Semua Bab The Devil's Plaything: Bab 101 - Bab 106

Lucian's POVThere were things I had not known about myself before Serena Vale.I had not known, for instance, that I was capable of sitting in a garden on a Sunday morning doing absolutely nothing, and actually being okay with it. For forty-one years I had treated stillness like a problem that needed fixing. Movement was the only thing I trusted. If I stopped moving, I was exposed. If I went quiet, I was left alone with myself in ways I had decided, somewhere in the long cold stretch of early adulthood, were not useful to anyone, least of all me.And yet here I was.Sitting in the garden.Doing nothing.The morning was the kind of October morning that belongs only to itself. The light was thin and gold and almost apologetic about how beautiful it was. The air carried the faint smell of turned earth and something woody drifting from the far end of the property, where the old oaks had begun letting their leaves go. There was a cup of coffee on the arm of my chair that had been growing

Lucian's POVI have never celebrated my birthday.Not since I was eight years old. Not once in thirty years.People who didn't know the full story sometimes found that strange. A man with the kind of money I had, the kind of life I had built, and he didn't throw a birthday dinner? Not even a quiet one? They would say it with that particular smile people use when they think you're being unnecessarily difficult about something simple.They didn't know what happened on my birthday thirty years ago.I was eight the last time a birthday felt like something worth celebrating. My mother had made a cake. A real one, not one she had ordered from somewhere, one she had made herself with her sleeves rolled up and flour on her forearms and Liam on the kitchen stool watching her with his big serious eyes, asking questions about every single step. Liam was five and curious about everything in that exhausting and wonderful way that five-year-olds are. He wanted to know why the eggs had to be at room

Serena's POVThe party was everything she had wanted it to be and then some.The media got hold of it somehow, the way the media always got hold of things involving Lucian, and by nine o'clock there were already posts spreading across the internet. Lucian Devlin, the devil himself, turns 38. The photographs were everywhere. The garden, the lights, the man himself standing with his wife and his twins and the particular expression on his face that was so different from the expression he wore in boardrooms and in photographs taken without his knowledge. He looked, Serena thought, like someone who had been given something he didn't know how to hold yet but was learning.She thought: good. Let them see it. Let everyone see it.Lucian spent the first hour being the version of himself that came out when he was genuinely happy and not trying to manage it, which was a version Serena loved unreservedly. He was warm and dry and made the kind of quiet remarks to Marcus that had Marcus nearly chok