BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 13🌸

🌸 Sera's POV

She was still thinking about his hand.

Four days after the gala and she was still thinking about it — the specific weight of it, the warmth of it, the way his fingers had closed over hers with that absolute certainty he brought to everything and hadn't let go. She had replayed it more times than she was comfortable admitting, in the quiet hours of the library and the longer quiet hours of the night, turning it over the way you turn over something you've found and aren't sure yet if you should keep.

She was keeping it.

That was the part that frightened her.

She was keeping it alongside the botany section and the moved meeting room and the knocked door and the you don't have to go and the light that burned until four in the morning, and the collection of things she didn't know what to do with had grown large enough that it had stopped being a collection and started being something else. Something with a shape she could almost see if she didn't look at it directly.

She was looking at the roses through the library window and not looking at the shape of it when Lena appeared in the doorway with the particular expression that meant something had happened.

"What is it?" Sera said immediately.

"There's a dinner tonight," Lena said carefully. "Mr. Sebastian's inner circle. It happens quarterly." A pause. "Mr. Dave will be attending."

Sera absorbed that. "Does Sebastian know?"

"Mr. Dave is still — technically — part of the inner circle." Lena's voice was very precise. The precision of someone navigating a sentence that has edges. "He hasn't been formally removed." Another pause. "Yet."

Sera looked at her.

Lena looked back with the expression of someone who has said exactly as much as they intended to say and not a word more.

"Should I stay in my room?" Sera asked.

"Mr. Sebastian asked me to tell you," Lena said, "that dinner is at eight. And that you should come."

She almost didn't.

She stood in front of the wardrobe at seven forty and had a very serious internal conversation about the merits of a headache — a real one, she could work with a real one, her head had been doing something uncomfortable all afternoon that could generously be described as the beginning of a headache — and then she thought about Sebastian's face at the gala when he'd said my wife to a room full of people and she put on something appropriate and went downstairs.

The dining room was different with people in it.

She had only ever seen it empty or with just Sebastian, and the presence of eight additional people transformed it into something that felt both larger and smaller simultaneously — larger because the conversation filled it, smaller because every person in it was the kind of person who occupied space with the particular confidence of someone who had never once in their life been unsure of their right to be somewhere.

Roman was there. He looked at her when she entered with the steady, unrevealing expression that was simply his face and nodded once — which she had learned, over weeks, was Roman's version of warmth.

Marco was there, silver-haired and sharp-eyed, who rose slightly when she entered with the old-world courtesy of someone who had been taught manners before he had been taught everything else.

Elias. Viktor. Cole. Several others she recognised from the edges of the house's activity without knowing well.

And Dave.

He was at the far end of the table — not beside Sebastian, she noted, which was a change from what she had gathered was usual — and he looked up when she entered with the easy smile that she now read the way she read weather. Surface information. Not necessarily representative of conditions underneath.

Sebastian was already seated at the head of the table.

He looked at her when she came in.

Just looked — that specific quality of attention she had stopped being able to fully brace for because it never felt the same twice. Tonight it felt different again. Something in it that was almost — she didn't finish the thought. She went to the chair that had become, over breakfast after breakfast, simply hers, which was not the far end of the table anymore, which was closer than that, and sat down.

His hand found hers under the table.

Brief. Just for a moment. Just his fingers closing over her hand and then releasing — a small, private thing that nobody at the table saw and that she felt all the way up her arm and into her chest and that she spent the next twenty minutes trying not to think about while simultaneously thinking about nothing else.

The dinner was — fine.

That was the honest word for it. Fine. The conversation was the kind of conversation that happened in rooms like this — careful, multilayered, with as much happening in what wasn't said as in what was. She ate. She listened. She said the small things that were asked of her and no more, which she had learned was both the safest and the most appropriate contribution she could make to conversations that were really about things she only partially understood.

Dave was quieter than usual. She noticed that. The easy charm was present but reduced — turned down slightly, like a light on a dimmer. He spoke when addressed and not much otherwise and kept his eyes, mostly, away from her end of the table.

She noticed when that changed.

It was during the third course. Marco was telling a story — something about a negotiation in Lisbon, self-deprecating and well-constructed, the kind of story designed to make a table laugh — and the table was laughing, and in the loosening of the moment Dave's eyes moved to her.

Not for long. Not obviously. Just — a look. The kind of look that was meant to be caught only by the person it was directed at.

She looked at her plate.

She felt Sebastian go still beside her.

Not dramatically. Just — the particular quality of his stillness that she had learned to distinguish from his ordinary stillness, the kind that meant he was processing something and the processing was not pleasant. She didn't look at him. She kept her eyes on her plate and breathed carefully and willed the moment to pass.

It passed.

Marco's story ended. The table laughed. Someone refilled wine. The dinner continued.

But something in the room had changed. Something in the specific atmosphere around Sebastian had changed, and she could feel it the way you could feel weather changing before the sky showed it — a pressure, a quality of air, a stillness that was not restful.

She pressed her hand flat against her thigh under the table.

Dinner ended.

It happened in the movement between the dining room and the sitting room where the after-dinner drinks were being served — in the corridor, in the shifting crowd of people relocating, in the brief moment when the geography of the evening created gaps between people.

Dave appeared at her elbow.

"Sera—"

He got that far.

One word. Her name. That was all he got.

Sebastian was there.

She didn't see him move — she never saw him move, that was the thing about Sebastian Drave, he covered distance with a speed that his size didn't suggest and an absence of visible effort that should have been impossible — and then he was simply there. Between her and Dave. A wall that had not been there a moment ago.

The corridor had other people in it. Roman. Elias. Marco. Cole. All of them suddenly very interested in not looking directly at what was happening.

Sebastian looked at his brother.

Dave looked back. The smile was gone. All the way gone, for the first time, and what was underneath it — she saw it properly now for the first time, not the flash of it, not the one-second glimpse she had been filing away, but the full thing — was nothing like what the smile had promised. Dark and hot and entirely without the warmth she had been reaching for in those early desperate weeks when warmth had felt like survival.

"I said something to you," Sebastian said. Quietly. The corridor-level quiet. The quiet that was not quiet at all.

"She's a person, Sebastian." Dave's voice was different too. The warmth was gone from that as well. What was underneath was harder. "Not one of your—"

"I'm going to stop you there." Sebastian took one step forward. Just one. Dave didn't step back — she noted that, the not stepping back, and noted also that it cost him something, she could see it costing him. "Because you're going to finish that sentence in a way that we don't come back from. And I'd like to give you the opportunity not to."

The corridor was absolutely silent.

Someone had closed the sitting room door. She didn't know when.

"You've been watching her," Sebastian said. Still quiet. "Since the day she arrived. I've watched you watching her. I've been—" a pause, something in it she couldn't name, "—patient about it. I told you once. Privately. You didn't listen."

"I care about her," Dave said. The words came out raw. More raw than anything she had ever heard from him, rawer than the constructed warmth and the easy smile — this was something underneath all of it, something that might have been real even if everything built on top of it was not. "Whatever you think, I actually—"

"Don't." Sebastian's voice dropped another register. Lower than quiet now. Almost nothing. "Don't say that to me. Don't say that in front of her. Don't—"

"You don't deserve her." Dave's voice cracked on it. Not with weakness — with something that had been held for too long. "You don't know how to—you've never—she's terrified of you. She has been since the beginning and you just—"

"Dave."

The name. Just the name. Said in a voice that was no longer quiet in the contained way — said in the voice of something that had come to the end of a very long patience and found only the edge of it.

Dave stopped.

Sera stopped breathing.

Sebastian looked at his brother for a long moment. Everyone in the corridor looked at Sebastian looking at his brother and nobody said anything and nobody moved.

"You are done," Sebastian said. "In this house. At this table. In any room she is in. You are done with the inner circle and you are done with the access that came with it and you are done with any part of this world that requires my tolerance to exist in." A pause. "You are done, Dave. You did that. Not me."

Dave looked at him.

Something moved across his face — complicated and fast and entirely uncontrolled in the way of someone who has stopped managing it. Anger. Hurt. Something that might, in different circumstances, have been grief. And underneath all of it, looking at Sera over Sebastian's shoulder with an intensity that made her want to step backward — that thing. The thing that wasn't love but called itself love. The thing that was worse than anger because it thought it was righteous.

"This isn't over," Dave said.

Not a threat. Not quite. Something worse than a threat — a statement of intention from someone who had just been stripped of everything and had therefore nothing left to lose.

Sebastian said nothing.

Dave left.

The corridor breathed again — a collective exhale, careful and quiet, the sound of a room full of people who had just witnessed something and were processing what it meant for everything that came after.

Sebastian turned.

He looked at her.

She looked back at him with her heart in her throat and her hands shaking and her eyes doing the bright wet thing she had been managing all evening and that she was now, in the aftermath of everything, less able to manage.

He looked at her face for a long moment.

Then he did something she had not seen him do. Not once. Not in all the weeks and all the breakfasts and all the library evenings and all the careful silences.

He reached up and — very briefly, very gently, just for a moment — pushed a strand of hair back from her face.

His fingers barely touched her. It lasted less than a second.

Then his hand dropped and he stepped back and said, to Roman, without looking away from her, "Clear the evening."

Roman said, "Yes, sir," and began quietly redirecting people and the corridor slowly emptied and Sebastian looked at her for one more moment and then said, very quietly, just for her—

"Are you alright."

Not are you alright after the dinner or are you alright after what just happened or any of the framing that would have made it smaller. Just — the question. Whole and direct and without the armour of context around it.

She nodded.

She wasn't entirely sure that was true.

She was entirely sure that she didn't want to be anywhere else. 🌸

🌸 END OF CHAPTER THIRTEEN 🌸

You are done. 🖤

In front of everyone. Every single person in that inner circle watched Sebastian Drave cut his brother out and not one of them said a word because not one of them had words for what they just witnessed.

And then he pushed a strand of hair from her face. 😭🥀

One second. Barely a touch. And she didn't want to be anywhere else.

I need a moment. Do you need a moment. 🌸

What did you think of Chapter Thirteen? 👀

🌸 The hand under the table at the beginning — 🥀

🌸 Dave's this isn't over — how scared are you right now? 👀

🌸 Sebastian's voice dropping that final register — 😭

🌸 The hair. THE HAIR. One second. 🖤

🌸 And the question of the chapter...

Dave said she's terrified of you. Sebastian heard that. What do you think he did with it? 👀

💭 Drop everything in the comments! 🌸

🌸 Vote if this chapter gave you chills and feelings simultaneously!

🌸 Comment the moment that destroyed you!

🌸 Follow — Chapter Fourteen is a turning point and I promise you are not ready 🖤

🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🌸

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Fourteen...

Where something shifts. Finally, irrevocably, in the space between two people who have been circling each other for months.

And Sebastian Drave does something he has never done for anyone. 🥀🖤