Chapter 110 You Didn’t Even Try
Cain was waiting for her outside her room, which was not a surprise. What was a surprise was that she wasn’t pacing. She was standing with her back against the wall and her arms crossed and her eyes on the far end of the corridor, and she didn’t move when Lilith turned the corner, just shifted her gaze and let the weight of it land.
Lilith slowed but didn’t stop, not until she was close enough that stopping felt like a choice rather than a retreat.
“You went to Mammon,” Cain said.w
“I did,” Lilith said
“With Belphegor. The two of you walked into his office and sat down and had a conversation about the binding and neither one of you thought to come find me first.” It wasn’t quite a question. Cain said it the way she said most things, like she was laying evidence on a table and waiting to see what Lilith would do with it.
“That’s correct,” Lilith said. “That’s what happened.”
Cain pushed off the wall. She was in her sparring clothes, her dark hair pulled back, and there was something in the set of her shoulders that Lilith recognized by now as the difference between Cain who was going to shout and Cain who had decided shouting wasn’t sharp enough for what she wanted to say.
“I have been here these past few days,” Cain said. “Through everything, through Azrael’s sessions and Mammon’s grievances and Lucian circling everyone like he’s waiting for someone to faint so he can step over them, I have been here. And you went to Mammon. You went to Belphegor. You have Asmodeus, somehow, which I still don’t fully understand. And you are standing in front of me right now because I came to find you, not because you came to find me.”
Lilith looked at her steadily. “You’re right. I didn’t come to you first.”
“I want to know why.”
“Because these past few days you have been aggressive with everyone around you, and I needed to build something before I walked into that.” Lilith kept her voice even, not unkind but not soft either. “I wasn’t afraid of you. I want to be clear about that. But there is a difference between not being afraid and being willing to walk into a room with someone who has been moving through every conversation like it’s a fight she’s already decided to win. I needed allies, Cain. I needed people who were ready to think. I wasn’t sure that’s what I would find with you right now, and I wasn’t willing to risk it.”
Something moved through Cain’s expression that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite hurt but lived somewhere uncomfortably between the two.
“You think I wouldn’t support you,” she said.
“I think you would support me and argue with me at the same volume simultaneously, and I needed to know what I was doing before I had that conversation.” Lilith paused. “I was going to come to you. I want you to know that. You were never at the end of the list because you matter less. You were further down because the conversation with you is harder and I needed to be ready for it.”
Cain was quiet for a moment. Outside the window at the end of the corridor the sky had gone the deep amber color it turned in the late afternoon, and it caught the edges of her hair and made her look, briefly, like something that had been set alight from the outside in.
“You could have just come to me,” she said, and her voice was different now, lower, the performance of anger dropping away into something more honest underneath it. “Even if I argued. Even if I was difficult. You could have come anyway and let me be difficult and worked through it. That’s what you do with people who matter. You don’t wait until they’re easier. You show up when they’re hard.”
Lilith looked at her for a long moment. There was something true in that, genuinely true, and she wasn’t going to pretend there wasn’t.
“You’re right,” she said. “I should have come sooner. I’ll own that.” She paused. “But I need you to own something too, because there’s something I haven’t said yet and I need to say it.”
Cain waited.
“It was my birthday two days ago,” Lilith said. “I turned twenty years old. People came to find me. People knocked on my door and sat with me and made the effort to show up even in the middle of everything falling apart around us.” She held Cain’s gaze and didn’t look away. “You didn’t. Not a knock, not a word, not a message passed through anyone, nothing, and I know you didn’t know, and I know these past few days have been consuming, and I know grief makes people turn inward. But Sera would have known. Sera, who was taken from this palace and is sitting in a cell somewhere right now, would have known the date and shown up with something terrible that she’d made herself and sung badly and refused to leave until I laughed.” Her voice stayed even the whole time. “You didn’t even try, Cain. And I need you to sit with that, because I am not a cause you’re fighting for. I am a person. And I needed someone to remember that two days ago and you weren’t there.”
The corridor was very still.
Cain’s face had done something during that speech that it rarely did. It had gone unguarded. The sharpness was still there but it had turned inward, and what was left on the surface was something rawer and less comfortable, the expression of someone who had been handed a mirror at an angle they weren’t expecting.
“I didn’t know,” she said quietly.
“I know you didn’t,” Lilith said. “That’s what I’m telling you.” She stepped around her. “I’ll come to you when I’m ready to have the real conversation. Until then you can think about what I said.”
She walked down the corridor without hurrying, without looking back, her footsteps steady on the stone floor.
Behind her Cain said nothing, and that silence was the loudest thing in the hallway. Lilith had expected an argument, a last word, something. Cain always had something. The fact that she didn’t follow, didn’t call after her, didn’t push back even once, said more than any response could have.
Lilith turned the corner and kept walking, and the amber light followed her halfway down the hall before the angle of the palace swallowed it up and left her in the ordinary dark.