21. Lilith
LILITH
Marcus is wearing a proper coat.
Not a charity coat, not a hand-me-down three sizes too large with the elbows worn through.
A proper coat—dark wool, fitted, brass buttons.
He stands in the palace receiving room that Caligo dressed up as a merchant's parlour and he looks like a young man.
Not a hungry boy. Not a rookeries kid in stolen clothes doing his best impression of respectable.
A young man with filled-out shoulders and a voice that has dropped a full register since the last time I heard it.
"Lily, you look well." He says it carefully. Marcus is careful about everything—he was the one who counted the money after I counted it, the one who checked the locks after I picked them. Careful Marcus, who learned early that the world will rob you if you let it.
"You look like you're eating."
"Three times a day." He grins. The grin is new. He didn't used to grin. "The school has a refectory."
Elena brought a book. She sits in the chair by the fire—there's a fire, Caligo arranged a fire in a room where fires don't naturally exist because Shadow Court runs cool and he knew, he knew I'd want them warm—and she opens the book on her lap and tells me about it with animated hands and bright eyes and I listen and smile and something cracks inside my chest.
Not breaks. Cracks. The hairline fracture of a wall I didn't know I'd built, the one that stands between the sister who provides and the woman who was claimed three nights ago on a stone floor.
Elena is fourteen and she's reading for pleasure.
Not survival—not street maps or fence inventories or the pamphlets I used to steal from bookshops because she begged for something with words in it.
A novel. She's reading a novel about a girl who goes to sea and her eyes are bright and her hands move when she talks and she looks like our mother.
Tommy runs to me.
He's faster than he was. Heavier. He grabs me around the waist and buries his face in my stomach and his arms go all the way around now because he's grown two inches in six weeks and the force of his hug pushes me back a step.
"Lily, your employer must be very kind because I've never seen you look this healthy."
I haven't looked in a mirror. Not once, in six weeks.
I never look at myself. I look at them—checking their colour, their weight, the dark circles under their eyes, the way they carry their shoulders.
I've been looking at them since I was six and they were the only thing in the world that mattered and I never turned the assessment inward because the state of my own body was irrelevant.
I was the tool. Tools don't check their own condition.
But I've been eating regular meals for six weeks. Sleeping in a warm room. Training my body instead of breaking it. The shadow-steel sessions have built muscle in my arms and shoulders. My skin has cleared. My hair—I run my hand through it while Tommy hugs me—is thicker.
I look healthy because I am healthy. For the first time since Mam died.
"He is," I say. And I mean it in a way that terrifies me.
The mark sits under a high collar. I chose the collar this morning—dark fabric, stiff, covering the shadow-patterns that crawl across my throat.
I keep touching it through the cloth. The mark shifts under my fingers and through the fabric and the bond pulses at the base of my skull and Caligo is two rooms away, waiting, his shadows doing the protective curl against the walls.
Three days ago I was knotted on a stone floor begging a Fae prince for more. I came so many times I lost count. I gripped his horns and screamed his name and his shadows held me while I sobbed and the knot sealed his release inside me and I stayed.
Tommy is hugging me.
Both things. At the same time. The sister and the claimed mate. The hands holding Tommy's head against my stomach are the same hands that gripped charcoal horns three nights ago. The mouth that kissed Elena's forehead is the same mouth that said please.
I keep the smile. I've been keeping smiles since I was six. This one hurts more than most because it's real.
They stay for two hours. Marcus tells me about school—geometry, Latin, a boy called Freddie who can solve equations in his head.
Elena reads passages aloud. Tommy sits in my lap even though he's too big for it now.
I hold him and breathe the clean-soap smell of his hair and memorise it.
I'm a thief. Thieves memorise the things they cannot keep.
When it's time to leave, Marcus shakes my hand. Formal. He's practising being a man. Elena hugs me tight and whispers "I miss you" and I say "I miss you too" and the crack in my chest widens.
Tommy holds on. He holds on the way I hold on—with everything, refusing to let go until the world physically pries his fingers loose. I have to unpeel him. Gently, finger by finger, the way you ease a pick from a difficult lock.
"I'll see you soon," I tell him. "Be good for Marcus."
"I'm always good."
"You are never good. That's why I like you."
He laughs. He runs after the others. The shadow-passage takes them back to Ashworth—three seconds of dark, and they're gone.
I watch from the window. Not the passage—you can't see it from here. Just the wall where the passage is. The stone that took my siblings away and will bring them back and took my siblings away.
He's behind me. Warmth on my spine. His shadows are doing the protective curl—the one I've seen on my door frame, the one that wrote itself into my throat during the claiming.
The curl that means mine, which is a word I'm not ready to hear from a male who already owns my debt and my body and apparently my bloody locks.
"Thank you," I say. I don't turn around.
"You earned it."
I didn't earn it. He gave me everything I negotiated for and more. My siblings are thriving because a Fae prince decided to honour a contract with a rookeries pickpocket, and the gratitude is so large and so dangerous I can't look at it directly.
Gratitude is a lock I don't know how to pick. Every other feeling has a mechanism—anger sharpens, fear tightens, grief settles. Gratitude just sits there, heavy and warm, and it doesn't have any edges I can find.
I keep my eyes on the wall. I keep my hands at my sides.
I don't turn around because if I turn around I'll see him and if I see him I'll feel the bond pull and if the bond pulls I'll walk toward him and if I walk toward him I'll put my hands on his chest and press my face into the hollow of his throat the way I did last night when the heat had broken and the knot had softened and I was so tired and so held that I forgot to be afraid.
I can't afford to forget to be afraid. Fear is the last mechanism I have that still works.
"Lilith."
"Don't."
Silence. His shadows flatten. The protective curl recedes.
I leave the window. Walk to my room. Close the door. Sit on the bed and press my hands flat against my thighs.
The coat. The book. Elena's bright eyes. The way Tommy said kind.
The crack in my chest opens wider and wider until it's not a crack anymore but a door and behind the door is the thing I've been trying not to look at since the first night.
The male who kept his word. The prince who let me find the second ledger on my own. The shadow-creature whose darkness makes locks for me to pick and gardens for me to sit in and meals that arrive without asking.
My hands press harder against my thighs. Crying is not something I do.
Except three nights ago. Three times. On his floor. While his shadows caught my tears.
I'm not afraid of him anymore.
That's the problem.