Chapter 108 Holding On
“You came ,” Lilith said.
Belphegor stood in the doorway of her sitting room like he was still deciding whether the decision was final. He had dirt on his hands from the garden, which he hadn’t bothered to clean, and his hair was loose, and he looked like someone who had spent a month outdoors and was only now remembering that indoors existed.
“You asked for my help,” he said.
“Yesterday.”
“I needed to think about it.”
She stepped back from the doorway and let him in. He moved through her room the way he moved through most spaces, slowly, taking careful stock of things without touching them. He stopped at the window, looked out at the garden below, and then turned and sat in the chair nearest the wall without being invited, which for Belphegor was practically effusive.
Lilith sat across from him and waited. She had learned his rhythm in his kingdom. He would get there.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
“I need the brothers to stop fighting long enough to hear the binding plan properly. Not in a throne room with everyone performing for each other. One at a time, privately, with enough space to actually think.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Asmodeus is already with me, I think. You’re here. That’s two.”
“Asmodeus is with whatever keeps things interesting,” Belphegor said, not unkindly. “Don’t mistake that for commitment.”
“I’m not. But interesting and useful can be the same thing.” She paused. “Who do you think comes next? After you.”
He considered it with the unhurried patience that used to frustrate her and now felt like the most solid thing in the palace.
“Not Azrael,” he said. “Not yet. He needs to feel the throne before he questions it. Not Cain, she’s too angry right now and anger makes her dig in. Lucian is possible but he’ll want something in return and you need to know what you’re willing to give before you sit across from him.” He looked at her steadily. “Mammon.”
“Mammon.”
“He’s practical. He doesn’t want the throne, he wants stability, and right now he has neither. If you can show him the binding is more stable than a succession war, he’ll listen.” A pause. “He’ll ask questions you won’t like.”
“I can handle questions.”
“He’ll want to know what the binding actually means for his kingdom’s autonomy. Whether uniting under you changes his authority over Greed’s territory. Whether he answers to you or alongside you.”
Lilith thought about what her mother had shown her in the vision. Seven pillars, not one throne with six subordinates. Beside, not beneath.
“Alongside,” she said. “It has always been alongside.”
Belphegor nodded slowly, like she had confirmed something he already believed.
“Then go to Mammon,” he said. “I’ll come with you if you want. He’s less likely to turn it into a negotiation if there are two of us.”
She felt something shift in her chest, the particular relief of a plan that had been abstract becoming concrete. One thread pulled taut and holding.
“Thank you,” she said.
He looked at his hands, the dirt still in the creases of his knuckles, and said nothing for a moment.
“Find her,” he said quietly. Not a request. Not quite a command. Something in between, the kind of thing that came from a place too deep for politeness.
“I will,” Lilith said. “I promise you I will.”
He nodded once and stood, and she thought he might leave, but instead he crossed to her bookshelf and pulled a thin volume from the middle row and held it out to her.
“Sleep,” he said. “You look like you haven’t in days. This one is dull enough to help.”
She took the book. The cover read: A Comparative History of Territorial Borders in the Eastern Reaches, Volume Four.
“Volume four,” she said.
“Volumes one through three are worse.”
She almost smiled. It was the closest she had come all day.
He left quietly, pulling the door shut behind him, and Lilith sat with the book in her lap and the thin new shape of a plan and let herself feel, for just a moment, like it might actually work.
Three hundred miles east, in a room with no windows and no light, Sera was counting.
She had started on the second day because she needed something to do with her mind, something to hold onto that Armageddon couldn’t take. She counted her own heartbeats in sets of one hundred. She counted the seconds between the guards changing at the door, identified by the particular sound of their footsteps, the wrong-jointed rhythm of the constructs that made her skin crawl even now. She counted the number of times she had refused to answer a question.
Thirty-one.
They had stopped asking three days ago, which was either a good sign or a very bad one.
The cell was cold in the way that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of a place that had never held warmth, that had been built without any intention of it. The walls were smooth and dark and slightly damp, and the floor was the same, and when she pressed her back against the corner and pulled her knees to her chest she could feel both at once.
She thought about Morpheus.
She had been trying not to, because thinking about Morpheus led to the sound he had made, which was not a sound she could afford to carry. But in the dark with nothing to count there was no stopping it. The small bright weight of him. The way he had curled against her neck when he slept. Gone in a second, between one breath and the next, and she hadn’t even been able to stop it.
She pressed her forehead to her knees and breathed.
Lilith would be looking for her. She knew that the way she knew her own name. Lilith would be pulling apart every resource she had, calling in every favor, refusing to stop. And Belphegor. She let herself think his name carefully, like something fragile.
Belphegor would not stop either.
The door at the end of the corridor opened. Not the constructs this time. The footsteps were different, too even, too perfect, the sound of something that had chosen to move like a person without quite getting it right.
Sera lifted her head.
The slot at the bottom of her cell door opened and a tray slid through. Bread and water, the first food in three days. She stared at it in the dark.
They wanted her alive, then. Still.
She waited until the footsteps retreated and the corridor door closed again before she moved. She ate slowly, methodically, because her body needed it and her body was the only tool she had. She drank every drop of water.
Then she went back to her corner, pulled her knees up, and started counting again.
One. Two. Three.
She was still here. That was enough for now.