BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 3🌸

🌸 Sera's POV

She woke up and didn't know where she was.

That was the worst part — that single, blinding second of complete disorientation where her body was awake but her mind hadn't caught up yet, where she reached instinctively for the familiar sounds of home. The creak of the floorboard outside her room. Her mother's slow breathing through the wall. Lily's alarm going off two minutes before she actually intended to wake up.

None of it came.

What came instead was silence. The particular kind of silence that didn't exist in small houses on ordinary streets — deep and total and faintly oppressive, the silence of a place so large it swallowed sound whole. And light that was wrong, coming through curtains that were too heavy and too dark and too expensive, falling across a bed that was too wide and too soft and too everything.

Sera sat up slowly.

The room was enormous.

She had known, somewhere in the back of her terrified mind during the car ride yesterday, that Sebastian Drave's home would be nothing like anything she had known. She had known it the way you know things that haven't happened to you yet — abstractly, theoretically, without the weight of reality behind them. But sitting in the middle of a bed that could have fit her entire childhood bedroom inside it, in a room with ceilings high enough to make her feel like something very small at the bottom of a very deep well, the abstract became concrete in a way that sat heavy in her chest.

This was real.

This was her life now.

She pressed both hands flat against the duvet and breathed.

The room was furnished in dark wood and deep colours — burgundy, charcoal, the occasional cold gleam of gold in the lamplight. Everything in it was beautiful and everything in it felt entirely untouchable, the way museum pieces felt untouchable. Not hers. Never hers. She was a guest in this room the same way a bird was a guest in a cage — technically accommodated, fundamentally trapped.

There was a window.

She got up on legs that felt unreliable and crossed to it, pulling back the heavy curtain with both hands. Outside, the grounds of the Drave estate spread out in the pale morning light — manicured and vast and entirely enclosed, iron fencing visible in the far distance, a garden that was beautiful in the severe, architectural way of things that had been designed rather than grown. Beyond the fencing, the city. Her city. Close enough to see. Far enough away that it might as well have been another country.

Her throat tightened.

She let the curtain fall.

The knock at the door came at half past eight.

Sera was sitting on the window seat by then, knees pulled to her chest, still in yesterday's clothes because she hadn't been able to bring herself to open the wardrobe and confront whatever was inside it. The knock was soft — two gentle raps, completely unlike the sounds she had been bracing herself for all morning, and she uncurled slightly.

"Come in," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

The door opened and a woman stepped through — mid thirties, dark hair pulled back neatly, wearing a simple uniform and carrying a tray that smelled of coffee and something warm. She had a kind face. Not dramatically kind, not the performed kindness of someone trying to manage a situation, but quietly, genuinely kind in the way of someone for whom it was simply the default setting.

"Good morning." She set the tray down on the small table beside the window seat. "I'm Lena. I'll be looking after you while you're here."

Sera looked at her. While you're here. As if it were temporary. As if there were a while with an end attached to it somewhere.

"Sera," she said softly. "My name is Sera."

Lena smiled. Small and warm. "I know." She straightened up and looked at her with the particular careful attention of someone taking stock of a situation without making it obvious. "Have you eaten anything? Since yesterday, I mean."

Sera tried to remember. She shook her head.

Lena clicked her tongue quietly — not unkindly — and pushed the tray a little closer. "Eat something. It doesn't solve anything but it helps a little." She paused. "The bathroom is through that door. There are clothes in the wardrobe — I chose things I thought might be comfortable, nothing too—" she seemed to choose her next word carefully, "—unfamiliar."

Sera looked at her hands. "Thank you," she said. The words felt inadequate and enormous at the same time.

Lena nodded. She moved toward the door, then stopped with her hand on the frame and looked back. "The house has rules," she said quietly. "I'll explain them all properly when you're ready. But the most important one—" she held Sera's gaze for a moment, steady and serious, "—is don't be where you're not supposed to be. And if you're ever not sure where that is, find me first. Before anyone else."

Sera nodded slowly. She understood, she thought, what Lena was really saying underneath those words. She filed it away carefully.

"Okay," she said.

Lena left. The door clicked shut softly behind her.

Sera sat alone in the enormous room and stared at the tray of food and thought about the fence she had seen from the window, the iron and the distance, and then she picked up the cup of coffee with both hands and held it the way you hold something warm when you are very cold and have nothing else.

She found the corridor by accident.

She hadn't meant to explore — hadn't meant to go anywhere at all, actually. She had eaten, she had changed into the simplest thing she could find in the wardrobe, and she had sat in her room for what felt like hours trying to understand the shape of her new existence. But the walls had eventually begun to press in on her in that particular way of walls in unfamiliar places, and she had needed air, or at least the illusion of it.

The hallway outside her room was long and silent and lined with doors she didn't open. She walked slowly, trailing one hand along the wall, not going anywhere in particular, just moving. Just existing in the space and trying to make it feel slightly less alien.

She turned a corner without thinking about it.

And stopped.

At the end of a shorter corridor was a set of double doors, slightly ajar, and through the gap she could hear — very faintly — the sound of someone speaking. Low, controlled, precise. The particular cadence of someone who was not accustomed to being interrupted or questioned.

Every rational instinct she had told her to turn around.

She stood very still instead, heart hammering, and listened without meaning to.

"— move it forward. I don't care about the timeline, I care about results. If Petrov can't deliver by Friday then he's not delivering at all and we'll discuss what that means for him personally—"

A pause.

"I didn't ask for an explanation. I asked for a solution."

Another pause. Shorter.

"Then find one."

Silence.

Sera realised she had been holding her breath. She exhaled very quietly and took one careful step backward.

The door opened.

Sebastian Drave filled the frame so completely and so suddenly that Sera made a sound she would spend the rest of the day being mortified by — a small, strangled thing that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a scream and was entirely involuntary. She stumbled back, her shoulder hitting the wall, and stood there with both hands pressed flat against it behind her, staring up at him with wide eyes and a heart that had completely abandoned any pretence of a normal rhythm.

He looked at her.

The phone was still in his hand. He had ended the call at some point — she wasn't sure when. He stood in the doorway of his study and looked at her the way he had looked at her yesterday in the entrance hall, with that same unreadable precision, like she was a variable he was in the process of placing.

"I — I'm sorry—" The words came out fractured, barely held together. "I didn't mean to — I wasn't trying to — I just got lost, I didn't know where I was going and I—"

"Sera."

Her name in his mouth cut through every word she was trying to produce. Just her name, nothing else, said in that voice that was so quiet it somehow took up all the available space in the corridor.

She stopped talking immediately. Her mouth closed. Her eyes stayed fixed on his face with the helpless attention of someone who has learned that looking away from a dangerous thing is more frightening than looking at it.

Sebastian looked at her for one long moment. Then his eyes moved — briefly, almost imperceptibly — to her hands pressed flat against the wall behind her, white-knuckled and shaking.

"Breakfast is served in the east dining room at eight," he said. "Lunch at one. Dinner at seven. You are not to be in this corridor."

Sera nodded. A tiny, jerky movement.

"The west wing is yours. You don't need to be anywhere else."

Another nod. She wasn't entirely sure she was breathing.

Sebastian looked at her one more second. Then he stepped back, pulled the study door almost closed, and was gone.

Sera stood in the corridor for a long moment after that, hands still pressed against the wall, waiting for her legs to agree to hold her again.

They took a while.

She found her way back to her room without turning another wrong corner. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and told herself she was fine.

She almost believed it.

Almost.

🌸 END OF CHAPTER THREE 🌸

And so it begins. 🥀

Sera wakes up inside the golden cage and discovers that surviving Sebastian Drave isn't just about surviving him — it's about learning the rules of his world before his world swallows her whole.

But she found Lena. 🌸 And sometimes one quiet ally is everything.

What did you think of Chapter Three? 👀

🌸 Did Lena already steal your heart a little?

🌸 That corridor moment — her stumbling into him — did your heart stop?

🌸 What do you think Sera is feeling underneath all that fear?

🌸 Is Sebastian being cruel or is he simply being Sebastian?

🌸 And the most important question...

How long before the cage starts to feel like something else entirely? 👀

💭 Drop your theories in the comments! I read every single one. 🌸

🌸 Vote if this chapter gave you feelings!

🌸 Comment your favourite moment!

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🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🖤

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Four...

Where we go back inside Sebastian's head. And discover that the girl wandering his corridors is becoming a problem he didn't account for. 🥀🖤