Chapter 71: Corporeal Synergy

The afternoon has gone gold and lazy by the time they finally make it back down to the front steps, sunlight slanting long through the brothel’s curtained windows, the whole street outside smelling faintly of woodsmoke and someone’s dinner starting early a few doors down.

Lucien stands at the door of the pleasure house, arms crossed, pouting hard, as a small cluster of the girls crowd around Serenith on the front steps, each one taking turns hugging her, begging her to come back and visit whenever Lucien stresses her out too badly, which, several of them note, glancing his way, seems likely to be often.

Serenith accepts it all with genuine warmth, tucking the flower carefully behind one ear.

"This has honestly been the best day I’ve had since I was first tasked with looking after him," she tells them, glancing briefly, meaningfully, toward Lucien. "I’ll put in a good word with the higher-ups for each of you, personally. You’ve all earned it."

The girls gasp in unison, delighted, several of them pressing hands to their own chests like they’ve just been handed a blessing far more valuable than gold. They thank her again, and again, until she finally has to laugh and wave them off.

Serenith flutters her wings once, twirls gracefully in the air, and vanishes in a flash of brilliant light. The exit leaves every single one of them staring at the empty space where she’d been, mouths open, minds thoroughly, divinely blown.

Lucien rolls his eyes as Serenith reappears beside him a half-second later, invisible now to everyone but him, and sighs with deep, evident contentment, watching the girls dissolve into excited, overlapping chatter about their afternoon with an actual angel.

"Are you quite done, then?" Lucien asks, hands sliding into his pockets. "I would love to get back to the inn and drown myself properly in food and wine, since that’s apparently the only physical pleasure I’ve been allowed access to for an entire week now." He pouts at her, exaggerated and hopeful, like the expression might somehow convince her to give up on the whole arrangement.

She only giggles at him in response. "You look constipated."

He growls, shaking a fist at her, entirely unamused, and drops his voice into the closest thing he can get to dignity, despite the pout still tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"My pain should not be so funny to you. You’re an angel." he says pointedly. "Aren’t you supposed to protect me from suffering like this? There’s got to be a clause somewhere. A commandment. Something."

"You wish." She laughs, hard, tipping her head back, "my job is to watch over you. Guide you, where I can. Not protect you from the consequence of your own actions, even when the consequence happens to be a lack of action!"

She bursts out laughing at her own joke, wings fluttering with the force of it.

"I have never, in either of my lives, been so thoroughly humiliated." Lucien sneers at her, deeply wounded.

"It’s only been one day," Serenith says, still grinning. "You’ve got plenty more humiliation still waiting for you before the week’s out."

Lucien gasps, scandalized.

"You’re a monster! A monster!" He calls out before storming off down the street toward the inn, boots striking the cobblestones with far more force than the walk requires.

The sound of wooden-soled shoes clacking against stone trails up behind him a moment later, quick and deliberate, the kind of footstep that clearly wants to be heard, and he flicks around sharply to find absolutely nothing there. The street behind him empty, a single startled hen scattering off toward a fence post.

Then he yelps, stumbling half a step sideways, when Kamiko appears suddenly beside him instead, materializing instantly from a puff of purple smoke, arms already looped comfortably through his own like she’d been walking there the whole time.

"You promised." He scowls, flushing instantly. "No illusions, no tricks."

"I couldn’t help myself," she says, entirely unrepentant, tilting her head to study his expression. "You look cute when you’re upset. Genuinely."

He pouts harder, averting his gaze toward the rooftops. She giggles and pulls him a step closer anyway, undeterred.

"What do you want," he asks, not quite managing to keep the wariness out of his voice. "Our deal’s done. And as you well know," he shoots a brief, sour glance skyward, toward wherever Serenith’s currently hovering, "I’m grounded. So whatever you’re aiming for, I can’t—"

"Dinner," she says simply, cutting him off before he can finish the sentence. "I’d love to have dinner with you. No strings attached, I promise. Assuming Lady Serenith approves, of course."

"Serenith?" Lucien scoffs, lifting his hands in protest. "That angel doesn’t control every single—"

But he’s cut off entirely as Serenith materializes directly in front of both of them without warning, arms crossed, expression carefully serious.

"I’ll allow it." she says simply.

Lucien gasps, celestially betrayed.

Kamiko giggles, divinely delighted, and offers a small, genuine bow of thanks to Serenith.

"Oh, so you’re openly flying around the village now?" Lucien turns on Serenith, scowling. "Visible and everything! That’s surely against some celestial code or another. This is flagrant abuse of po—"

"Only Kamiko can see me," Serenith says. "We have an understanding."

"I don’t approve of this." Lucien groans, dragging both hands down his face. "The two of you, ganging up on me like this. It’s unnatural. It’s collusion. It’s unfair!"

"Deal with it." Serenith responds, arms still crossed, a proud smirk settling over her face. She floats a little higher and tousles his hair lightly with one bare foot as she drifts above him.

He sneers up at her for exactly one second, and then his expression splits abruptly into a wide, entirely too pleased grin, and he turns to Kamiko with casual, deadly precision.

"Did you know," he says, eyes going half-lidded, "that angels don’t wear underwear? Kinda kinky."

Kamiko’s eyes flick immediately upward toward Serenith, and she claps a hand over her mouth, backing away half a step in a hurry, already anticipating the angel’s wrath.

Serenith looks down at him, eyes widening in dawning horror.

She registers the angle of his vision from directly below her, and exactly how that angle allows him a clear view straight up the length of her gown.

Lucien, smirking, still perfectly composed, shoots her a smug little wink.

She flushes crimson instantly, halo sparking with a sharp, startled crackle, and slaps both hands over her thighs with an undignified squeak. She shoots him a holy raspberry, somehow charged with just enough divine energy to make the air around her tongue fluctuate, before quickly floating ahead of them both, pouting, arms crossed hard over her chest.

"How are you still alive?" Kamiko chuckles, still recovering.

Lucien waves it off breezily, like he hadn’t just upskirted an angel.

"You don’t need to brown-nose the angel quite so hard, you know. She’s actually pretty easygoing, once you get past the halo and the threats of smiting."

Kamiko laughs at that, shaking her head slowly. "I’ve genuinely never once heard of a mortal treating an angel the way you do and surviving the ordeal, let alone thriving in it. You truly are an anomaly, Lucien."

"I’m just a very likeable person," he says, entirely without irony.

"I don’t doubt that for a second," she says, watching him with something more thoughtful now behind her usual amusement. "But I have a feeling Serenith considers you rather more than just a burden to be managed. Perhaps more than just a friend, even. I’ve watched a great many people fall in and out of my rooms over the years, Lucien. I know what devotion looks like when it isn’t being paid for."

Lucien goes quiet, eyes locked onto something in the distance, his mind adrift somewhere else entirely.

Kamiko bites her lip, watching the change ripple across his face in real time. The usual swagger, the practiced smirk, both falling away by degrees into something far more thoughtful, far more unguarded than she’s seen from him yet, in all the days she’s known him, like a curtain briefly pulled back on a room she was never quite meant to see.

Ahead of them, Serenith has gone quiet too, wings barely moving, apparently too absorbed in her own sulking to notice the sudden shift in the conversation trailing behind her.

Or, Kamiko privately suspects, doing an excellent job of pretending not to.

Kamiko tightens her grip on his arm slightly, voice softening to a whisper. "Lucien, do you actually like Se—"

"I’m starving," He says, before she can press further, a touch too quickly, already scanning the street ahead. "Is there anywhere else decent to eat around here? Val cleaned the inn out completely last time."

She doesn’t answer him right away, letting the silence stretch a beat longer while he works visibly, and not entirely successfully, to smooth his own expression back into something more familiar.

Then she gives him a soft, knowing smile, tucks her arm more firmly through his, and pulls him gently along down the street.

"I know a lovely place," she says, and doesn’t press the issue for the rest of the night.