Chapter 140 Two days
They helped her up off the corridor floor eventually.
Azrael on one side and Sera on the other and she let them because her legs had opinions about standing that she was not yet in a position to argue with, and they walked her back through the palace slowly and nobody made it a bigger moment than it needed to be.
The brothers were waiting outside the arena entrance.
All six of them, which was not something that had happened voluntarily in months, and they were standing in a loose group in the pale morning light and when Lilith came through the entrance with Azrael and Sera on either side of her they all looked at her and nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Asmodeus stepped forward.
He looked at her, properly, the way he looked at things he actually cared about rather than the way he looked at things he was performing caring about, and he said, “That was the most extraordinary thing I have ever watched on an arena floor and I have been watching things on arena floors for a very long time.”
Lilith looked at him. “Thank you.”
“I’m not finished.”
He stepped closer.
“I had twenty gold on you and I still wasn’t prepared for that.”
She almost smiled. “You had a bet on me.”
“I always had a bet on you.”
He said it simply, without the performance, and it landed differently than she expected, it was warm and genuine underneath the words that she felt move through her tired chest.
“Well done, Lilith. Genuinely.”
He stepped back and Mammon stepped forward.
He didn’t say much.
He looked at her with his sharp practical eyes and said, “You earned it,” and nodded once and stepped back, and coming from Mammon those three words carried the weight of a much longer speech.
Beelzebub came next and he was the opposite of Mammon, wrapping her in a brief embrace that was enormous and warm, and she felt it in every sore muscle she had and didn’t complain about any of it.
“The meal,” he said, when he stepped back. “Don’t forget about the meal.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”
Belphegor stood at the back of the group and when the others had stepped back he came forward and looked at her with his quiet steady eyes and said, “You were never going to lose,” with the same certainty he said everything, the certainty of someone who had thought about it thoroughly and arrived at a conclusion he was not going to revisit.
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“I do,” he said simply, and stepped back.
Lucian was last of the brothers, and he looked at her with his mirror eyes for a moment and said, “The spatial sense of the arena shifted when your power came out. I felt it from the wall.”
A pause.
“I have never felt anything older than me. That was older than me.”
He inclined his head, precise and genuine.
“Well done.”
She looked at them all, standing in the morning light outside the arena entrance, and felt something settle in her chest that had nothing to do with the Seraph power and everything to do with the months of being in this palace and everything it had taken to get here.
Then she looked at Cain.
Cain had not stepped forward with the others.
She was standing slightly apart, her arms at her sides, her shoulder wound freshly wrapped from the Lucian fight, and she was looking at Lilith with an expression that was complicated and layered and entirely unreadable from a distance.
Lilith looked at her.
Cain looked back.
Then Cain walked forward and stopped in front of her and the group around them went quiet in the particular way groups went quiet when they understood something was happening that needed space.
“You won,” Cain said.
“Yes,” Lilith said.
“You used something none of us have and you still fought the whole fight before you used it.”
Cain’s jaw was set but her eyes were doing something different from her jaw, something that was working through several things at once.
“You didn’t just throw power at him. You fought him and then you used it when you needed it.”
She paused.
“That’s not luck. That’s not prophecy. That’s you.”
Lilith held her gaze.
“I know what I said in the council room,” Cain said. “I know what I called you.”
She didn’t look away.
“I was wrong, not just about the sneaky bitch part, about all of it. The binding is real and you are the right person for it and I knew both of those things before I said what I said and I said it anyway because I was angry about something else and I used the binding as a place to put the anger.”
She stopped.
“That was wrong.”
The corridor was very quiet.
“I know why you were angry,” Lilith said.
“I know you know,” Cain said. “That’s not the point.”
“The point is I was wrong and I’m telling you I was wrong and I’m telling you in front of all of them because I said it in front of all of them and that’s how it should be corrected.”
She held out her hand.
“I’m in. Fully. No more conditions, no more doubt. I’m in.”
Lilith looked at her hand.
Then she took it.
Cain gripped it once, firm and brief, and stepped back and the group around them exhaled collectively and Asmodeus said something under his breath that made Beelzebub cover a laugh and the moment broke into something easier and Lilith felt the last of the weight she had been carrying shift into something she could put down.
Sera got her back to her room.
She slept for most of the first day, the deep unconscious sleep of a body that had decided rest was not optional, and she woke in the late afternoon to find Azrael sitting in the chair by the window with a book he wasn’t reading and the necklace catching the last of the afternoon light on her throat.
He looked up when she stirred.
“How long have i been sleeping for?" she asked
“Six hours,” he said.
She sat up slowly and her body made its feelings about the previous day known in considerable detail and she acknowledged them and moved anyway.
“You stayed.”
“Yes.”
“You have sessions.”
“I cancelled them.”
She looked at him sitting in the chair by her window with the afternoon light on his face and felt something move through her that was warm and quiet and entirely without drama.
“Come here,” she said.
He put the book down and came and sat beside her on the bed and she leaned against him and he put his arm around her and they sat like that while the afternoon light moved across the room and the palace went about its business around them and neither of them said anything that needed saying.
The second day was quieter still.
She ate properly for the first time since the tournament, real meals at real intervals, and she walked in the garden in the morning with Sera and in the afternoon she sat with the Keepers’ notes she had been given months ago and read through them again, the details of the binding chamber and the seven pillars and what was supposed to happen inside it, and she felt the Seraph power moving back into her chest slowly and without announcement, the way it always came, not when she reached for it but when she stopped reaching and let it arrive.