Chapter 150 What Comes Next
Sera was in the corridor outside her room when Belphegor found her.
She had her back against the wall and her shoes off and she was holding them in one hand and looking at nothing in particular with the expression of someone at the end of a very good evening who wasn’t quite ready for it to be over yet.
He stopped in front of her.
She looked up at him.
“Good meal,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
She smiled and looked back at the corridor, and he stood there for a moment, and she could feel him working up to something, the way she had learned to feel him working up to things, the particular quality of his silence when it had something in it.
“Sera,” he said.
She looked at him.
He looked back at her steadily, the way he looked at everything he had thought about properly and arrived at with certainty.
“I would like to be with you,” he said. “Not the way things have been. Properly. If you want that.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“Belphegor,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“I have wanted that since your kingdom,” she said. “Since the garden and the dream blossom, Morpheus falls asleep on my shoulder.” She pushed off the wall and stepped toward him. “I have wanted that for a very long time.”
He looked at her, and something in his face that was usually very still moved, just slightly, just enough.
She reached up and kissed him.
He kissed her back with the same quiet certainty he brought to everything, his hands finding her face, and she felt the warmth of it move through her completely and she kissed him properly and he held her like she was something he had been patient about for a long time and was done being patient about, and when they finally pulled apart she kept her hands on his chest and looked up at him.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
“I wanted to be sure,” he said.
“You could have been sure months ago.”
“Yes,” he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
She laughed and he looked at her laughing, his face did the thing it did when he felt something he wasn’t going to say out loud, and she took his hand and they stood in the corridor together in the quiet of the late evening and she felt the palace around them and felt the night and felt entirely and completely where she was supposed to be.
Lilith stopped at the window at the end of the east corridor.
Azrael stopped beside her and they stood together looking out at the gardens below, the moonvine moving faintly against the wall, the white flowers pale in the dark, and the palace was quiet around them and the evening was behind them and there was nowhere either of them needed to be.
“I used to stand at this window and think about how to leave,” she said.
He looked at her. “When?”
“The first few weeks. I would come here at night when I couldn’t sleep and look at the gardens and think about what it would take. How far I would get before someone noticed.” She paused. “I never did anything about it.”
“What stopped you?”
She considered it properly.
“Something here felt like mine before I understood what it was,” she said. “I kept waiting to feel like a stranger and I never fully did and I didn’t know what to do with that so I stayed.” She looked at him. “And then things kept happening and I kept staying and eventually staying stopped feeling like a choice I was making and started feeling like just where I was.”
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the gardens.
“When did you stop thinking about leaving?” he said.
“I can’t tell you the exact moment,” she said. “But I stopped.”
He turned and looked at her and she looked back at him and the torchlight was low and warm in the corridor and she felt the evening and the meal and the long months before all of it pressing gently at her back.
She turned to face him fully and looked him in the eyes.
“I chose you, Azrael,” she said. “Not because of the binding or the prophecy or anything that was decided before I got here. I looked at all of it, everything this palace asked of me, everything it cost me, and at the end of all of it I looked at you and I chose you.” She held his gaze. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Not because a prophecy says so, not because of what we are to each other in the binding, because I want to. Because you are the person I want beside me when everything is good and when everything is falling apart and every version of the day in between.”
He looked at her and the corridor was completely still.
She watched everything she had said move through him, moving through all the parts of him that were real and unguarded and entirely his own, and he didn’t say anything for a long moment and she let him have the moment because this was Azrael and some things need time to find the right words.
“When you walked into that throne room,” he said quietly, “I looked at you and I thought this is going to be complicated. And I was right.” He looked at her steadily. “But I also thought something else that I didn’t let myself think about for a long time.”
“What?” she said.
“That you were the most remarkable person I had ever seen walk into a room,” he said. “And that whatever happened next, I was not going to be indifferent to you.” He paused. “I have not been indifferent to you for a single day since.”
She felt that land in her chest and stayed there.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you more” he replied.
He reached out and pulled her toward him and their lips met and she felt the warmth of it spread through her from her mouth down through everything, and she kissed him back with the same certainty, her hands finding the front of his shirt and holding on, and he kissed her like he had been thinking about it since they left the dining hall and she kissed him back like she had been thinking about it longer than that.
When they finally pulled apart she stayed close, her forehead against his, both of them breathing a little differently, and she felt his hands warm at her waist and felt the corridor quiet around them.
“Come on,” she said softly.
They walked the rest of the way to her room together and she opened the door and the lamp was burning low and her room was warm and quiet.
He closed the door behind them and she turned and he was right there and their lips met again, slower this time, and his hands moved to her face and tilted her toward him and she felt every part of the kiss, the softness of it and the warmth of it and the particular feeling of being kissed by someone who meant it completely, and she kissed him back with everything she had and felt him smile against her mouth and she smiled too and they stood there in the warm room kissing and smiling like two people who had earned this moment and they knew it.
He pulled her close and she rested her head against his chest and his arms came around her and she felt his heartbeat under her ear, steady and certain, and he pressed his lips to the top of her head and held her there and she closed her eyes.
They moved to the bed and lay down together in the quiet, her head on his chest, his arm around her, his hand moving slowly through her hair, and she felt his warmth beside her and felt the night settle around them like something that had been waiting to do exactly this.
Outside the window, the demon realm was dark and peaceful.
The moonvine moved in the gardens below and the white flowers held in the soil, growing where they weren’t supposed to grow, ordinary and stubborn and entirely themselves.
She listened to his heartbeat.
She thought about a girl who had woken up in a strange bed with three moons outside the window and no idea what any of it meant, who had grabbed her best friend’s hand and said, " We are going to survive this.
She had done considerably more than survive.
She closed her eyes and felt the night hold them both and felt the life around her, the one she had not planned for and would not trade for anything, and she let herself rest in it completely.
The night went on around them warm and quiet and entirely theirs.