All Chapters of The Villain's Captive: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Seraphina's POVHis name was Rael.She had seen him around the keep for three weeks without learning it. He was the kind of man who occupied space quietly, not through shyness but through a particular quality of stillness that reminded her, she realised one morning with a jolt of recognition, of Kael. Not in appearance but in manner. The same economy of movement. The same sense of a person who had learned that most things did not require a reaction.He was perhaps forty, broad through the shoulders, with a weathered face and close cropped grey at his temples and hands that had the same quality as the weapons on the walls, used and maintained and completely serious about their purpose.

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Seraphina's POVShe had not expected it to feel like this.Leaving the keep.She had spent the first days of her arrival counting the ways out, mapping the distances, calculating what it would take to get back to the life she had been taken from. She had stood at her window and looked at the road going south and felt the pull of it the way you feel the pull of anything familiar even when the familiar thing is a cage.Now she stood at the gate with her bag over her shoulder and looked at the same road and felt something she had not expected.She did not want to leave.Not permanently. Not the way she had not wanted to leave in the beginning, which had been less about not wanting to leave and more about not having anywhere to leave to. This was different. This was standing at the edge of something that had become real and solid and hers and feeling the specific weight of stepping away from it even temporarily.She looked back at the keep.The dark stone. The high walls. The window of th