Chapter 120 Sneaky bitch
A servant knocked on her door mid-morning with a message from Lucian.
She was still in bed when it came, she wasn't sleeping, she was just lying there with the morning light coming through the curtains and her thoughts moving through everything that had happened the night before.
She read the note sitting on the edge of the bed.
The scrying had produced something substantial and Lucian wanted everyone in the east council room within the hour.
She dressed and left her chamber.
Belphegor was already there when she arrived, sitting in the corner with his arms crossed and his eyes on the table, the stillness of someone who had not slept and was not pretending otherwise.
Asmodeus was beside him, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, none of his usual performance in his face.
Lucian was standing at the head of the table with a map spread open in front of him.
Cain came in after Lilith and took the chair across from her without looking at her.
Lilith noticed and said nothing.
“The scrying gap opened again at around three this morning,” Lucian said, without preamble. “Wider than before, long enough to get a proper read on the location.”
He pressed two fingers to a point on the map.
“Underground compound, eastern territory, here. Mammon’s contacts independently flagged the same location three days ago for unusual construct activity. Both sources match.”
Lilith looked at the point on the map.
“How certain are you?
“Certain enough to move on,” Lucian said.
Belphegor’s stillness shifted almost imperceptibly at those words.
Lilith caught it.
They worked through the details for the an hour, entry points, construct numbers, the problem of Malachi’s wards and what it would take to get through them cleanly.
Lucian led it with the focused precision of someone who had been thinking about nothing else since the gap opened, and for that hour everything else in the palace ceased to matter.
There was just the map and the kingdom and the problem of getting Sera out of it in one piece.
The meeting was almost over when Cain spoke.
She had been quiet through the entire meeting, which was unusual enough that Asmodeus had glanced at her twice, and when she finally opened her mouth it was not about Sera.
“While we’re here,” she said, her voice completely even. “I want to talk about the binding.”
Lucian looked up from the map.
Asmodeus went still.
“The binding is not what this meeting is for,” Lucian said carefully.
“I know what it’s for.”
Cain’s eyes moved to Lilith and stayed there.
“I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s a story Lilith built to avoid making a choice, something elaborate enough and convincing enough that all of us stopped questioning it because we were too busy being persuaded by her.”
“Cain,” Belphegor said.
“I’m not finished.”
She didn’t look away from Lilith.
“She came here knowing she was supposed to choose one of us. She didn’t want to do that. So she built a reason not to, a vision only she witnessed, a prophecy that means whatever she needs it to mean on a given day, divine wards that opened for her because she is a Seraph and not because of anything more significant than that.”
Her voice was steady and deliberate and entirely without its usual heat, which was somehow worse.
“And some of us stopped thinking clearly the moment she walked into a room.”
“That’s not what happened,” Lilith said.
“Then tell me what happened? Tell me again about the seven pillars and your mother and the binding chamber?
Tell me why I should believe it.”
“I have told you, i have told everyone in this palace exactly what I saw and what the Keepers confirmed and what the wards proved when I walked through them without feeling a thing.
I have been honest about every part of it including the parts I don’t fully understand yet, and I am not going to defend it again from the beginning because you decided overnight to stop believing it.”
“Overnight,” Cain said, and something cracked in her voice, just slightly.
“Right. Overnight.”
Asmodeus sat forward.
“Cain.”
“You wouldn’t choose,” Cain said, and the control was slipping now, the heat coming up through it.
“All this time, months, you wouldn’t choose and we all accepted it because of the binding and the prophecy and the vision, and I stood in the garden with you yesterday morning and told you I believed you, I told you I was in, and then.”
She stopped, her jaw worked once.
“And then I find out that you’ve been sleeping with my brother.”
Nobody in the room moved.
Lilith held her gaze and said nothing.
“That has nothing to do with the binding,” she said finally.
“It has everything to do with it.”
Cain stood up, and now the careful evenness was completely gone.
“You want us all to yourself, that's what this has always been.
You couldn’t choose one so you made up a beautiful reason to keep all seven of us right where you wanted us, and we all stood around believing it because none of us wanted to be the one to say it out loud.”
She looked at Lilith with something that was cold and hurt in equal measure, two things that had no business being on the same face at the same time.
“You want all of us and you don’t want to give up any of us and you were sleeping with him while the rest of us were taking your prophecy seriously.”
Her voice dropped.
“I never knew you were a sneaky bitch.”
The slap came before Lilith had fully decided to throw it.
Her hand connected with Cain’s face and the sound cracked through the room like something breaking and nobody moved, not Lucian, not Belphegor, not Asmodeus, the four of them suspended in the second after it happened with the echo of it still in the air.
Cain’s head had turned with the force of it.
She stood completely still.
Lilith’s hand was still raised, she lowered it slowly.
Her eyes were burning and her chest was doing something uncontrolled and painful and she was not going to cry in this room, she was not, but she needed to not be here anymore.
She pushed her chair back and walked to the door and nobody stopped her.
She made it into the corridor before the first tear came and she kept walking, faster, not running but close to it, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth and putting as much distance between herself and that room as her legs would carry her.
Behind her the council room was silent for one long moment.
Then Asmodeus’s voice, low and stripped of everything casual.
“Someone needs to tell me what just happened in there.”