All Chapters of Surrendering To The Devil I Married : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

53 Chapters

Chapter 31: Not Tonight

The study was dark when I finally came downstairs.I hadn't meant to. I'd spent an hour staring at the ceiling in my room, running my fingers over the places on my shoulders where his hands had been, replaying the way his breathing had changed, the way his forehead had almost touched mine. The way he'd pulled back like I'd burned him.Not like this, he'd said.What did that mean? Not like this. Like this was wrong, or like this wasn't the right moment, or like he was one breath away from something he couldn't take back and he knew it?I gave up on sleep around midnight and wrapped a cardigan around myself and went downstairs, not thinking about where I was going until I was already standing in the hallway outside his study door.The light was on underneath it.I almost turned around. I told myself to turn around. My feet didn't move.I knocked twice, light, like I wasn't sure I wanted an answer."Come in."His voice was rough. Tired. I pushed the door open.He was at his desk, jacket

Chapter 32: What The Dead Leave Behind

The call came on a Thursday.I was in the middle of folding laundry… something the mansion staff would have done without being asked, but I needed something to do with my hands that morning. The folding helped. The repetition of it. Shirt, sleeve, sleeve, fold. Shirt, sleeve, sleeve, fold. A rhythm small enough to live inside when everything else felt too large.My phone buzzed on the dresser. Natalia's name on the screen.I almost didn't answer. We hadn't spoken since the last visit, and that conversation had left marks. But something made me pick up, some old reflex, some part of me that still believed bad news was better faced directly."She's gone," Natalia said. No greeting. No softening. "Last night. Heart failure, they're saying."The shirt in my hands went still."Aurora." Her voice sharpened the way it did when she wanted a reaction and wasn't getting one fast enough. "Did you hear me? Mother is dead.""I heard you," I said.A pause. I could hear her breathing. "The funeral i

Chapter 33: The Lock

Aurora's POVI shouldn't have gone back.That was the thought sitting at the back of my mind the entire drive to the Sinclair house, quiet, persistent, the kind of thought you hear clearly and choose to ignore because you've already made your decision and talking yourself out of it feels like too much work. Evelyn had told me to return to the mansion. She'd been specific about it. Go back. I'll contact you.But my father was in that house. Whatever Reginald Sinclair was or wasn't, whatever had been true or performed over the course of my entire life, he was the only version of a father I had. I wasn't ready to walk away from the burial of his wife without seeing him first. I needed to look at him. I needed to see his face with everything Evelyn had told me sitting fresh in my chest and understand what I was actually looking at.So I told the driver to take me to the Sinclair house instead.The place looked smaller than I remembered. That happened sometimes when you'd been living somew

Chapter 34: What He Came For

Aurora's POVBy the second day I had stopped going to the door.Not because I'd given up, but because the energy it cost to stand and try the handle and confirm what I already knew was energy I needed for other things. Like staying calm. Like thinking clearly. Like not letting the room shrink around me the way rooms did when you'd been inside them too long with nothing but your own thoughts.Nobody came to the door.Not once.On the second evening I stopped knocking and sat cross-legged on the floor with my back against the wall beneath the window and I thought about my mother. Mireille. I'd known her name my whole life, it was the one thing Dad had never stripped from me, perhaps because keeping it cost him nothing. But I had never known her as a person. I had been given the outline of her, beautiful, beloved, taken too soon. The kind of description people gave when they didn't want to give you anything real.Evelyn knew her. Evelyn had grown up beside her, watched her fall in love,

Chapter 35: Somewhere He Doesn't Know

Aurora's POVHe didn't take me back to the Draven mansion.I noticed when the car turned the wrong way but I didn't say anything immediately. I watched the city change outside the window.Lucian sat beside me without explaining, and I had spent enough time in his company to understand the difference between silences that were withholding and silences that were simply waiting for the right moment.This was the second kind.We drove for forty minutes.The house beyond it was not what I expected. I had expected something that matched Lucian's aesthetic, everything designed to communicate control. This was different, older than the Draven mansion by at least a generation. It looked like somewhere a person actually lived, rather than somewhere a person performed living."Where are we?" I asked."Mine," he said. Simply. Like that answered it.We got out of the car. A man I hadn't seen before appeared at the front door, older, with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been running this pa

Chapter 36: The Morning After Everything

I woke up not knowing where I was.That specific panic, the split second before your surroundings resolve into something recognisable lasted longer than usual. The ceiling was wrong. The light was wrong. The sounds of the house were different from the Draven mansion, quieter and older, settling into themselves rather than performing stillness.Then it came back. The stone house. The wild garden. The crackers on the bedside table.Lucian.I sat up slowly. The bedside table had been cleared of the cracker plate at some point during the night and replaced with a fresh glass of water and a small bowl of cut fruit. I stared at it for a moment. Someone had come into this room while I slept and done that without waking me.The thought should have unsettled me. Instead I picked up a piece of mango and ate it and tried to decide what I actually felt.The answer, when I was honest about it, was too many things at once.I felt betrayed. I was angry at him. I was also, uncomfortably.I got up, wa

Chapter 37: Mireille's Letter

Aurora's POVEvelyn arrived at seven.Sebastian was still in the house. He'd spent the afternoon in the study with Lucian, the door closed, voices too low to make out from the hallway. I hadn't tried to listen. I'd sat in the sitting room with the unread book.Evelyn came in from the cold with her coat still on and found me in the hallway.She stopped when she saw me. "You're alright," she said."Mostly," I said.She crossed the distance between us and took both my hands in hers, briefly, firmly, the way she'd done since I was small when she needed me to understand she was serious. Then she let go."Where is he?" she asked."Study. With Sebastian."Something shifted in her expression at that. "Sebastian is here.""He arrived this afternoon. He said he's been making enquiries." I watched her face carefully. "You don't look surprised.""I'm not," she said. "Sebastian has been moving toward this for some time. He just needed something to catalyse it." She began unbuttoning her coat. "Luc

Chapter 38: Four Inches

Aurora's POVThree days passed without either of us acknowledging what had been said in the garden.Not because we were avoiding it or not only because of that. More because the house had settled into a rhythm that neither of us disrupted, and disrupting it felt like breaking something that was, for now, holding us both upright. We moved around each other with a careful, unspoken consideration. Meals at the same table. Coffee in the mornings. The occasional exchange that was about nothing important and therefore safe.I was learning the house. That was how I spent the days. Small things. Solid things. The kind of things you reached for when the large things were too large.On the fourth morning I came downstairs to find something on the kitchen table that hadn't been there the night before.A bowl, filled with the specific brand of honey-roasted cashews that I had eaten during the first weeks at the Draven mansion.I stood at the table and looked at the bowl for a long moment.Margare

Chapter 39: Let Go

Aurora's POVThe house had a rhythm now and I had learned to move inside it.Mornings were mine. I woke before Lucian most days or before he emerged from the study and I had the kitchen to myself for an hour with coffee.Afternoons belonged to whatever work Lucian was doing behind closed doors, which I had stopped trying to map precisely. I understood that the empire Evelyn had referenced was not the Draven name, not Sebastian's carefully constructed legacy, but something Lucian had built independently and quietly over the better part of a decade. Lucian Draven had a specific yield and it was rarely the thing you actually wanted.Evenings we spent in my same room.On the sixth evening, I was on the sitting room floor with my sketchbook."You're holding the pencil wrong," he said.I turned around. He was looking at my hand, not my drawing."I've been drawing since I was eight," I said."I know. You're still holding it wrong." He pointed out. "You grip too hard. See how your knuckles ar

Chapter 40: The Morning After

Aurora's POVHe acted like it hadn't happened.That was the first thing I noticed the next morning, the way he sat across the breakfast table with his coffee, phone, carefully assembled distance and looked at me the way he might look at a piece of furniture he was faintly surprised to find still in the room.No acknowledgment. No reference. Nothing in his expression that admitted the previous evening had occurred at all.I poured my coffee and sat down and decided, quietly, that I was not going to be the one to bring it up. If Lucian wanted to pretend he hadn't kissed me twelve hours ago, that was his decision to make and his loss to carry. I had my own dignity and I intended to keep it.I lasted approximately four minutes."Are we not going to talk about last night," I said.He turned a page on whatever he was reading. "What about it?""What about it," I repeated. Flatly."We had a moment," he said. "It happened. It doesn't need to be discussed at breakfast."Something hot moved thro

1 2 3 4 5 6

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP