Chapter 315: What Comes After Strength
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Now she stood behind the desk of his auction house and watched what caution had cost her.
Raka and his men were grown under Sekhmet.
Literally growing stronger.
Not a metaphor. Not influenced. Not money. But power.
The lesser vampire standing there was proof enough.
The men around Raka receive the same path or some version of it.
Bat Bat had become human.
The twins had become something more. The twins are stronger than them. She and the twins came together in his life. But they are so far away from her. In terms of power.
Lily, whatever else she was now becoming, had been chosen too.
Everyone who stepped closer to Sekhmet changed.
Everyone became stronger.
Everyone except her.
Because she had chosen a work contract like a careful fool instead of stepping all the way in.
Mira’s fingers tightened on the edge of the desk.
No one noticed. She didn’t let no one notice yet. But Inside her own mind, the truth arrived with cold, humiliating clarity.
She had made a mistake by not joining him. In stopping halfway. She should have told him everything. About her past. About the enemies she still carried behind her name.
About the things she needed power for and the things waiting out there that would one day come looking for her if she remained as she was.
Because now everyone was becoming more under Sekhmet’s hand.
And she was still the same Mira who had chosen safety over trust.
That would not hold much longer.
Her eyes stayed on him while Raka’s men drew in toward the promise of change, and one final decision formed inside her with enough force that she knew it would not leave.
She would ask him. Not today but soon.
She would tell him the truth and ask Sekhmet to make her strong too.
Sekhmet stepped closer to Raka.
He asked, "How do you feel?"
One of the men near the front answered before Raka did.
"Hungry."
Another said, "Fast."
A third touched the side of his face and frowned. "Cold."
Raka finally spoke over them. "Better... stronger..."
Those were the two words he chose, and it was enough.
Sekhmet nodded once.
"You will learn to control."
No one argued.
Because all of them felt it already. Hunger. The sharpening of sight. The changed body. The awareness of blood in the room itself. Not enough to lose control. Enough to know loss of control was now a thing to be learned around.
Mira looked from face to face and thought about her bad decision again and again. That thought took root deeper in her.
Raka, meanwhile, was looking at Sekhmet with the expression of a man who had just been given a kingdom-sized secret and did not yet know whether to kneel or grin like an idiot.
He managed something in between.
"We remain yours servants," he said. "Master."
Sekhmet held his gaze. "You were already mine."
A few of the men behind Raka smiled at that in the dangerous way lower men smiled when hard truth sounded like praise.
For a little while nobody in the Dawn auction house moved with any real confidence.
That was not because danger had increased.
Bat Bat, seated now on the edge of a chair she had not been invited to occupy, watched all of it with delighted attention. Her new human-sized body was still too expressive. Every thought crossed her face before it remembered to become private. At the moment, her expression was the delighted curiosity of a child at a theater mixed with the pleased superiority of someone who had already transformed before breakfast and therefore felt ahead of the curve.
"You all look much better now," she announced.
Half the men looked at her.
Raka’s good eye shifted toward her.
Bat Bat added, "Except the face one. He still looks like he crashed into a wall."
That got a few dangerously suppressed sounds from the back lines.
Raka ignored her on principle.
He was learning.
Sekhmet stood with his usual stillness at the center of all of it, watching his work settle into place. He did not look proud. Mira noticed that first. He did not look surprised either. He looked the way he always looked when a dangerous thing had gone the way he intended and his mind had already moved three steps ahead to what came next.
That was somehow more unsettling than pride would have been.
The newly made lesser vampires had stopped gasping and touching their own throats in wonder. Their first shock had cooled into something else now. Hunger, yes. Awareness, definitely. But also possession. The strange, immediate understanding that the world had tilted and they were no longer standing on the weaker side of it in quite the same way.
One of the younger men near the edge muttered, very softly, "I can smell the blood in the butcher’s alley through the front walls."
Another man beside him swallowed and nodded. "And the man behind me who still hasn’t cleaned his knife properly."
That got a grim little snort from someone farther back.
Raka’s voice cut through them all.
"Shut up and stand straight."
They did.
Instantly.
That pleased Sekhmet more than he showed.
The obedience structure held.
He looked over them again, reading posture, eye movement, breath, the first signs of how well the conversions had stabilized. The changes varied slightly from man to man. Some had gone colder in appearance. Some sharper. Some had stronger red in the eyes. A few still carried enough of their old roughness in the face that the transformation only made them look like more dangerous versions of themselves rather than entirely new creatures.
Useful.
Very useful.
Not beautiful in the noble vampire sense.
Not meant to be.
These were not house ornaments.
These were field creatures. Ambush stock. Enforcers. A lower-market bloodline force with enough speed, recovery, and instinct to turn street-level violence into something much more lethal.
Good.
He began testing without announcing it as "testing" because men often performed badly when told they were being measured.