Chapter 358: Game Preparation IV
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Morning in Dawn House did not care that blood had been spilled in a hidden district only hours earlier.
Servants still rose. Floors still had to be cleaned. Water still had to be heated. Bread still had to be cut. People still needed to be fed.
That was one of the things Sekhmet had slowly begun to understand about building power. Real houses did not stop being houses simply because danger increased. If anything, they became more disciplined. Panic belonged to weak places. Routine, properly sharpened, became armor.
He had slept very little. Not because he could not.
Because the game with Mihos, Eyra’s message, Seraphiel’s departure, the first night hunt with lily, and the movement of his own growing forces had left too much alive in his head to let rest sink deeply.
Still, when morning came, he was already awake.
The first light over Slik City slid pale and cool through the shutters of his room. For a short while, before the fuller day began, the house carried that half-silent quality between dark and duty. The world had not yet started speaking loudly. It only breathed.
Sekhmet sat at the low table near the window, one forearm resting against the wood, Kess’s rough map notes spread before him.
Not proper maps. Those would come later.
These were servant maps. The better kind for certain things. Lines of movement. Family habits. Which roads in the Middle Domain mattered because they looked important and which mattered because they carried the wrong wagons too often to be harmless. Which gate houses should never be approached by outsiders first. Which minor lines of the Dawn territory would smile and mislead before the main house ever needed to dirty its own hands.
Information. As useful as blades. Perhaps more useful.
The room still smelled faintly of Lily. That was not difficult to notice after what she had become.
Even now, with the first excitement and first hunger of her rebirth behind them, traces of her bloodline remained in the air more clearly than before. A softness. A warmth. Something floral and metallic intertwined in a way that did not belong to ordinary women.
Suddenly a knock came. Not a servant knock. It was too direct.
"Come." he said.
Lily entered the room. The room had gone quieter by then. Not with peace.
With the kind of silence that came when instinct, blood, and desire all stood too close together and none of them wanted to pretend they were strangers anymore.
Lily stood near him, breathing a little too carefully.
The hunt had done something to her. Not damage. Awakening. Her Cruoraphim senses were sharper today than they had been the night before. She had tracked well, moved well, chosen well. She had resisted feeding from filth when she did not want that stain in her mouth.
That restraint mattered. But it had left a different hunger alive in her.
Sekhmet could feel it in the way her eyes kept returning to him. Not to his face first. To his throat. Then his mouth. Then back to his eyes as if she resented her own honesty and could not help it anyway.
He stood up and stepped closer.
Lily did not move away.
"Hungry!" he said.
It was not a question.
She nodded once. "Yes."
The word came softer than she liked.
Sekhmet lifted one hand and touched the side of her neck. Her pulse jumped under his fingers instantly. Her body had begun learning him too quickly. Blood remembered what mouths did not always know how to ask for.
"You did well, yesterday," he said.
That should have been enough to steady her.
Instead it made the hunger twist deeper, because praise from him and blood from him had already become too easy for her body to place in the same dark and dangerous chamber.
Lily swallowed once. "I still want to feed."
"You will."
That pulled a visible tremor through her.
Then Sekhmet moved. He lowered his head and let his mouth brush the side of her throat first, just once, as though testing the place he already knew too well. Lily’s fingers tightened in the fabric over his chest at once. Not to stop him. To hold on. A quiet sound escaped her before she could bury it.
He felt her shame for that. Felt it and ignored it.
She needed to stop fighting the truth of her own body at the wrong moments.
His lips touched her skin again, it was warmer this time, slower. Not hurried hunger. Claimed hunger. The old kind. The kind that belonged in dead castles, candlelit rooms, velvet curtains, and stories where blood was never just blood and everyone with sense knew it.
Lily tipped her head back for him without being asked. That pleased him more than he showed.
Then his fangs entered her throat. The bite was clean. It was precise. And the effect on her was immediate.
Lily’s breath broke. Her whole body arched toward him for one helpless instant before his arm came around her waist and held her through it. The first pull of blood from her did not hurt the way mortals imagined such things hurt. It went deeper than pain. Her blood answered his mouth with a shiver so intense it seemed to ring through her spine and down into the soft places in her body that now belonged too closely to hunger, trust, and dark pleasure.
She clutched him harder. The room disappeared.
The world narrowed to his mouth at her throat, the pull of blood, the terrible sweetness of being taken by someone she wanted to be taken by, and the way every beat of her heart now seemed to travel straight into him.
That was the worst and most beautiful part. Not the bite. But her surrender.
The fact that her body knew what it meant before her pride could finish pretending otherwise.
Sekhmet drank only enough to stir her bloodline fully, not enough to weaken her. He felt the taste of her move across his tongue, richer than before now that her Cruoraphim nature had settled more deeply into itself.