BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 9🌸

🌸 Sera's POV

Three weeks into her life at the Drave estate, Sera had developed a map.

Not a physical one — she had no paper, and even if she had, drawing maps of Sebastian Drave's house felt like the kind of thing that would be difficult to explain if discovered. It was an internal map. A careful, constantly updated chart of safe hours and unsafe hours, occupied rooms and unoccupied ones, the particular sounds the house made when Sebastian was moving through it versus when it was simply settling.

She knew, for instance, that he was always in his study by seven in the morning and that the east wing was therefore navigable before that if she was quiet. She knew that the library was safe between two and five in the afternoon with the reliability of something scheduled, because whatever else Sebastian Drave was, he was a man of routine and his routines had become, over three weeks, her survival guide.

She knew that breakfast was the one unavoidable overlap.

She had stopped dreading breakfast.

She wasn't sure when that had happened exactly — couldn't pinpoint the morning she had walked into the east dining room and sat down and realised that the vibrating terror of those first days had settled into something lower and steadier. Not gone. Never gone. But different. The difference between a storm and the weather that comes after — still cold, still grey, but navigable in a way the storm hadn't been.

He still said very little at breakfast.

But he said some things. That was the part she couldn't stop turning over — the some things. The occasional observation delivered to his newspaper that she slowly understood was not delivered to his newspaper at all. The east garden has been replanted near the south wall. Said without looking up. As if she might find that interesting. As if he had considered, however briefly, that she might find that interesting. The library has a section on botany if you're interested in the roses. Said the morning after she had spent twenty minutes looking at the rose beds through the window.

She had gone to find the botany section that same afternoon.

It was the small things. That was what she couldn't map, couldn't chart, couldn't fit into the survival guide — the small things that didn't match the shape of what she had been so certain he was.

She was thinking about this, in the unfocused way of someone whose mind is doing something her hands aren't, when she heard footsteps on the garden path behind her.

She turned, expecting Lena.

Found Dave.

"You have that look again," he said, dropping onto the other end of the bench with the easy familiarity that had developed over the past two weeks of occasional garden encounters. He had been careful since the hand incident — she had noticed that too, the deliberate care of it, the way he kept a precise and respectful distance. It had gone some way toward settling the small alarm she had filed after that moment.

Not all the way. But some way.

"What look?" she said.

"The one where you're somewhere else entirely." He stretched his legs out, face tilted up to the pale sun. "Thinking about home?"

"Sometimes," she said. "Not right now."

"What right now?"

She hesitated. There were things she didn't say out loud — a long list of them, carefully maintained. But Dave was looking at the sky and not at her, which made it easier, which was something she had noticed about him. He often made himself less direct when she needed space to speak.

"I'm trying to understand something," she said carefully. "And I keep getting it wrong."

"Understanding Sebastian?" Dave said. No particular inflection. Just the name, easy and familiar.

She looked at her hands. "Is it that obvious?"

"He's difficult to understand," Dave said. He was quiet for a moment. "He doesn't — he doesn't do things the way other people do them. Everything with him is—" a pause, "—underneath. You won't find it on the surface."

Sera thought about the botany section. About the east garden replanting.

"I know," she said softly. And then, because she hadn't said it out loud to anyone, because Lena was careful about what she offered on the subject of Sebastian and Sera had respected that carefulness — "He's not what I expected."

Dave looked at her then. She felt it — the shift of his attention from the sky to her profile. She kept her eyes on her hands.

"What did you expect?" he said.

"Worse," she admitted. "I expected worse."

The silence that followed was the comfortable kind. The garden was quiet around them, the roses past their best now, the autumn settling properly into the grounds with its particular stripped-back honesty. Sera breathed it in.

"He moved someone," she said. "A meeting. Someone came to the house and Sebastian moved the meeting room because the original room was near the library and I was in the library and—" she stopped. "Lena told me. I don't think I was supposed to know."

Dave said nothing.

"I don't know what to do with that," she said.

"You don't have to do anything with it," Dave said. His voice was easy. Warm. "Just — let yourself notice it. You're allowed to notice things."

She nodded slowly.

They sat in silence for a while. The garden moved gently around them, a light wind through the remaining leaves, and Sera thought about maps and survival guides and the things that didn't fit in either.

She was so settled into the quiet of it that she didn't notice the figure at the upper window of the house.

She didn't see him at all.

She found out about it from Lena.

Not directly — Lena didn't deal in direct when it came to Sebastian, had a whole sophisticated language of carefully placed information that Sera had been learning to read like a second alphabet. It came in the form of a warning delivered over morning tea the next day, quiet and serious in a way that cut through Sera's sleepiness immediately.

"He knows you've been spending time with Mr. Dave," Lena said. She kept her eyes on her cup.

Sera went still. "Is that — is that a problem?"

Lena was quiet for a moment. The particular quiet of someone choosing words with surgical precision.

"Mr. Sebastian," she said finally, "notices everything that happens in this house. Everything." A pause. "And Mr. Dave is—" another pause, longer, "—not always what he appears to be. That's all I'll say."

Sera looked at her. "Lena—"

"That's all I'll say," Lena repeated gently. And changed the subject.

She was in the corridor outside the east sitting room when she heard them.

She hadn't been trying to hear anything. She had been walking — her afternoon walk, part of the internal map, a route she had established that kept her in the parts of the house that were hers — and the door to the east sitting room had been open, which it wasn't usually, and the voices coming through it stopped her feet before her brain had caught up with the decision.

Sebastian's voice first. Low. Precise. Utterly controlled.

"You've been spending time with her."

A pause. Then Dave's voice — still warm, still easy, but with something underneath it that she recognised. That one-second quality. That flash.

"She's lonely, Seb. You put her in this house and you—"

"That is not your concern."

"She's a person. She's—"

"She is my wife." The words landed in the corridor like something physical. Quiet and absolute and with an edge that could cut. "And you will remember that."

Silence.

"I was being friendly," Dave said. Lighter now. Careful. "That's all."

"I know what you were being."

Another silence. Different from the first. Heavier.

"Stay away from her, Dave."

It wasn't a request. It wasn't even really a command — it was something beyond both of those things, something that existed in the register of statements that simply describe how things are going to be, the way gravity describes how things fall. Inevitable. Non negotiable.

Sera stood in the corridor with both hands pressed flat against the wall and didn't breathe.

She heard footsteps — Dave's, she thought, lighter than Sebastian's — and then a door and then silence.

Then different footsteps.

Slower. Heavier. The footsteps she knew better than any other sound in this house because her body had spent weeks learning to hear them and respond to them before her mind caught up.

The sitting room door opened fully.

Sebastian stepped into the corridor.

And found her.

Standing against the wall with her hands flat against it and her eyes wide and her breathing giving away every single thing she had been trying to keep to herself.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

The corridor was very quiet.

"I—" She couldn't. The word dissolved. She tried again. "I wasn't — I didn't mean to—"

"How much did you hear." Not a question. He already knew.

She swallowed. "Enough."

Sebastian looked at her for a long moment. She couldn't read his face — she had never been able to read his face, it was the most controlled surface she had ever encountered, giving away nothing, absolutely nothing — except—

Except there was something in his eyes.

Something she had no name for yet. Something that had no business being there in a man who had told her she was a transaction and a restructured debt and nothing more. Something that looked — she didn't let herself finish the thought. It felt too dangerous to finish.

He stepped toward her.

She pressed back against the wall — not in panic, just in the reflexive adjustment of someone calibrating distance — and he stopped. Not because she'd asked. Not because she'd said anything. He just — stopped. Looked at her. Recalibrated.

"Go back to your room," he said quietly.

She went.

She didn't look back.

But she thought about his eyes all the way down the corridor and all through the evening and long into the night when she should have been sleeping and wasn't.

She thought about what she had seen in them.

The thing she hadn't let herself name.

She named it at two in the morning, alone in the dark, with the ring on her finger catching the faint light from under his door.

She named it — and then lay very still with the weight of it sitting on her chest, because if she was right, if she had read it correctly, if that was actually what she had seen in Sebastian Drave's eyes when he'd found her in that corridor —

Then everything was more complicated than she had thought.

And it had already been very, very complicated.

She stared at the ceiling.

The light under his door didn't go out until nearly four. 🖤

🌸 END OF CHAPTER NINE 🌸

She named it. 🥀

At two in the morning, alone in the dark, Sera Calloway looked at the light under his door and she named what she saw in his eyes in that corridor.

And I'm not going to tell you what it was. 😏

Because I think you already know. 🖤

What did you think of Chapter Nine? 👀

🌸 She is my wife. The way he said it — possessive or protective or both? 👀

🌸 Dave's reaction when Sebastian told him to stay away — did you notice the something underneath?

🌸 Lena's warning — not always what he appears to be — she knows more than she's saying 👀

🌸 Sera naming the thing she saw in his eyes at two in the morning — what do YOU think she named?

🌸 And the question of the chapter...

Is Sebastian Drave jealous? 😏🖤

💭 Drop everything in the comments! I genuinely cannot wait to read your theories 🌸

🌸 Vote if this chapter wrecked you in the best way!

🌸 Comment what you think Sera named!

🌸 Follow — Chapter Ten is Vivienne and she is NOT coming in quietly 🌸

🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🖤

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Ten...

Where a woman who has wanted Sebastian for years walks into a room and finds Sera sitting in it. And decides, with a smile like a blade, that this is a problem she is going to solve. 🥀🖤