Free Web NovelChapter 236: Chapter 236: Sera Went To See Eve
Eve’s POV
They gave her a room.
Not the war room. Not Seraphine’s study. A small sitting room off the main corridor, quiet and empty. Raphael steered her there without asking and closed the door.
She sat on the edge of a chair, put her hands in her lap, and looked at the floor.
The bond was still flooded, all three of them, relief and pride coming through in waves, she sat there and let it just wash over her. Damian wanted to come in. She could feel him outside the door, the effort it was costing him to stay out there.
She sent something back through the bond.
Give me a minute.
Felt him accept it.
Raphael sat across her and waited for her to catch her breath.
That was the thing about Raphael. He always knew when to give her space to breath. Knew when it needed filling and when it needed to be left alone.
For a while she just sat there and look around her, then everything that happened during the demonstration flooded her mind.
The stone floor of the hall. The warmth going outward. The moment the door opened wider than she’d planned and she’d chosen not to close it.
Nine people kneeling.
She hadn’t expected that.
Hadn’t expected any of it to feel like that.
"Tell me," she said finally.
Raphael looked at her.
"What it looked like from the back of the room."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Your father," he said slowly, "when he did this... the room felt something good. Something real and warm and worth protecting." He paused. "People wept because they recognized something they’d forgotten. Like being reminded of something you loved and lost."
Eve looked at her hands.
"What did my room feel like?" she asked.
Raphael looked at her for a long moment.
"Like being seen," he said. "Completely. Without mercy and without cruelty... just fully, entirely seen." He paused. "Your father’s nature made people feel safe. Yours made people feel known." Another pause. "Those are different things. Known is harder. Known is more."
The room was quiet.
"Nine people knelt," she said.
"Yes."
"I didn’t ask them to."
"No," Raphael said. "That’s why it meant something."
Eve looked at the wall.
She thought about her mother at twenty-six. About her father standing in that hall forty years ago.
She thought about the weight of all of everything that has been happening.
She’d been carrying it as a task. Something to accomplish. The throne, the factions, the hearing, the moves and countermoves.
She hadn’t let herself feel what it actually was.
It felt like completing something.
Not starting it, But completing it.
Her parents had started it and been stopped, and she was the continuation. The thing that survived. The reason they’d done what they’d done. freewēbnoveℓ.com
Tears rushed to her eyes and she pressed her hand over her mouth.
Raphael didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. Just stayed exactly where he was and let her cry.
She cried.
Not like she’d cried for Margaret, that had been grief, clean and specific and devastating. This was something else. Something without a clean name. The weight of what she was carrying and what it meant and who had paid for her to be sitting in this room. The fact that nine people had knelt on stone because she’d let them see what she was.
It lasted maybe two minutes.
Then she wiped her face with the back of her hand and breathed.
"Sorry," she said.
"Don’t," Raphael said simply.
She looked up at him.
His eyes were wet too, But he didn’t address it. He Just held her gaze with steady warmth of someone who’d loved her parents and waited twenty years for this moment.
"You did extraordinarily today," he said. "Both of them would have..." He stopped. Tried again. "They would have been..."
He couldn’t finish.
She reached across and put her hand over his.
They sat like that for a moment.
Two people who’d lost the same people in different ways.
***
The knock came an hour later.
Not Damian, she’d finally let him in twenty minutes after Raphael left. Let both of them in, then sat in the middle of them on the small sofa and just existed inside the bond for a while without talking.
Damian’s hand was in her hair. Damon’s shoulder was under her cheek. Their silence that meant they had things to say but had decided she needed a quiet moment more.
This knock was different, it was soft and Uncertain. The way a person would knock if they weren’t sure they should be present somewhere.
Damian’s eyes went to the door.
"I’ll get it," Eve said.
She crossed the room and opened the door.
The woman was older, silver-haired. Eve recognized her immediately....third tier, right side. The first person who’d knelt.
She was maybe five feet tall, looked like someone’s grandmother, and had the off the feeling of someone who’d been composing what they wanted to say for the past hour and still wasn’t entirely sure they had it right.
"Lady Evangeline," she said. "I’m sorry to intrude. I’m... my name is Sera. Sera Aldric."
Eve went still.
The fifth seat.
"I know who you are," Eve said. "Please come in."
Sera Aldric sat in the chair Raphael had used an hour ago, holding a cup of tea Elena had produced from somewhere.
The brothers had moved to the far end of the room without being asked. Present but distant. This was Eve’s conversation.
"I knelt," Sera said. "I want you to understand that I’m not a person who does that. In sixty years on the Court, I have never..." She stopped. "It wasn’t a choice. I need to be clear about that. What you did in that room today... I didn’t decide to knelt. My body decided."
"I know," Eve said. "I’m sorry if it was..."
"No," Sera said firmly and Immediately. "Don’t apologize." She held Eve’s gaze. "I came to tell you something. Not because of the hearing. Not because of the panel seat or faction politics or any of that." She paused. "Because of what I felt in that room. And because I’ve been carrying something for twenty years that I think you deserve to know."
The room went very quiet.
"I knew your mother," Sera said.
Eve went still.
"Not well. We weren’t close. But I was here when she was here, her and your father both. I was junior Court administration at the time, nobody significant, which meant nobody cared about what I saw or what I might remember." She paused. "I was in the corridor outside the council chamber the night everything happened. The night they..." She stopped. Collected herself. "The night Malachai’s plan concluded."
