Chapter 425: Echoes Through Blood
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Lily’s fingers tightened against the chair before she could stop herself. At first it was only warmth, a pulse beneath her skin that did not come from her own heart. It moved deeper than blood and gentler than command, like something inside her had turned its face toward a distant flame. She drew a slow breath and forced herself not to react too quickly.
The warmth came again.
This time it carried shape.
Not pictures. Not sounds. Nothing so cruelly clear. It was more like feeling carried through water. A pressure of closeness. A growing thread between Sekhmet and the twins. Trust, desire, relief, surrender, all tangled together in a way that made Lily’s throat tighten even though no one had touched her.
She opened her eyes and looked at her reflection in the dark window. The face looking back at her was calm. Too calm, perhaps. Noble daughter. Hidden wife. First hybrid vampire. A Cruoraphim. Jealous woman. All of them wore the same face, and none of them agreed with each other.
"So this is what it feels like," she whispered.
No one answered.
The bond did not apologize either. It only continued to warm, slow and steady, like a door opening somewhere she could not see. Lily hated that she could feel it. She hated more that it did not feel wrong. If it had been ugly, she could have stood up, named it, and let anger do what anger was good at. But it did not feel ugly. It felt like Vera and Vela had finally stepped out of duty and been accepted as women.
That did not mean it did not hurt.
It did.
Lily placed one hand over her chest. "You are mine too," she said softly, though she did not know whether she was speaking to Sekhmet or to the bond itself. Perhaps she was speaking to the part of herself that still wanted a simpler kind of love, the kind sung by foolish poets who had never met vampires, concubines, hidden marriages, and bloodlines that refused to remain polite.
A faint pulse answered.
Warm.
Steady.
Sekhmet.
It was not an apology. There was no explanation. Only presence.
Lily let out a slow breath and shook her head faintly. "Annoying man."
Elsewhere in the house, Mira stopped writing.
The ink tip of her pen hovered above a ledger, one dark drop gathering at the edge before falling onto the page. She did not notice the stain at first. Her eyes had gone distant, fixed on nothing in the room and everything beneath the skin.
Mira sat alone in the workroom she had claimed for herself. Around her lay the tools she understood best: ledgers, route slips, coded notes, merchant names, pressure points, debt chains, and quiet disasters arranged into columns. Numbers were easier than people. Numbers did not smile at the wrong moment. Numbers did not enter a man’s room at night. Numbers did not touch a bloodline from across the estate and make a woman remember that usefulness was not the same as belonging.
The second pulse came stronger.
Mira lowered the pen.
"Oh," she said quietly.
She understood at once. Her body understood even before her mind arranged the words. Something in the inner circle had shifted. Not the whole bloodline, not its public power, not anything a servant in the hall could sense. This was private. A closeness had tightened somewhere beyond her reach, and she could feel the edge of it because she too had been pulled into Sekhmet’s growing world.
Sekhmet.
Vera.
Vela.
The twins were closer now.
No, not simply closer.
Accepted.
That distinction mattered enough to irritate her.
Jealousy came first, and Mira disliked it immediately. Not because jealousy was shameful. She had survived too much to be ashamed of honest ugliness. She disliked it because it was inefficient. It arrived without request, sat inside her chest, and began rearranging thoughts that had been perfectly useful before.
She had asked for cultivation first. She had been useful. She had built routes, ledgers, pressure lines, countermeasures, and half the clean machinery now cutting Iron House open from the inside. Yet Lily had a place by vow. The twins had a place by blood and tonight by something more intimate. Even Bat Bat, ridiculous creature that she was, had a place no one could simply replace.
Mira’s mouth tightened.
"So this is the private kingdom," she murmured.
Then the bond pulsed again, and this time her resentment faltered.
Because beneath the warmth there was trust.
Not shallow pleasure. Not simple hunger. Trust.
That was the dangerous part. Desire could be dismissed. Hunger could be managed. But trust was a door, and Mira knew better than most how much power belonged to the person allowed through one.
She stared at the ruined ink mark on the ledger and found that she did not resent them as cleanly as she wanted to. Beneath the jealousy, another feeling stirred.
Want.
Not only for Sekhmet’s touch. That would have been simple enough to name. This was worse. She wanted certainty. She wanted to know where she stood without measuring it from orders, glances, privileges, and the way other women moved around him. She wanted her usefulness to stop being the strongest proof that she belonged.
Mira’s fingers relaxed slowly around the pen.
"Later," she told herself.
It sounded like a promise.
Or a warning.
In the Void Land, Bat Bat had far less dignity about the entire matter.
She pressed her face into a folded cloth and made a muffled sound of outrage so dramatic that Auri finally looked up from Leaf’s glowing patch.
"Why are you doing that?" Auri asked.
Bat Bat lifted her face, eyes wide with accusation. "Because I am feeling things."
Auri blinked once. "Everyone feels things."
"Not this loudly."
Leaf’s cocoon pulsed beside them, red and green light moving through the bud-shaped shell in slow waves. The little living zone around it had grown more stable over the last few hours. Grass shifted with no wind. Tiny red-veined leaves turned toward Bat Bat as if even the plants had begun treating her as a regular disturbance in the natural order.
Bat Bat clutched the cloth to her chest. "The harem is getting stronger."
Auri stared at her for a long moment. "You cannot possibly know that."
"I can feel it in my bones."
"You do not have a blood bond like theirs."
Bat Bat raised one finger with great seriousness. "That is because I have something better. Superior instinct."
Auri looked unconvinced, but Bat Bat was already warming to her own argument. She flapped once, hovered a few inches above the grass, then dropped back down as if the weight of destiny had become too heavy for her wings.
"The house is changing," Bat Bat said. "Master is gathering wives, blood women, bond women, almost-wives, future-wives, and probably ledger-wives."
"Mira would hate that title."
"She should have chosen a less ledger-shaped personality."
Auri turned her face away, but not quickly enough to hide the faint amusement.
Bat Bat narrowed her eyes. "You felt it too."
Auri’s expression became still.
That silence answered more honestly than denial would have.
Bat Bat’s voice softened, and for once the softness did not become a joke immediately. "You are jealous."
"No."
"You answered too fast."
Auri’s wings shifted once behind her. "I am not like them."
That was true. It was also not the same as no.
Auri looked toward the dark edge of the Void Land, where Leaf’s red-green patch ended and the old emptiness began. Her voice came quieter when she spoke again. "They can stand near him differently. Lily. The twins. Mira, perhaps one day. They have paths that look clear and those paths are different from ours."
Bat Bat stopped teasing.
Auri rarely gave words to anything that hurt.
"I serve," Auri continued. "I guard. I will help build this place. I know my value. But knowing value and knowing my place are not always the same thing."
Bat Bat landed beside her. For several seconds, she did not speak, which was remarkable enough that Auri glanced at her.
"That sounds sad," Bat Bat said at last.
"It is not sad."
"It sounds very sad."
"It is practical."
"That is what sad people say when they have wings and too much pride."
Auri looked at her.
Bat Bat lifted both hands. "I am queen bat. I can diagnose things."
"You are not queen yet."
"I am close friends with Leaf, and Leaf is becoming important. She became a queen. So I must become a queen myself. I can’t fall behind."
Before Auri could answer, Leaf’s looked at them.
Both of them turned at once.
The tiny hybrid Vampire Spirit Sanguifey sat beneath the young sapling, her red-green eyes bright in the soft glow of the patch. The grass around her leaned closer, as if the land itself waited for her mood.
Bat Bat froze. "Leaf, you did not hear everything."
Leaf tilted her head, then said in a small, soft voice, "I heard."
Bat Bat’s wings stiffened. "That is not good."
Auri looked at Leaf carefully. "What did you hear?"