actually. The whole thing. Very tall and very grumpy and very — very monster-ish—"

Sebastian moved.

He didn't decide to. His hand was on the door before the thought had fully formed, pushing it open quietly — not dramatically, not with any particular intention beyond the simple fact that he had been standing in the corridor outside a room listening to himself being described as monster-ish by a girl who came up to his chest and had spent most of their acquaintance trying to disappear into walls, and something about that required — addressing.

The door swung open.

Lena saw him first. She went still with the practiced stillness of someone who had worked in this house long enough to have developed excellent instincts for self-preservation. She set down the cup she was holding very carefully, straightened up, and said, in a perfectly composed voice, "Mr. Drave. I'll just—" and was gone through the connecting door before she finished the sentence.

Sera had her back to him. She turned at the sound of Lena's exit and then went completely, absolutely still.

The colour drained from her face so quickly he could watch it happen. Her eyes went wide. Her hands — which had been wrapped around a cup of tea — tightened around it convulsively, and he watched her throat move as she swallowed once, then again, like she was physically trying to push something down.

Sebastian leaned against the doorframe.

He looked at her.

She looked back at him with the expression of someone who has just understood, with horrible clarity, exactly how much of a conversation they were not supposed to have had.

"I—" The word dissolved before it became anything. She tried again. "I didn't mean—"

"Monster-ish," he said.

The word sat in the room between them. Sera's mouth closed. Opened. Closed again.

He held her gaze with that particular quality of patience that had nothing gentle in it — the patience of someone who was not going anywhere and was entirely prepared to wait.

"I didn't mean—" she tried again. Her voice was barely there. "I was just — I was talking, I didn't know you were — I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to—"

"You think I'm grumpy."

She made a sound. Not a word. Just a small, strangled sound that was somehow both confirmation and apology simultaneously.

Sebastian regarded her for a long moment. The colour had come back to her face now — too much of it, a mortified flush that started at her throat and worked upward. She was gripping that cup like it was the only solid thing in the room. Her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere around his collarbone because looking directly at his face had apparently become impossible.

He straightened up from the doorframe.

Crossed the room.

Stopped in front of her close enough that she had to tilt her head back to maintain that stubborn focus on his collarbone, and looked down at her with an expression he kept absolutely controlled and said, very quietly, very precisely —

"Next time, Sera—"

She flinched at her name. Actually flinched. He watched it move through her like a small electric current.

"—if you have observations about my height—" the faintest pause, "—keep them to yourself."

He held her gaze for one more second.

Then he turned and left the room.

And if there was something in his chest on the walk back to his study that felt faintly, disturbingly like the distant ancestor of amusement — he buried it completely before he reached the door.

He was Sebastian Drave.

He did not find things amusing.

He especially did not find her amusing.

He told himself that.

Once.

It didn't entirely work. 🖤

🌸 END OF CHAPTER FOUR 🌸

Oh he is SO in trouble and he doesn't even know it yet. 🖤

Monster-ish. She called him monster-ish. And he stood in that corridor and listened to the whole thing. 😭

What did you think of Chapter Four? 👀

🌸 The corridor eavesdropping scene — did it deliver?

🌸 Roman and Sebastian — what did you think of what Roman said about Sera barely eating?

🌸 That last scene — terrifying or oddly soft?

🌸 Sebastian telling himself once that he doesn't find her amusing — 👀

🌸 And the big question...

Is this the moment Sebastian Drave started losing? 😏

💭 Drop everything in the comments! I love you all so much for reading 🌸

🌸 Vote if Chapter Four gave you butterflies wrapped in terror!

🌸 Comment your favourite line!

🌸 Follow for updates — Chapter Five is coming and Sera is about to meet someone new 👀

🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🖤

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Five...

Where Sera meets someone who smiles too easily, speaks too softly, and feels just a little too safe to actually be safe. 🥀

Dave Drave has entered the story. 🖤