Chapter 238: The Weight of a Name III
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And now here she was again, arriving not as a memory, not as a soft story, but as an injured unknown woman carried into the heart of an ancient god-house by its heir.
"What was her origin?" he had asked.
Elena had shaken her head immediately.
"Unknown."
"To them or to you?"
"To all of us," Elena had said. "Either your father did not know, or he refused to say. Your grandfather asked. Others asked. He answered none of it."
Sekhmet remembered hearing the next lines with an almost detached clarity, the sort that happened when the mind could not afford emotion and therefore sharpened itself instead.
"Your grandfather," Elena had said, "was the leader of Dawn House at the time. A proud man. A very powerful man. He demanded explanations. Your father gave him none. He brought home an unknown woman, protected her, named her carrying his child, and refused every question attached to her."
"And that cost him," Sekhmet had said.
Elena had nodded.
"In fury, your grandfather stripped him of his heir position."
The sentence landed hard.
Sekhmet had not realized until then that some hidden part of him had still imagined his father leaving that life by choice. Walking away. Rejecting it. Burning a bridge himself.
But no...
The bridge had been cut under him.
"It was given to his younger brother," Elena had continued. "The inheritance. The title. The future. All of it."
Sekhmet remembered the cold anger that had flared through him then.
"My father lost everything because he protected my mother."
Elena had said nothing for one heartbeat.
Then, carefully, "Not everything."
The correction had stung in its own way because it was true.
He had not lost her.
Not yet.
Not until later.
And later had come.
Elena’s eyes had lowered briefly before she continued. "One year after when you were born, your mother fought with Eyra."
Sekhmet had straightened from the desk then.
"What?"
"She nearly killed him."
This time the shock did not arrive as disbelief.
It arrived as a sharp, physical silence that pulled all other noise out of his thoughts.
"My mother," he had repeated.
"Yes."
"She almost killed my father."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Elena’s gaze had lifted to his then, and there had been something firm in it, something boundary-like.
"I do not know the details," she had said. "Do not ask me for them. That is one of the things you must ask your father when he returns."
Sekhmet remembered the fury that had flashed up then, quick and confused and painful. Not clean loyalty to one side. Not clean hatred to the other. Just hurt trying to find shape.
"She left him."
"Yes."
"She nearly killed him and left."
"Yes."
"And no one knows why."
Elena had been quiet a moment.
Then she had said, "No one here knows why."
That distinction had mattered.
Someone knew.
Perhaps his father knew. Perhaps his mother. Perhaps both. But the truth had not lived in this house.
Elena had continued after letting him sit with the wound of it.
"When your mother left, your grandfather’s fury deepened. To him, the humiliation became complete. An unknown-origin woman had entered his house, taken the future heir’s loyalty, beaten his firstborn son almost to death, and vanished, leaving him with a child."
The old anger in Elena’s voice had been almost invisible, but not entirely absent. She did not approve of the old Dawn House customs. That much had been clear from the next words.
"In Dawn House," she had said, "the men leaving women was treated as normal. They moved on. They collected histories. They made children, alliances, mistakes, and new arrangements. But a woman leaving one of them? A woman shaming one publicly? That was another matter. Pride there is an old disease."
Sekhmet remembered a humorless smile touching his own mouth.
"So my father embarrassed them."
"He humiliated them," Elena had said bluntly. "Or that is how they chose to see it."
And that had led to exile.
Not by chain.
Not by prison.
Not at first.
"He was sent away," Elena had said. "Vanished from Dawn House with you."
The word vanished had done ugly work inside Sekhmet’s chest. It sounded too close to abandonment until Elena had clarified.
"He could not return until called. He could not openly name himself as a member of Dawn House. He could not use the family name in any official, acknowledged sense."
Sekhmet had stared at the shelves again, this time seeing none of them.
"So he came here."
"Yes."
"To the Lower Domain."
"Yes."
"To Slik."
"Yes."
And then the next realization had arrived on its own.
The business.
The name.
The trouble.
Sekhmet had said it before Elena did.
"He used the Dawn name anyway."
Elena had nodded.
"As you are guessing now, yes. Your father came to Slik and opened a business using the Dawn House name. Maybe not fully, maybe not publicly enough to trigger immediate destruction, but enough. Enough for the old rules to notice eventually....
...And that is why he was called back."
"....." Sekhmet’s mind went blank for a few seconds. He had nothing to say.
Those words had settled between them like iron. He was not away on business. Not in any ordinary sense. He had been recalled to the main Dawn house.
Taken back into the center of the house that had once stripped him of his title, watched him walk away, and waited for mistakes.
"Where is he now?" Sekhmet had asked.
"In the Middle Domain. We do not know when he will return."
That had been the answer. Not, he is coming soon. Not tomorrow. Not even safely.
Just a location and uncertainty.
The Middle Domain. A vast house. A god-level father. A family old enough to move lives like pieces across a chess board.
Sekhmet had sat down then because his legs had finally decided standing through all this was no longer necessary to dignity.
Elena had remained where she was, she was quiet, letting the shock finish its work.
But she had not finished hers.