Chapter 267: The Quiet Vow III
There were no singers. There were no banners. No parade of names and ancestors and old noble nonsense designed to make two living people feel small under dead traditions.
"These vows are spoken under this roof, before chosen witnesses, by free will and with full awareness," she said. "No house beyond this room holds authority over what is said here until those within choose to reveal it."
Elena did not even turn her head. "Thank you, Seraphiel."
Sekhmet almost smiled. Lily nearly did.
Then Elena took the ceremonial blade and offered it first to Sekhmet. He accepted it without hesitation. A small cut across the palm. It was sharp enough to draw blood. It was clean enough to remain ceremonial rather than dramatic. Lily took the blade after him and did the same.
Sekhmet looked at her and said the truth plainly because he had no use now for beautiful lies.
Lily looked at him with tears in her eyes and absolutely refused to let them fall.
"I take you knowing you are not safe, not simple, and not ordinary. I take you knowing the future beside you will ask more of me than the future behind me ever would. I do not come to you by accident. I choose you. If your darkness becomes mine, then my life becomes yours too."
Elena instructed them to press their blooded palms together over the cloth.
Their blood touched. Warm. Alive. Red. Soon to become stranger in ways only one of them yet understood fully.
Elena spoke the final binding sentence.
No lightning split the roof. No divine choir sang. The candles burned steadily. The room remained quiet. The world did not pause.
Lily looked at Sekhmet as if she had stepped somewhere irreversible and was not the least sorry for it.
It fit.
"To bad decisions made correctly," she said, raising a cup.
Lily almost laughed against the emotion still tight in her chest.
They drank. Only once.
There was food too, though little of it. Enough to keep the body steady. Enough for Elena not to glare at them both like children who had forgotten flesh required maintenance.
The white and silver dress could not be seen by the wrong eyes. The house swallowed the traces of the vow as carefully as it had created them. Elena oversaw everything. The ceremonial room was cleared. The blade vanished. The cups disappeared. The cloth was folded and taken away. By the time a wandering servant might have passed nearby, the room already looked like a quiet room again and nothing more.
When she returned to Sekhmet privately for a few brief moments before leaving the inner rooms, the contrast nearly made him laugh. Only hours ago she had stood as his bride in white. Now she wore the same kind of simple noble day dress she might have chosen for any ordinary visit.
Only Elena.
That secrecy made the air between them even more intimate.
"So?"
Sekhmet stared at her.
"What face."
That was irritatingly accurate.
The smile changed on her face. Softened. Deepened.
That answer pleased him far too much.
"Go before I stop being responsible."
"It is a warning."
"Yes."
Sekhmet watched her go.
Wife.
Then a maid came.