Chapter 125 White Flowers
Sera had been awake for three hours when the knock came.
Lilith had left an hour ago to wash and change and eat something, under strict instruction from Sera, who had taken one look at her and decided that someone needed to be sensible about it. The healer had come back in the morning, checked her over, left more of the restorative tonic that tasted like bark with something sweet underneath, and told her to stay in bed for at least two more days.
Sera had agreed, mostly because her legs had demonstrated very clearly when she tried to stand that two days was probably accurate.
She was sitting up against the headboard with a cup of tea going warm between her palms when the knock came.
Soft and unhurried. The knock of someone who would wait as long as necessary and had no intention of going anywhere.
“Come in,” she said.
Belphegor opened the door and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at her the way he looked at most things, carefully and without rushing it.
He had dark circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there before she was taken, and his hair was loose, and he looked like someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had only just been allowed to set it down.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“I’m awake,” she said.
He came inside, closed the door, pulled the chair close to the bed, and sat.
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
It was not uncomfortable.
It was the particular quiet of two people who had already said the most important things without words and were now just being in the same space and letting that be enough.
She looked at him properly in the daylight, at what the weeks had done to his face, at the kind of exhaustion that went deeper than sleep could fix.
“You didn’t sleep,” she said.
“Not much.”
“While I was gone.”
He looked at his hands briefly. “No.”
She set her tea down on the bedside table.
“Belphegor.”
He looked up.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the flowers. For not stopping looking. For carrying me out of that place.” She held his gaze. “For all of it.”
He met her eyes steadily. “You don’t need to thank me.”
“I know I don’t need to, I want to.”
She didn’t let him deflect it. She just held his gaze until he accepted it, which took a moment, because accepting things gracefully was not something he had ever found easy.
“The white flowers,” she said. “I saw them from the window this morning.”
Something in his expression shifted, just slightly.
“They survived better than I expected.”
“You put something in the soil around them.”
“A compound from my kingdom. It helps things grow where they’re not supposed to.”
He paused.
“You said once that you missed ordinary things.”
“I remember,” she said.
They sat with that for a moment, the morning light coming in through the window, the distant sound of the palace moving around them.
She thought about counting heartbeats in the dark, about the way she had held onto his name in that cell like something she could press between her palms and keep warm.
“Morpheus,” she said.
He was quiet.
“Tell me about him,” she said. “Not what happened. I know what happened. Tell me something about him that I don’t know. Something from before.”
Belphegor looked toward the window for a moment, then back at her.
“He used to steal the blankets off my bed,” he said. “Every night without exception. I would wake up and he would be in the corner of the room wrapped in everything and looking entirely unbothered about it.”
He paused.
“I bought heavier blankets three times. It made no difference.”
Sera pressed her lips together.
“He liked the sound of rain,” Belphegor continued, quieter now. “He would go to whatever window was closest when it rained and just sit there. Not watching it particularly. Just listening.”
Another pause.
“He liked you immediately. From the first day. He was not like that with most people.”
“I liked him immediately too,” Sera said.
“I know,” he said. “I could tell.”
She looked at her hands in her lap and thought about the small, bright weight of Morpheus and the way he had curled against her neck when he slept.
This time, she let herself feel it properly.
The loss of him.
She didn’t try to manage it or put it somewhere safe.
Belphegor sat beside her and let her feel it without trying to fix it, without trying to fill the space with words.
It was exactly right.
It was so completely him that it made her chest ache in a different way.
After a while, she looked up.
He was watching her with his quiet, steady eyes, his hands loose in his lap, and he looked like someone who had decided some time ago that wherever she needed him to be was where he would be, and had not reconsidered that decision once.
She reached out and put her hand over his.
He turned his hand over and held hers properly.
She leaned back against the headboard and looked toward the window, at the pale morning sky beyond it, and for the first time since Malachi had pulled her through that portal, she felt like she was actually somewhere she belonged.
“Stay for a while,” she said.
“Yes,” he said simply.
And he did.