BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 8🌸

🖤 Sebastian's POV

He had a system.

He had always had a system. Structure was not something Sebastian Drave had stumbled into — it was something he had built deliberately, methodically, over the course of thirty two years, beginning in childhood when he had understood earlier than most children understand anything that the world did not organise itself and that if you wanted order you created it or you lived without it and living without it was not something he was willing to do.

His days had a shape. His weeks had a shape. His months, his years, his entire existence had a shape that he had engineered and maintained with the same precision he brought to everything else — the business, the empire, the network of arrangements and agreements and understood silences that kept his world functioning exactly as he required it to function.

The system did not accommodate variables.

Sera Calloway — Sera Drave — was a variable.

He became aware of this with increasing clarity over the two weeks following the wedding, in the accumulation of small moments he would have preferred not to notice. The way the east dining room felt different with another person in it — not uncomfortable, precisely, which was itself uncomfortable, because uncomfortable he could have managed. Just different. Occupied in a new way, like a room where furniture had been rearranged and his eye kept going to the spaces where things used to be. The way he had started, without deciding to, timing his morning to arrive at breakfast before her — not to see her, he told himself, but because it was his house and his table and his schedule and it had nothing to do with her.

He told himself that.

He told himself a great many things these days.

It was a Wednesday when the system first showed its c***k.

He was in the study — where he spent most of his hours, where the world made the most sense to him, where the variables were numbers and contracts and intelligence reports rather than a girl in a window seat with a book she held with both hands like it might try to leave — when Roman knocked and entered with the particular expression that meant something required handling.

"Petrov," Roman said. "He's here."

Sebastian looked up. "I said Friday."

"He moved it." Roman's expression communicated precisely what he thought of people who moved things Sebastian had set without asking. "He's in the east sitting room. He brought two of his men."

Sebastian stood. Reached for his jacket. "Get Marco."

"Already done." Roman paused at the door. "The east sitting room connects to the library corridor."

Sebastian looked at him.

"She's in the library," Roman said. Simply. Just that.

The pause lasted less than two seconds. Sebastian put on his jacket. "Move him to the west meeting room."

"He specifically requested—"

"West meeting room, Roman."

Roman nodded and left. Sebastian followed, and did not think about why he had changed the room, and did not examine the particular speed with which the decision had been made, and did not look at the library door as he passed it in the corridor.

He looked at the library door as he passed it.

The door was slightly ajar. Through the gap he could see — not much. A corner of the window seat. A patch of afternoon light. The edge of something — a sleeve, pale fabric, the suggestion of someone curled into the window with a book.

He kept walking.

The Petrov meeting lasted two hours and required three separate implicit threats before the man understood that Sebastian's patience was not a renewable resource. He left with what he had come for and without what he had hoped to negotiate, which was the correct outcome, and Sebastian stood at the window of the west meeting room afterward and looked at the city and thought about the quarterly restructure and the Silas situation which Roman still hadn't fully resolved and the three calls he needed to make before end of business.

He thought about all of those things.

He went to the library.

He told himself it was because he used the library in the evenings and it was nearly evening and that was simply his schedule. He told himself that while he walked down the corridor. He told himself that while he pushed the door open.

She was still in the window seat.

She had fallen asleep.

He stopped just inside the door and looked at her — this was becoming a habit he hadn't consented to, the looking — and something in the quality of the looking was different when she was asleep. When she was awake she was always performing something. Composure or terror or the careful neutral expression she had developed for their shared meals, the one that gave nothing away and cost her everything, he could see it costing her. Asleep she was just — there. Present without effort. The book had slid from her hands and was resting against her knees, still loosely held by fingers that had relaxed in sleep.

She looked younger.

She looked — he searched for the word and found it and set it aside immediately because it was not a word he was going to use — she looked like someone who had put down something very heavy for the first time in a long time and the rest of it was all over her face.

He should leave. He had come for the library and the library was occupied and the correct response to that was to return when it was not occupied. He had a system. The system was clear on this.

He crossed the room instead.

Not to her. To the shelves on the far side, which was where he had been intending to go, which was the reason he was here and had nothing to do with her. He moved quietly — not because he was trying to let her sleep, that was not what this was — and found the file he kept on the third shelf from the left that Marco had been asking about and took it down.

He turned to leave.

The book slid off her knees.

It hit the floor with a soft thud — not loud, not dramatic, but enough. She startled awake with the particular disorientation of someone surfacing from deep sleep in an unfamiliar place, eyes flying open, a sharp intake of breath, hands grasping at — nothing, looking for — something, some anchor, finding only the empty air and then—

Finding him.

Standing six feet away. With a file in his hand. Looking at her.

The sound she made was very small. She pressed back into the window seat with both hands, shoulders hitting the glass, eyes wide and fixed on him with an expression that reached into something behind his ribs and did something he had no name for and no interest in naming.

"I—" She couldn't finish it. Her breathing was audible. "I didn't — I fell asleep, I'm sorry, I'll go—" She was already moving, scrambling up from the window seat, reaching for the book on the floor—

"Sera."

She froze. Crouched half way to the floor with her hand extended toward the book. Every muscle in her body locked.

"You don't have to go," he said.

The words came out before he had decided to say them. He heard them with the slight detachment of someone listening to a recording of themselves and finding it mildly surprising. He had not decided to say that. He had not run it through the system. It had simply — come out.

She looked up at him from her half crouch, eyes still wide, still full of that expression he wasn't naming.

He held her gaze for a moment.

"Pick up your book," he said. Because he needed to say something after that — something controlled and precise that would rearrange the moment into something that made sense. "And sit down."

She picked up the book. She sat down. Slowly, carefully, like someone who had been told the chair might not hold her weight and was testing it with increasing caution.

He went to the reading desk on the far side of the room. Opened the file. Sat.

The library settled around them. The light outside the window was going gold and long, the particular gold of late afternoon moving toward evening, and the room was warm and quiet and smelled of old paper and somewhere a clock ticked and—

It was not uncomfortable.

That was the thing. That was the c***k in the system, the real one, the one he could feel and couldn't explain away. He was sitting in his library with his wife while she read and he worked and it was not uncomfortable. It was — he searched for the right word with the irritated precision of someone who prides himself on finding the right word for everything and was finding this one elusive—

It was simply — not uncomfortable.

He looked at the file.

He looked at the file for a long time without reading it.

On the other side of the room, he heard a page turn.

He almost said something. He had no idea what — nothing appropriate, nothing that fit inside the system, nothing that made sense given everything that this was and everything that it wasn't. He almost said something and then he didn't and the moment passed and the clock ticked and another page turned.

Sebastian looked at the file.

He did not think about the page turning.

He thought about it for the rest of the evening. 🖤

🌸 END OF CHAPTER EIGHT 🌸

He moved Petrov to the west meeting room. 🖤

He didn't even think about it. Roman said she's in the library and Sebastian changed the room. Just like that. No explanation. No acknowledgement. Just — done.

And then he went to the library anyway. And told her she didn't have to go. And sat across the room from her while she read and couldn't read a single word of his own file.

Sebastian Drave. Cracking. 😭🌸

What did you think of Chapter Eight? 👀

🌸 The Petrov room change — did you catch what that meant?

🌸 Him watching her sleep — how are you feeling? 👀

🌸 You don't have to go — three words he didn't decide to say. 🥀

🌸 Sitting in the same room, her reading, him pretending to work — your thoughts?

🌸 And the question of the chapter...

At what point did Sebastian Drave stop being in control of this situation? 😏

💭 Tell me everything in the comments! I love you all 🌸

🌸 Vote if this chapter gave you the slow burn you came here for!

🌸 Comment your favourite moment!

Follow — Chapter Nine is coming and Dave is about to show Sebastian exactly how much attention he's been paying to Sera 👀

🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🖤

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Nine...

Where Sebastian sees something he was not supposed to see. And the cold, controlled, ruthless man who feels nothing — feels something. 🥀🖤