Chapter 132 Unbothered
She found him in the east corridor outside the arena, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes on the middle distance, the wrapped wound on his forearm the only visible evidence that he had just spent twenty minutes on an arena floor in front of a crowd of several hundred people.
He looked entirely unbothered.
Sera stopped beside him and looked at his face and then at the wound and then back at his face.
“You lost,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“You don’t seem particularly troubled by it.”
“I’m not.” He looked at her briefly and then back at the corridor ahead of them. “I went into that arena because the rules required it. I fought because walking in and conceding immediately would have been an insult to Mammon and I respect him too much for that.” He paused. “But I was never fighting for the throne. I have never wanted the throne. What happens in that arena between my brothers is their business and what happens at the end of it when Lilith steps onto that floor is what I actually care about.”
Sera looked at him for a moment.
“So the whole thing was a waste of energy,” she said.
Something moved through his expression that was almost amusement. “A necessary waste of energy. There’s a difference.”
She leaned against the wall beside him and they stood together in the corridor with the sounds of the arena filtering through the stone walls around them, the crowd settling back in for the next fight, the particular hum of a large number of people waiting for something.
“Your arm,” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“Can I see.”
He turned slightly toward her and held out his forearm and she took it carefully and looked at the wrapping the attendant had done, neat and tight, no bleeding coming through.
“It’s fine,” he said again.
“I’m checking,” she said, without looking up.
He let her check.
She held his arm for a moment longer than checking required and then looked up at him and he was already looking at her with those quiet steady eyes and the corridor was very still around them.
“You fought well,” she said. “Before the floor thing. I was watching.”
“The floor thing was clever,” he said, without resentment. “I should have anticipated it. Mammon has been using that particular technique for centuries and I knew about it and I let him set it up anyway.” He looked at the wall across from them. “That’s what happens when you go into a fight you don’t particularly want to win. You don’t think as carefully as you should.”
“Because you agree with Lilith.”
“I have always agreed with Lilith,” he said simply. “From the moment she said bind all seven instead of choose one I understood what she meant and why it was right. The prophecy was never about possession. It was about connection.” He paused. “I don’t need a tournament to tell me that.”
Sera looked at him.
“Then why did you agree to it,” she said.
“Because Lilith needed the others to agree to it and they needed to feel like they had tested her before they committed, and sometimes you give people the process they need even when the conclusion was already clear.” He looked at her. “She’s going to win.”
“You sound very certain.”
“I am very certain.” He said it the way he said things he had thought about thoroughly and arrived at with conviction. “She trained with Cain for months and she spent three days with Zara and she has been watching every fight this morning with the specific attention of someone building a map of how to beat each of us.” He paused. “And she gets up. Every time something knocks her down she gets up differently than she went down, which is the thing that makes a fighter genuinely dangerous and it cannot be taught.” He looked back at the wall. “She’s going to win.”
Sera felt something warm and solid settle in her chest at that.
“Don’t tell her you think that,” she said. “She’ll use it to put pressure on herself.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m telling you.”
They stood together in the corridor and the sounds of the arena moved around them and somewhere inside the next fight was beginning and neither of them moved to go back in, just stayed where they were in the quiet of the corridor with his arm still slightly toward her and her hand still loosely around his wrist and the morning going on without them.
“Come back inside with me,” she said eventually.
“Yes,” he said.
She kept her hand on his arm on the way back in, not holding exactly, just present, and he didn’t say anything about it and she didn’t either, and they found their seats and settled in and below them the arena floor held another fight and the day kept moving forward toward the thing that was waiting at the end of it.