All Chapters of The Devil's Plaything: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Lucian POV I knew the name Helena Voss the way you knew a weapon you had never been foolish enough to pick up.Not from experience. From the gap that experience left behind in others — the particular quality of caution that appeared in people who did not normally deal in caution, the way certain names, when spoken in the right rooms, caused a brief and involuntary stillness. I had heard the name perhaps a dozen times over eight years of working close to the networks my father had moved within, and each time it arrived attached to something that had already happened, something that could not be undone, and no reliable account of who had done it.That was Helena Voss.She had been described as Reyes's right hand for fifteen years, which was the version of the story that people told when they didn't want to spend time on the real one, or when they hadn't done the work to find it, or when they had done the work and found it unsettling enough that the simpler version felt better. The real

Serena's POV Her name was Isabela Carvalho, and she arrived on a Tuesday in a car so unremarkable I almost didn't notice it coming up the drive.I watched from the upstairs window — a grey saloon of the kind that existed in such numbers on European roads that your eye slid right past it without leaving any memory of having seen it at all. That was not a coincidence. I understood enough, by now, about the world Lucian had moved through for eight years to recognise a deliberate choice when I saw one. The car was not grey because Isabela Carvalho had no preferences. It was grey because she had thought carefully about what she wanted people to notice when she arrived somewhere, and had decided the answer was: nothing. Or as close to nothing as a human being and a vehicle could manage.She got out alone. No driver, no companion, no one in the back seat. One bag, over one shoulder, carried with the ease of someone who had long since narrowed down what they needed to what could be moved qui

(Serena's POV – Six Weeks Later)Liam got sick on a Wednesday.It started the way infant illness always started, which was to say it started with nothing that looked like a beginning. A slight warmth when I lifted him from the cot that morning that I told myself was the room, because the room had been warm, because it had been a close night and the window hadn't been open wide enough. It got worse in the afternoon but I told myself he was teething, because he had been working on a tooth for three weeks and teeth made babies miserable and this was the most reasonable explanation and I needed it to be the most reasonable explanation. A small, particular cry at two in the morning that I stood in the doorway and listened to and told myself was ordinary, was the kind of waking that babies did, was nothing.By Thursday morning the warmth had become a fever. Not the mild, manageable warmth of a child who was a bit under the weather and would be better by the weekend. A fever that registered

(Lucian's POV)The meeting happened on the fourth morning.Liam had been cleared to come home the previous afternoon, and I had carried him through the front door of the estate myself, which was not something I had planned or thought about. It had simply happened. The nurse placed him in my arms at the hospital exit and I carried him to the car and then from the car to the house and up the stairs to the nursery, and I stood there for a long time after putting him down, watching him sleep in his own cot in his own room with the focused attention of someone who needed to see a thing with his own eyes before he could fully believe it was real.Serena had stood in the doorway behind me and said nothing.She did not need to.The threat had also had four days to settle into something we could look at without the sharp distortion that immediate fear produced. Fear was necessary — it was information, it told you what mattered and how much — but it was also loud in a way that made it hard to t

Serena's POV My father's desk used to sit in the front room of our flat.It was a simple desk. Small, wooden, the kind of thing bought secondhand from a market stall and carried up three flights of stairs by two people who had underestimated the weight of it. There was a scratch on the left corner where he had set down a mug one morning and caught it with his elbow on the way to answering the phone, and the mug had gone over the edge and landed on the floor and the scratch had stayed. He never replaced the desk, never did anything about the scratch except occasionally run his thumb along it when he was thinking — the way people touched familiar things without knowing they were doing it.He said, when I asked about it once, that it was proof that even the best mornings could be clumsy and survive it. I had been about eleven. I accepted this as the kind of thing adults said that was probably wiser than it sounded, and went back to my homework.I thought about that scratch a great deal