All Chapters of The Devil's Plaything: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

106 Chapters

Karla

She arrived seven months later, at four in the morning, during a thunderstorm that lit up the Hill Country sky every thirty seconds in great white bursts.She was small and sure of herself and very loud about being in the world, which Jean said was exactly right and Kael agreed with completely. She had Jean's directness already, somehow — you could see it in the way she looked at things. That clear, straight, completely unbothered gaze of someone taking an honest look at everything around them.He held her for the first time in the grey light just before dawn, with the storm moving off to the east and the room going quiet around them. He thought about all the rooms he had ever stood in the back of, watching doors. All the years of looking outward, always outward, checking everything for danger.He looked down at Karla.She looked back at him with those dark, serious eyes and made a small sound — not quite a complaint, not quite a question."Hello," he said quietly. "I'm your dad."It

The Letter About The Cafe

Serena.I finished the programme three weeks ago. I want to say it felt like a door opening, which is the kind of thing people say about finishing a programme, but what it actually felt like was more like waking up in a room you've been in before and being able to see it clearly for the first time. The room was always there. I just couldn't see the walls for a while.There is something I want to tell you, and I am going to tell you plainly because that is what seems to work between us.Her name is Marisa. She is the prayer coordinator at the facility, which I did not expect to matter to me as much as it did, but there it is. She has this quality of stillness — not the cold kind, not the kind that comes from shutting things out, but the kind that comes from having decided what she believes and standing in it completely. I have not been around many people like that. I think possibly you are one of them, from what I have seen.Things are moving slowly between us. She lost her parents two

The Party

Lucian had been planning it for two months before she found out.She found out because Mona, who simply could not keep a secret from Serena — it was just not something she was able to do — let something slip about a delivery on the fourteenth. When Serena asked what delivery, Mona's face did the thing it did when she had said something she hadn't meant to. That brief, caught expression of someone deciding whether to keep pretending or just hand the whole thing over.She handed it over."He's been planning it since August," Mona said, with the calm of a woman who had made her peace with Lucian Devlin's particular way of doing things a long time ago."My birthday isn't until the fifteenth.""He is aware of that. He has been very aware of that for quite some time."Serena stood in the kitchen and thought about this."How big?" she asked.Mona seemed to give the question honest thought. "He called it intimate," she said. "But you should know that his idea of intimate has changed quite a b

The Girl From The Supermarket

She was thinking about none of this, three weeks later, pushing a trolley down the cereal aisle on a Tuesday afternoon with Liam in the seat and Lucille walking beside her, holding the side of the trolley with the careful seriousness of someone who had been given an important job.She was thinking about whether she had enough eggs, whether Ethan's train was running on time, whether she had replied to the email from the publisher — and she turned the corner into the coffee aisle and walked straight into someone coming the other way.The paper cup the other woman was holding tipped sideways.Coffee — pale brown, milky — ran across the front of the woman's coat in a long diagonal stripe."Oh —" Serena said. "I'm so sorry, I wasn't — I am so sorry —""It's nothing," the woman said. She looked down at her coat with an expression that wasn't angry, just briefly caught off guard. The expression of someone who was used to small bad things happening and had got good at dealing with them."It's

The Engagement Party

It was over coffee — real coffee, at Vale & Co, which Serena had finally made herself walk back into, and which had been, as she had always known it would be, both harder and better than she'd expected — that Marisa mentioned him.Not by name, the first time. She said someone I'm seeing, with the careful quietness of a person protecting something they don't yet want to hold up to too much light, in case the light changes it."Tell me about him," Serena said.Marisa looked down at her cup. That small smile. "He's trying," she said. "He's trying very hard and very patiently and he doesn't push. Which is — that is not a small thing, for me. Someone not pushing is not a small thing.""No," Serena said. "It isn't.""He makes me feel like I have time," Marisa said. "I have not always felt like I had time." She looked up. "He lost things too. He understands what it costs to lose things. I think that's why he doesn't push." She paused, turning the cup slowly in her hands. "Once, I mentioned t

By The Beach

The engagement party was Lucian's idea, naturally.Marcus had mentioned it — once, briefly, in the careful way he mentioned things he wanted without quite believing he was allowed to have them — that he had been thinking about proposing. That Marisa had said once, almost in passing, that she would want to be engaged by the beach. That he had held onto this piece of information quietly, like something precious he wasn't sure yet he had the right to use.Lucian had listened to all of this across the table at Vale & Co on their third time meeting — they had been getting together once a fortnight, the four of them, building something slowly the way you build things when you are being careful with them — and had said nothing at the time.Two days later he called Marcus directly."The beach," Lucian said. "Tell me which one."Marcus was quiet for a moment. "Why?""Because if she said by the beach, then it should be by the beach. And if it's going to be by the beach, it should be done proper

The Call

(Serena's POV) The call came on a Wednesday. Not that the day mattered. Bad news doesn't check your schedule first. It doesn't wait until you've had your coffee or finished your to-do list or had a moment to breathe. It just arrives. And wherever you are, whatever small, normal thing you were doing — that moment becomes the before. Everything after it becomes something else. Serena was trying to feed Lucille. Which, lately, had stopped being a simple thing. Lucille had discovered she had opinions. Strong ones. About food, mostly. The pediatrician had given a list of approved things to try, and Lucille had decided, with the quiet authority of someone twice her age, that she would be trying none of them without significant protest. Serena had the spoon raised. She was making a face — the kind of ridiculous, wide-eyed face that she never would have imagined herself making three years ago, back when she was a different version of herself in a different kind of life. Lucian had caugh

What Remains Of A Man

By nightfall, the speculation had already begun. This was the nature of a name like Lucian Devlin's. It accumulated stories the way certain old houses accumulated atmosphere, not deliberately, not through any particular effort, but simply by existing in the world long enough and with enough weight that anything that happened in proximity to it became freighted with implication. Frederick Marsh had been in custody for fourteen months. He had been in good health, or at least in adequate health, or at least in the health of a man in his mid-sixties who had spent years in the company of people who ate and drank very well and exercised not at all. And then he was dead. And nobody, officially, knew why. The rumours moved fast. Serena heard them first from a source she would not have expected, which was Mona, who had come in from her Wednesday morning errands with the expression of a woman who had information she was deciding whether to volunteer and had decided, on balance, that she woul

Something In The Air

Serena's POVIt was Mona who noticed first.Mona always noticed first. It was her gift, and sometimes her burden too. She could read a room, a house, a person, with the calm patience of a woman who had spent decades paying attention and had no plans to stop. She noticed things the way other people breathed. Naturally. Without even trying.She said nothing for three weeks.Serena only knew this later, when she went back and tried to piece together the timeline. Once things became clear, she could see that the signs had been sitting right there in front of her the whole time, quiet and unhurried, waiting to be found. Mona had spotted it first and simply waited. Because Mona understood the difference between a thing that needed to be told and a thing that needed to be discovered on its own.It was a Thursday afternoon in November. One of those ordinary Thursdays that feels exactly like every other Thursday until later, when you look back and realise that something small had shifted that

The Balcony

Serena's POVIt was a Saturday.The morning had been its usual beautiful chaos. The specific comedy of two toddlers who had recently discovered the joy of taking things that didn't belong to them, and who had not yet developed any understanding of why this might be a problem.Liam, in particular, had spent the morning running what could really only be described as a campaign against his sister. He had taken her stacking rings. He had taken the small cloth rabbit Mona had given Lucille in September, the one she carried everywhere and regarded with a devotion she gave to very few things in the world. And then, with the calm confidence of someone who had simply decided that ownership was a concept that didn't apply to him, he had moved into the exact corner of the play mat where Lucille had settled herself with her book, and made himself comfortable there as though he had always been sitting in that spot.Lucille had made her feelings on all of this very clear. Loudly.Serena heard it fr

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