BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 7🌸

🌸 Sera's POV

She woke up as someone's wife.

The thought arrived before she was fully conscious — slipping in through the gap between sleep and waking the way the worst thoughts always did, when the mind was too unguarded to keep them out. She lay still for a moment with her eyes closed and let it settle over her like something cold and heavy and inescapable.

Mrs. Drave.

She pressed her face into the pillow.

The ring was on her finger. She could feel it — unfamiliar and precise, a small circle of weight that hadn't been there yesterday and was there now and would be there tomorrow and every day after that for reasons that had nothing to do with love or choice or any of the things she had quietly, privately, never-spoken-aloud imagined a ring on her finger might one day mean. She had imagined it. Of course she had. In the small shy way of someone who kept their hopes very close to their chest and never said them out loud in case saying them made them fragile — she had imagined it. Someone who loved her. Something chosen.

Not this.

She sat up.

The room was the same as it always was — too large, too dark, too expensive, too everything. But something felt different this morning and it took her a moment to identify what it was. Then she realised. The door that connected her room to the adjoining suite — a door she had noted on her first day and subsequently ignored with the focused determination of someone who has decided that a thing does not exist if they don't look at it — had a thin line of light underneath it.

Someone was on the other side.

Sera pulled the duvet up slightly. As if that would help anything.

The light stayed. She stared at it. It didn't move.

She got up eventually, because she was not going to spend the rest of her life staring at a line of light under a door and she knew it. She dressed in the bathroom with the door locked — a habit she had developed in the first days that she had no intention of abandoning — and came back into the room and looked at the connecting door again.

Still. Quiet. Light underneath.

She sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

Nothing happened.

After twenty minutes of nothing happening she felt, underneath the fear, the faintest thread of something that might have been — not quite irritation, but its distant, frightened cousin. She was sitting on the edge of her own bed, in her own room, waiting for something terrible that wasn't coming, and at some point that became its own kind of exhausting.

She got up. She went to breakfast.

He was already there.

Of course he was. Sebastian Drave, she was learning, moved through his own house with the certainty of someone who had never once in his life arrived somewhere and found himself unwelcome. He was at the head of the long dining table with a coffee and a newspaper — an actual newspaper, the physical kind — and did not look up when she came in.

Sera stopped in the doorway.

The room was large. The table was long. There were approximately fourteen chairs between her and where he sat, which in any other context might have felt like enough distance. In this context it felt like standing at the edge of a lake and measuring the water.

She went to the chair at the far end.

"Sit here."

She stopped.

Sebastian hadn't looked up from his newspaper. He turned a page with the unhurried precision of someone whose mornings had never once been interrupted by anything as inconvenient as another person's anxiety.

He hadn't gestured. He hadn't specified. He had simply said sit here and the here was — not at the far end. The here was clearly somewhere closer. She looked at the chairs along the side of the table and made a calculation about which one was closest to the far end while still technically complying with the instruction and moved to it.

She sat. She folded her hands in her lap. She looked at the table.

Lena appeared with breakfast — quietly efficient, warm eyes finding Sera's for just a second with something steady and reassuring in them — and set plates down and disappeared again with the particular tact of someone who understood exactly when their presence was not required.

Silence.

Sera ate because Lena had made her promise, in the gentle relentless way of someone who had decided that Sera eating was a hill she was prepared to die on, that she would eat breakfast properly. She ate and looked at her plate and listened to the sound of Sebastian's newspaper and tried to remember how to exist in a room with another person without vibrating with terror.

She was mostly failing.

"You didn't sleep."

She looked up.

Sebastian was looking at her over the top of his newspaper. Not at her face, precisely — at the space just below her eyes. He said it the way he said most things, which was like a statement of observed fact rather than a question or an expression of concern. Simply — you didn't sleep. As if he were noting weather conditions.

"I slept," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.

He looked at her for one more second. Then back to his newspaper.

"You have circles under your eyes," he said.

Sera looked back at her plate. She pressed her lips together. She had no response to that that felt safe to say out loud, so she said nothing, which was a policy she was finding increasingly functional in her interactions with Sebastian Drave.

The silence settled back between them.

She ate. He read. The morning light came through the tall windows and fell across the table in long pale rectangles and somewhere in the house a clock ticked and everything was — not fine, not remotely fine, but contained. Manageable. The particular exhausted manageable of someone who has been surviving something for long enough that surviving it has become the new ordinary.

She reached for her coffee.

Her sleeve slid back slightly. The ring caught the light.

She looked at it. Couldn't help it. Just — looked at it for a moment, at this thing on her finger that hadn't been there two days ago, that was there now, that would always be there now—

"Does it fit."

She looked up again. Sebastian was watching her. Had been watching her, she realised, for some amount of time she hadn't noticed because she'd been looking at the ring.

"Yes," she said. "It fits."

He nodded. Looked back at his newspaper.

She looked back at her plate.

And that was — that was all. That was the whole interaction. He had noticed the circles under her eyes and he had noticed her looking at the ring and he had said exactly as much about both as he apparently intended to say and then returned to his newspaper as if she were simply — there. Present. A feature of the morning rather than an intrusion into it.

She didn't know what to do with that.

She had been bracing, every moment since the wedding, for something. For the other shoe. For the thing that came after the ceremony, the thing that the ceremony had been leading toward, the thing she had been too frightened to think about directly but had been thinking about in her peripheral vision constantly since the car first drove through those iron gates.

Sebastian had said no at the altar.

He had not kissed her. He had walked away first. He had worked until — she had seen the light under his door until past three in the morning, had lain awake watching it, had only finally slept when it went out.

And now he was sitting at the other end of a breakfast table noting the circles under her eyes and asking if her ring fit and reading his newspaper.

She didn't understand him.

She was terrified of him.

But she was beginning to think, in the smallest most carefully held way, that terrified and understanding were two different things — and that maybe, maybe, the thing she was most afraid of was not quite the same shape as the thing that was actually here.

Maybe.

She wasn't sure enough to put any weight on that thought yet. It felt too fragile. Too much like hope, and hope in this place felt dangerous in ways she couldn't fully articulate.

But she filed it. The way she filed everything. Tucked it away somewhere quiet and kept it.

She found the library properly that afternoon.

Not the accidental finding of her first week, the reaching-for-a-book encounter that had produced Dave and an awkward retrieval of something from a high shelf. This was intentional — Lena had given her the location precisely, had said it's yours if you want it, he never uses it before evening with the careful information delivery of someone who had mapped the safe hours and was sharing the map.

The library was — she stopped in the doorway and looked at it and felt something unknot slightly in her chest for the first time since she had arrived.

It was enormous and warm and smelled exactly like libraries were supposed to smell — old paper and wood and something faintly dusty that was not unpleasant, that was in fact deeply, viscerally familiar, because there had been a small library two streets from her childhood home that she had spent more hours in than she could count and it had smelled like this. Exactly like this.

She crossed the room slowly. Ran her fingers along the spines of books she didn't know yet and some she did. Found a window seat — a proper one, wide enough to curl into properly, with a view of the garden — and stood in front of it for a moment.

Then she chose a book. Something she had read before, something safe and known, the literary equivalent of a familiar face. She curled into the window seat. She opened it.

She read.

And for one hour — just one, just that one — she forgot where she was.

It was the closest thing to peace she had felt in weeks. Fragile and borrowed and entirely dependent on a man with a newspaper and a locked schedule and a study light that went out at three in the morning — but real. For one hour, real.

She held onto it with both hands.

She was going to need it. 🌸

🌸 END OF CHAPTER SEVEN 🌸

She found the library. 🥀 And for one hour she forgot where she was.

And he — he noticed the circles under her eyes. He asked if her ring fit. He didn't touch her. He just — sat there. At the other end of the table. Being Sebastian Drave. Absolutely impossible to understand and absolutely impossible to ignore. 🖤

What did you think of Chapter Seven? 👀

🌸 Breakfast together for the first time — what was going through your head?

🌸 He noticed the circles under her eyes. He noticed her looking at the ring. He notices EVERYTHING. 👀

🌸 Sera beginning to think that what she's afraid of might not be the same shape as what's actually there — is she right?

🌸 The library scene — did it give you the relief it was meant to give you? 🥀

🌸 And the question of the chapter...

He said no at the altar. He didn't come to her room. He sat at breakfast and read his newspaper. What is Sebastian Drave doing? 😏

💭 Drop all your theories in the comments! 🌸

🌸 Vote if this chapter gave you complicated feelings!

🌸 Comment your favourite moment — mine is obvious 👀

🌸 Follow for updates — things are about to get more intense 🖤

🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🌸

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Eight...

Where Sebastian's control begins to show its first real c***k. And Sera starts to learn that the most dangerous thing in this house isn't his anger. 🥀🖤