All Chapters of Bound to the Devil I Wed: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Inside, the doctor arrived within minutes, an older man with steel-rimmed glasses and the composed exhaustion of someone who had spent years sewing violent men back together under bad lighting. He opened his case on the desk while Luca sat in the leather chair and removed his hand from the wound. Elena had to grip the back of another chair to remain standing. It was not a gunshot. A knife, she realized. A deep one. The shirt had been cut already where one of the men must have tried to see the damage. Blood slicked his side, dark and shocking against skin and cloth. Not instantly fatal, perhaps, but far from "nothing." The doctor began issuing brisk instructions. Boiled water. Clean towels. More light. Elena moved before anyone told her to. One of the maids nearly collided with her in the doorway carrying a basin, but Elena took it herself and set it where the doctor pointed. Her hands were steady only because terror had turned everything strangely precise. "Madam," the docto

After Sokolov's visit, the house changed.Not visibly to an outsider, perhaps. The flowers still appeared each morning. Meals were still served on time. The chandeliers still burned warm at dusk and the staff still moved with seamless quiet. But Elena felt the shift everywhere once she knew how to look for it.There were more guards.Not lined up theatrically, not enough to make the house resemble a barracks. But they existed now in places they had not before, at the east corridor turn, outside the lower terrace doors, near the back gardens after dark. Men she had not seen earlier in the week rotated through the entry hall in pairs. The gates remained closed longer before allowing cars through.And Luca?Luca became sharper.He spoke less. Slept less. The wound at his side should have slowed him; instead it seemed only to strip away what little patience he had. Twice Elena saw men come out of his study looking pale and newly repentant. Once she heard raised Russian from behind closed

Elena stopped just inside the threshold.She had imagined Luca's office before, despite herself. A room like the man: hard, cold, immaculate, stripped of softness.She had not been entirely wrong.But there were things she had not expected too. Books. Not for decoration, but worn at the spines. A chessboard half-played on the side table near the windows. A framed photograph turned slightly away on the shelf behind the desk, positioned so deliberately she knew at once it mattered.Luca crossed to the far wall and pressed a button hidden beneath the frame of a map.A second panel slid aside.Behind it, screens flickered to life.Camera feeds.The front gates. The east drive. The south wall. The city-facing perimeter road. The terrace below her rooms. Even the service entrance where deliveries came and went.Elena stared.Luca stood beside the monitors, one hand at his side, the other resting lightly against the edge of the desk as if the wound still pulled when he forgot not to move too

One of Luca's men had already appeared at the edge of the room as if summoned by Adriana's tension alone. She spoke to him in rapid Russian. He nodded and vanished toward the exit. Elena rose too quickly and almost caught the edge of the tablecloth with her chair. Across the room, Sokolov smiled. Not with triumph. With patience. As if he had expected exactly this. They were halfway to the private exit corridor when he intercepted them. Not physically. Just by stepping into the path before the guard returned. "Leaving so soon?" he asked. Adriana moved first, placing herself half a step in front of Elena. "Yes." Sokolov's eyes slid past her. "I wasn't speaking to you." Every muscle in Elena went taut. He wore civility like a tailored suit. No threat in his posture. No raised voice. Yet the menace beneath it sat plain as wire beneath skin. "I was enjoying the evening," he continued, eyes still on Elena. "It improved when you arrived." Adriana's voice cut like glass. "Move.

She avoided him the next day.Not dramatically.Not enough for anyone else to notice.But enough that when she heard his footsteps in the west corridor, she chose the east sitting room instead. When dinner was served later than usual, she asked Marta to send her tray upstairs rather than eat in the small family salon. When Adriana raised one brow over morning coffee and said nothing, Elena knew her evasion was not subtle enough to fool women who lived by noticing.Camilla, had she been present, would have called it sulking.It wasn't.Elena did not know what to do with the truth Luca had given her in that corridor, and until she did, distance felt safer.For him too.Especially for him.Because every time she remembered the look on his face when he'd said he'd imagined killing Sokolov, something deep in her chest tightened in a way that wasn't entirely fear. That made her angry with herself.By afternoon, Marta appeared in her rooms holding a cream-colored folder."Your husband asked