Semua Bab The Devil's Plaything: Bab 41 - Bab 50

Mona's POV — The Estate, Five Weeks After Serena's DepartureI had worked for the Devlin household for nineteen years.I had outlasted three housekeepers, two bodyguards, and one chef who survived precisely sixteen days before Lucian dismissed him for over-seasoning a steak — not rudely, not with raised voice, just with that particular flatness that meant a decision had already been made and the conversation was a formality. I had outlasted a very strange and chaotic period when Richard Devlin had decided that hosting monthly dinners for senators would improve his political insulation. I had carried trays through those evenings and kept my face neutral and forgotten everything I heard, which was the first and most important skill this household had ever asked of me.I had seen Lucian Devlin at his worst.After Beverley. After the grief that he hadn't permitted himself to show — not publicly, not even privately, not in any room where another human being might register it. I had seen hi

Serena's POV — The CityMarcus had a way of making things feel inevitable.It was his particular gift — not a dramatic one, not something you could point to in a single moment and name. It was quieter than that. It was the ability to occupy space in your life so naturally, so gradually, that one day you simply looked up and realised he was in all of it, woven through the ordinary hours like something that had always been there, and you couldn't quite remember the moment it had happened or the point at which you had agreed to it.He brought coffee on Tuesday mornings. He called on Wednesday nights — not late, not intrusive, just at the hour when the evening had gone quiet and the silence of the flat started to have texture. He showed up on Saturdays with groceries, letting himself in with the key I had given him during a weak moment two weeks after my mother's funeral, because he had decided — with the calm authority of someone who had appointed himself to the role — that I wasn't eati

Serena's POV — The CityMarcus called me to the café on a Thursday. A different one entirely, in a different part of the city, a fact I hadn't known until Raphael mentioned it carefully like he reserved for information he suspected would require time to land properly.Vale & Co. he had said. Just that. And then he had watched my face.I had made him repeat it.Vale & Co. My father's name — my name — above a door, on a street I had walked past a hundred times without ever stopping, in a neighbourhood my father had loved for its unhurried pace and its old buildings and the way the morning light came through at a particular angle that he used to say reminded him of somewhere he'd been before he met my mother, though he could never quite say where. I had laughed at him for that. I had told him he was being romantic about something he couldn't even remember, and he had said that was exactly the point — that some things were beautiful because they couldn't be fully explained.I had stood i

I didn't arrest him straight away.I know how that sounds. I know what it says about me — that I sat with the truth for three full days before I did anything. Three days where Frederick Hale kept walking around free, waking up each morning and going about his life, while I sat in the rooms he had poisoned and built the case against him. Carefully. Slowly. The way you build something meant to last.I called the intelligence contacts I'd worked alongside for nearly a decade. I gave them a file that had taken seventy-two hours to put together — every piece of evidence cross-referenced, every gap closed before anyone could use it against me in court. The detective who received it called me back within the hour. In thirty years on the job, he said, he had never seen evidence put together so thoroughly. He said it with a kind of uncomfortable admiration, like a craftsman who has just seen someone else do his job better than he ever could.I thanked him and hung up.But the real reason I wai

Mona called me on a Wednesday morning while I was sitting at my kitchen table eating toast that had gone cold, trying to decide whether to call my sister or just go back to bed and let the day happen without me.I had been doing a lot of that lately. Letting things happen without me. It had started as exhaustion and turned, somewhere around the fifth or sixth week, into something more deliberate — a conscious choice to stop deciding things for a while, because I had spent months making decisions at a pace that left no room for the ordinary business of taking care of yourself, and my body had eventually responded by giving me two babies I couldn't put off dealing with. So I ate cold toast and stared out the window and thought about my options, and that was when my phone rang."He's home," Mona said.No hello. No preamble."I know." I shifted the phone to my other ear. "Kael told me."Kael told me most things now, in the particular way he had of sharing information — one sentence per ev