Chapter 239: The Weight of a Name IV
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"There is more you should understand about me as well," she had said.
Sekhmet had almost laughed at that point, not from humor but from exhaustion. "Of course there is."
Elena had ignored the tone.
"Your father brought me here twenty years ago," she had said. "Me, you, and his personal butler, Ben. We came to the Lower Domain and to Slik together."
Sekhmet remembered freezing on that.
"Uncle Ben!!!"
"Yes."
A whole new set of memories had suddenly shifted under different light. Ben with his polished manners. Ben with his quiet efficiency. Ben with his irritating ability to seem ordinary while probably never having been ordinary in any meaningful sense.
"He was Father’s personal butler," Sekhmet had said.
"Yes."
"And you..."
"I was your father’s personal nanny since childhood."
There had been a long silence after that.
Nanny. Not a servant in the simple sense. Not just a house worker. But a guardian.
Not just a caretaker hired after the fact.
She had raised his father. Or at least been part of raising him.
Which meant her place in his life was older than everything Sekhmet had ever known. He thought they grew up together. She was like a big sister to his father. But now it looks like she is like a mother to his father.
It also meant his childhood had been surrounded, from the start, by people who did not merely serve his father.
They belonged to the deepest layers of his father’s true world.
Sekhmet had leaned back and looked at Elena then with new eyes, trying to align memory with this revelation. Her calm strictness. Her terrifying competence. The way she watched. The way no one in the house ever truly argued with her when real matters were at stake.
It all fits now. It fits too well.
"And uncle Ben is a god too?" he had said.
Elena had nodded once.
"Yes."
He remembered thinking then, with a strange hollow clarity, How many gods made my breakfast growing up?
The thought had almost made him smile.
Almost.
Elena continued.
"Five years ago, your father sent word that the maids should begin proper training."
Sekhmet had frowned.
"Elena..."
"Yes. All the maids of Dawn House know how to fight."
That had explained far too much.
The way they moved under stress. The way they watched doors. The way they handled knives in kitchens with more confidence than most guards handled spears. The way panic never quite looked natural on them.
That is why the three maids are ranked three. That explains everything.
They had been trained when he was doing his own training in the purgatory.
They had simply hidden it beneath aprons and soft voices and trays of tea.
Elena had continued, "This house in Slik was never meant to be unguarded. Your father may not have known when the old troubles would come for him, but he knew enough to prepare."
Sekhmet remembered asking then, "And you waited until now to tell me all this."
Elena had answered without defensiveness.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you noticed the truth and he wanted your life to remain as normal as it could for as long as it could."
That answer had cut deeper than any complex explanation might have.
Because it made sense.
Because it sounded like him.
Because it was both love and failure at once.
The flashback ended there in Sekhmet’s mind, not because that had truly been the last line spoken that night, but because that was the part that still carried the most weight. The rest had been questions without answers, fragments of older Dawn politics, vague warnings about patience, and the repeated instruction that some truths were better asked directly of his father when he returned.
If he returned...
"No." Sekhmet corrected the thought automatically even now.
"When he returns."
He looked at Lily across the table.
She had listened without interrupting much, only asking small questions at places where the line of the story needed breath.
Sometime during his recounting she had leaned forward with both elbows on her knees, her full attention on him. Her expression had shifted many times while he spoke.
Surprise. Disbelief. Hurt on his behalf. Curiosity. Worry. Then, at some point, a kind of stunned sympathy only very close people could show without making it feel like pity.
When he finished the shorter version of it, the room sat quiet for a while.
Lily blinked once, slowly.
Then she said the most reasonable thing anyone had said all morning.
"Oh."
Sekhmet let out the faintest breath that could almost have been a laugh.
Lily sat back a little. "That is... a very large secret."
"It is."
"Actually no," she corrected herself. "That is not one secret. That is an entire pile of secrets stacked on top of each other until they became a mountain and then someone shoved you into it."
That drew a real, small reaction from him this time. Not a smile fully. But something near it.
Lily noticed and took the tiny success with care.
"So," she said gently, "your father is not just some hidden important man. He is an actual god-level heir from an ancient house. Elena and uncle Ben are gods. Lady Seraphiel you mentioned is a god and used to date your father for a few hundred years, which I am not emotionally prepared to think about. Your mother came from nowhere anyone can explain, almost killed your father, then vanished. Your grandfather threw your father out, then your father still used the family name in Slik and got called back because of it. And the house maids are all trained fighters."
Sekhmet looked at her. That sums it everything in short.
"Yes."
Lily gave a slow nod. "That is a lot."
"It is."
She blew out a breath and leaned back against the chair, looking up once at the ceiling as if checking whether the gods mentioned in this story planned to drop through it and complicate things further.
"Honestly," she said, "the maid part is somehow one of the most upsetting details."
Sekhmet raised an eyebrow.