Chapter 121 First Time
She had made it to the far end of the east wing before she stopped.
There was a window alcove there, deep enough to stand in properly, and she pressed her back against the stone and her hand flat against her sternum and stood there breathing until the tightness in her throat became something she could manage.
She heard Asmodeus coming and turned her head.
He rounded the corner, saw her face, and stopped.
“Do you want to talk about it,” he said.
“No.”
He crossed to the alcove and leaned against the wall beside her and looked out at the courtyard below with the studied casualness of someone pretending they weren’t paying close attention to everything happening next to them.
A moment passed.
“Which part don’t you want to talk about,” he said. “The Cain part or the other part.”
She looked at him. “There’s only one part.”
“Lilith.” He turned and looked at her with his gold eyes, bright with something he was working very hard to keep in check. “I am your friend and I care deeply about your wellbeing and I also need you to understand that I have been in this palace for a very long time and nothing genuinely interesting ever happens and last night something very interesting happened and I am simply asking, as your friend—”
“Asmodeus.”
“Was it good?”
“I am not discussing this with you.”
“That means yes.” He turned back to the window looking thoroughly satisfied. “Good. He needed that. He’s been unbearably tense for months.”
“I said I’m not discussing it.”
“You’re not. I am. Different thing entirely.” He paused, glancing at her sideways. “Was it your first time?”
She opened her mouth to shut him down completely and then closed it again because the question had landed somewhere she hadn’t been prepared for and she was still raw. Her chest was still doing the uncontrolled thing and apparently, that combination was enough to get past every sensible instinct she had.
“Yes,” she said.
Asmodeus went quiet for three full seconds, which for him was practically a religious experience.
“He knows,” he said finally.
“I don’t know what he knows.”
“He knows,” Asmodeus said, with the certainty of someone who had known Azrael for centuries. “He absolutely knows and that explains several things I had attributed to the succession situation but was clearly something else entirely.” He nodded slowly to himself. “Good.”
“Stop saying good.”
“I’ll stop when it stops being accurate.”
He pushed off the wall slightly and looked at her properly for the first time since arriving, his eyes moving over her face and then dropping to her throat, and he stopped.
She watched him see the necklace.
He looked at it for a moment, the gold chain, the pendant with the diamonds catching the morning light, her name in the metal. His expression did something she hadn’t seen from him before, something that wasn’t the performance of him, something that was just genuine and unguarded and unexpectedly soft.
“He had that made,” Asmodeus said.
“Yes.”
“For your birthday.”
“Yes.”
He looked at it for another moment and then looked away, back at the courtyard, and she could see him deciding something internally, some recalibration happening that he wasn’t going to narrate out loud. When he spoke again his voice had the particular lightness of someone who had felt something real and chosen to carry it quietly.
“Your name,” he said.
“Yes.”
“He put your name on it.”
“Asmodeus.”
“I’m just observing.” He cleared his throat. “That’s very him actually. Doing something enormous and presenting it like it’s a perfectly ordinary thing to do.” He paused. “Did he put it on for you?”
She looked at him.
“I’m asking because the clasp on something like that is small and fiddly and it tells you a great deal about a person whether they’re patient enough to—”
“Yes,” she said. “He put it on for me.”
Asmodeus pressed his lips together and nodded with the energy of someone exerting tremendous self-control.
“How are you,” he said finally, and this time it wasn’t a performance. It was just a question.
She looked at the courtyard. The fountain was still, the morning light flat and grey across the stone. Somewhere in the palace a door closed hard enough to carry.
“I feel like I got called a sneaky bitch in front of four people and then cried in a corridor,” she said.
“You slapped her first.”
“She called me a sneaky bitch.”
“Fair,” he said immediately. “Completely fair. I would have done worse. You showed considerable restraint.”
She felt the corner of her mouth move against her will.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m serious. A single open palm. That’s almost dignified.” He tilted his head. “Did it feel good?”
“Asmodeus.”
“I’m asking for science.”
She laughed.
It came out before she could stop it, short and slightly wet at the edges because she was still in the aftermath of crying, and she pressed her hand over her mouth and shook her head and he stood beside her looking entirely too pleased with himself.
“There it is,” he said quietly.
She lowered her hand and looked at him. Underneath all the performance of him there was something genuinely steady, something she had come to rely on without noticing exactly when it had happened.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You found me in a corridor and made me laugh.”
He shrugged with entirely false modesty. “It’s a gift.”
They stood there together for a moment and the morning settled around them and she felt the worst of it begin to pass, not gone, not resolved, but manageable in the way things became when someone sat beside you in them without asking you to be fine before you were ready.
Then she heard it.
A voice from somewhere in the direction of the council room, controlled and quiet in the way that made controlled sound like the more dangerous word of the two.
Azrael.
She straightened. “He found out.”
“Someone in that room went to find him,” Asmodeus said, unsurprised. “Probably Lucian. He would have considered it relevant information.” He glanced at her. “Do you want to go?”
She listened to Azrael’s voice moving down toward the council room, toward Cain, and she thought about everything Cain had said and the way the room had gone silent around every word of it and the way her own hand had felt in the second after the slap.
“No,” she said. “Let him.”
Asmodeus nodded.
From somewhere in the east wing Cain’s voice rose to meet Azrael’s and the two of them collided the way they always did when things had gone past the point of civility, with the accumulated force of centuries between them, knowing exactly where to press and pressing there, and the palace walls carried the sound of it outward and Lilith stood in the alcove and listened and didn’t feel sorry about the slap.
Not even a little.
A few minutes passed. The voices from the east wing rose and fell and rose again and then went abruptly quiet in a way that was either resolution or the particular silence that came before something worse.
Then footsteps in the corridor.
Different from Cain’s, different from Asmodeus’s, measured and deliberate and familiar enough by now that she knew them before he appeared.
Azrael came around the corner and stopped when he saw her.
He looked at her face first, taking stock of the way he always did, and then his eyes dropped to her throat and found the necklace, and something moved through his expression that settled the remaining tension in his face into something quieter and more certain, the way a compass settled when it found its direction.
He crossed to her.
Asmodeus looked between them, straightened up from the wall, and said, “I’ll be somewhere significantly more comfortable,” and was gone before either of them responded.
Azrael stopped in front of her and reached out and touched the pendant at her throat with his fingertips, just briefly, the same careful touch as the night before.
“You’re wearing it,” he said.
“I haven’t taken it off,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment, and then he pulled her in without making it a question, his arms around her, her face against his chest, and she let herself lean into it fully and closed her eyes.
She could feel his heartbeat under her cheek, steady and even, and she thought about Cain’s face in the council room and the things she had said and the slap and the tears in the corridor and all of it felt very far away from here, from this alcove and this morning and these arms.
He didn’t explain what had happened with Cain. He didn’t tell her what he had said or how it had ended or what any of it meant for the days ahead.
He just held her in the quiet of the east wing while the palace made its noise around them, and she stood there and let herself be held and breathed him in and felt the morning slowly become something she could face.
His hand moved up to the back of her head, slow and deliberate, and she felt him press his lips to her hair once, quietly, and she tightened her arms around him and neither of them said anything at all.
They didn’t need to.