BOUND TO THE DEVIL

🌸CHAPTER 14🌸

🌸 Sera's POV

She called Lily on a Sunday.

Sebastian had arranged it — with the same quiet efficiency he brought to everything, no announcement, no ceremony, just Lena appearing at her door on Saturday evening with a phone and a time and the information that the line was secure and private and that she could speak for as long as she needed. She had held the phone for a long time after Lena left. Just held it. The weight of it — the simple ordinary weight of a phone, which was not a remarkable object, which was something she had held thousands of times — felt different. Felt like something she had been given back that she hadn't realised had been taken.

Lily picked up on the second ring.

"Sera." Not a question. Not a greeting. Just her name, said in a voice that had been waiting for this call for weeks and was trying very hard not to show how much.

She pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment. Then she said, "Hi, Lily."

What followed was forty minutes she couldn't have entirely reconstructed afterward — a tangle of voices and information and the particular relief of hearing someone who knew her, really knew her, the Sera from before. Lily was careful — she understood that carefully without being told, the carefulness of what she said and didn't say about their father, about the house, about the weeks since. Their mother was the same. Stable, Lily said. Which was not better but was not worse, and in the geography of their mother's illness not worse was its own kind of grace.

She told Lily almost nothing about where she was. What she said was — I'm okay. I'm learning. I'm not what I was but I don't think that's entirely a bad thing.

Lily was quiet for a moment after that.

"Are you safe?" she said. Just that. Direct and clear and seventeen years old and more perceptive than anyone had ever given her credit for.

Sera thought about that for a moment.

"Yes," she said. And meant it, which surprised her more than anything.

After she hung up she sat on the window seat for a long time with the phone in her lap and looked at the garden and thought about the word safe and how its shape had changed in her mouth over the past weeks. How it had started as an absence — the absence of the worst thing happening — and had become, quietly, without announcement, something with more substance than that. Not the safe of her old life, the known and ordinary safe of cinnamon mornings and her mother's garden. Different. More complicated. But — real.

She thought about a stone bench and a Damascus rose and my mother planted it.

She thought about what do you need.

She thought about his hand under the table at the dinner and how her fingers had found his and held on before she had consciously decided to.

She was doing that thing again — the thing she wasn't supposed to do, the thing that felt dangerous in a way she couldn't fully articulate — and she made herself stop and go to bed.

She didn't sleep for a long time.

She saw it by accident.

That was important — she needed to be clear with herself that it was an accident, because the alternative was that she had been trying to see it and she didn't think she could handle what that meant. She had simply taken a wrong turn. The house was large and her internal map was good but not perfect and on a Tuesday morning when she had been distracted by something she was thinking about she had taken the corridor that branched left instead of right and found herself in a part of the house she didn't usually navigate.

She heard his voice before she saw him.

Not the desk voice — not the controlled, precise, corridor-level quiet of Sebastian managing something or directing someone or doing any of the hundred things he did in the course of a day that produced that particular vocal quality. Something different. Lower. Something she had never heard from him before.

She slowed.

The door at the end of the corridor was open. Not wide — just ajar, the way doors were sometimes left when whoever had gone through them had both hands occupied and no hand to spare for the closing. She should have turned around. She knew she should have turned around.

She moved closer instead.

The room was one she hadn't seen before — smaller than the study, less formal, more — used, was the word that came to her. The kind of room that had been lived in rather than arranged. Books that were actually pulled from their shelves and replaced imprecisely. Papers that were stacked by use rather than design. A desk that was a working desk rather than a statement.

And Sebastian.

Sitting not behind the desk but beside it — in a chair pulled close to a low table, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and across from him in an identical chair, a boy.

Ten years old, perhaps. Small and serious-faced with dark eyes that were familiar in a way she couldn't immediately place. He had a book open on his knees and Sebastian was looking at it with him — looking at it with him, the way you looked at something with someone rather than looking at it for them, leaning in rather than presiding over, shoulder coming close to the boy's shoulder as he pointed to something on the page.

The boy said something she couldn't hear.

Sebastian said something back.

The boy frowned — a fierce, concentrated frown, the frown of someone working out a problem they were taking seriously. Sebastian watched him work it out and said nothing, and she saw — she saw it from the corridor, from the gap in the door, from the accident of a wrong turn — she saw something on his face that she had never seen there before.

Patient.

Not the patience of someone waiting for something to be over. Not the controlled stillness of someone managing their response to a situation. The patience of someone who was — content. In this moment. With this small serious-faced boy and this book and the problem being worked out with that fierce small frown.

The boy said something again.

Sebastian's face did something that wasn't quite a smile — she had never seen him smile, not genuinely, and this wasn't quite that — but it was in the neighbourhood of a smile in the way that warmth was in the neighbourhood of fire. Something that came from the same source. Something real.

He said something that made the boy's frown shift into something closer to satisfaction. The boy nodded seriously. Wrote something down with a pencil.

Sebastian leaned back slightly. Looked at what he'd written. Nodded once.

Sera stood in the corridor with her hand pressed flat against the wall beside the door and felt something rearranging itself in her chest with the slow inevitability of tectonic things — movement that had been building for a long time finally arriving at the surface.

She thought about the monster-ish comment and Lena laughing and the way he had leaned in the doorframe afterward with something almost dangerous and almost amused and she thought about the bench and the rose and she thought about all the things she had been filing for weeks under the heading of I don't know what to do with this and she looked at the man in that chair and she thought —

Oh.

Just that. Just the one syllable of it. The small quiet arrival of something she had been circling for weeks without letting herself get close enough to see it clearly.

Oh.

She stepped back from the door.

She walked back down the corridor the way she had come, slowly, carefully, with the particular care of someone carrying something fragile that they hadn't known they were holding until they looked down and found it in their hands.

She was in the library when he found her.

Not long after — twenty minutes, perhaps, the twenty minutes she had spent sitting in the window seat doing nothing, just sitting, just letting the rearranged feeling in her chest settle into whatever shape it was going to settle into.

He knocked.

"Come in," she said.

He came in. Stood in the doorway — the doorway he had claimed as his position in this room, the frame that was neither her space nor outside it. She looked at him.

He looked back.

"You were in the east corridor," he said. Not an accusation. Just — information. He had known. Of course he had known. She wondered if he had known immediately or if it had been something small that gave it away — a footstep, a shadow in the gap of the door.

"I took a wrong turn," she said. True.

He nodded. Looked at her for a moment. "Cole's son," he said. "He has — difficulties. With reading. He comes on Tuesdays."

She absorbed that. "Does Cole know?"

Something moved through his eyes. "It was Cole's idea."

She looked at her hands. At the ring. Back at him.

"He worked it out," she said softly. "Whatever the problem was. He worked it out."

Sebastian was quiet for a moment. "He usually does," he said. "He just needs — time. To find the way in."

She felt the words settle around something specific and looked at him and thought about time and the finding of ways in and the ten weeks she had been in this house and all the small things she had been collecting without knowing what she was building.

She knew what she was building.

The knowledge of it sat warm and terrifying and entirely too large for her chest.

"Sebastian," she said.

He looked at her. That specific quality of attention. All of it. Hers.

"Thank you," she said. "For the phone call. For — for Lily."

He held her gaze. "I told you not to thank me for that."

"I know." She looked at him steadily. Steadier than she had looked at him in ten weeks, steadier than she had thought she was capable of looking at him. "I'm thanking you anyway."

Something happened in his face.

Not the almost-smile of the small room with the boy and the book. Something different. Something that was specifically about her and about this moment and about the steadiness of her gaze and the thanking him anyway — something she felt across the room, that moved through the library air between them and sat in her chest alongside everything else she didn't know what to do with.

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he crossed the room.

Not to her — to the shelves, the far shelves, the ones he came to the library for, the file he kept there. The usual thing. But the crossing of the room was different today because she knew more than she had known before and knowing more changed the shape of everything.

He sat at the reading desk.

She looked at her book.

Neither of them spoke.

The library settled around them the way it always did — warm and quiet and smelling of old paper — and outside the window the garden sat in the pale autumn light and somewhere in the house a clock ticked and a page turned.

His.

She looked up.

He was reading. Actually reading — not the unfocused staring at a file she had noticed before, not the performance of working while thinking about something else. Actually reading, turned slightly toward the light, one hand flat on the page.

She looked at his hand.

At the ring on his finger.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked back at her own book and read a sentence she didn't retain and read it again and still didn't retain it and gave up and just sat in the window with the warm library air and the clock ticking and the quiet presence of him at the desk and let herself — just for this moment, just this one — not be afraid.

It felt like something.

She wasn't sure yet what.

But it felt like something real. 🌸

🌸 END OF CHAPTER FIFTEEN 🌸

Oh. 🥀

Just that. The one syllable of it arriving quietly in a corridor outside a door she was never supposed to look through.

She saw him with Cole's son. She saw the patience and the warmth and the something that was in the neighbourhood of a smile. And she thought oh and walked away carrying something fragile she hadn't known she was holding.

And then she thanked him anyway. And he crossed the room. And they sat in the library and she stopped being afraid for one moment and it felt like something real.

I'm going to need everyone to scream with me right now. 😭🖤🌸

What did you think of Chapter Fifteen? 👀

🌸 Cole's son and the Tuesday sessions — did this break your image of Sebastian completely?

🌸 Oh. — when did YOUR oh moment happen? 👀

🌸 She thanked him anyway. And he crossed the room. 🥀

🌸 Not being afraid for one moment — how long has she been waiting for that?

🌸 And the question of the chapter...

Is Sera Calloway falling? 😏🖤

💭 Tell me everything in the comments! I love every single one of you 🌸

🌸 Vote if Chapter Fifteen rearranged something in your chest!

🌸 Comment your favourite moment — there are so many to choose from 👀

🌸 Follow — Chapter Sixteen is the public humiliation of Dave and it is going to be devastating 🖤

🌸 Share with your dark romance girls 🌸

Thank you for reading Bound to the Devil 🤍

See you in Chapter Sixteen...

Where Sebastian calls a meeting. And Dave Drave discovers, in front of everyone who has ever mattered in his world, exactly what it means to cross a line that cannot be uncrossed. 🥀🖤