Summary: A handmaiden arrives at the Palace of the Dead expecting nothing more than servitude. Instead, she finds golden eyes, a mother's medallion, and the patient, terrifying attention of the god who has been searching for her for years. Being the daughter of Aphrodite, she should have known nothing in this pantheon would come without a price â or a claim.
Pairings: Anubis Ă Reader (AFAB)
Warnings: Explicit language, sensual intimacy, nudity, references to divine power dynamics, territorial behavior, mentions of pantheon politics, mortal-immortal relationship dynamics, reader is the daughter of Aphrodite (Greek/Egyptian pantheon crossover), mention of family death/dysfunction, possessive behavior, making out in bathwater
The mornings in the Palace of the Dead had a peculiar quality to them â not quite light, not quite dark, but something suspended in between, like the breath before a word you weren't sure you should say. The air always smelled faintly of lotus and something older, something that clung to the stone walls like a memory nobody could quite place. You'd been here three weeks now, and you still hadn't gotten used to it. You weren't sure you ever would.
You never thought you'd end up working for Anubis. The God of Death. The Keeper of Weighing Hearts. The guy who literally decided if your soul was light enough to pass into the afterlife or if it got eaten by a crocodile-lion-hippo nightmare creature. That Anubis. And yet here you were â up before dawn, following Nefertari, the senior handmaiden, through corridors that seemed to shift and breathe around you like the walls themselves were alive.
"I look ridiculous," you muttered, tugging at the fine linen draped across your shoulders. It was beautiful, you'd give it that â gossamer-thin, the color of pale honey, practically weightless against your skin. But it was also completely see-through in certain light, and you were fairly certain that was the point, and you were absolutely not going to think about why.
Nefertari glanced over her shoulder, her dark eyes glinting with something between amusement and reassurance. "You look perfect. Stop fidgeting."
"Easy for you to say. You're not about to meet the god who decides your eternal fate."
"He doesn't decide your fate, little one. He guides souls. There's a difference." She paused at a pair of towering doors inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli, reaching out to brush a strand of hair from your face with a gentleness that made your chest tighten unexpectedly. "Besides," she added, her voice dropping conspiratorially, "he doesn't eat handmaidens."
She laughed â a warm, throaty sound that echoed off the ancient stone â and then the doors groaned open, and you forgot how to breathe.
The throne room was vast. Cathedral-vast. Columns rose like the ribs of some enormous creature, draped in shadow and gilded light filtering through high clerestory windows. The floor was polished obsidian, reflective enough that you could see yourself in it â small, uncertain, wrapped in linen that caught the light like it was trying to hold onto something precious.
And there, at the far end, seated on a throne carved from what looked like solid onyx â
He was⊠not what the frescoes had prepared you for. Tall, yes. Broad-shouldered, yes. The jackal head â stylized, regal, the ears tall and alert â was unmistakable. But the frescoes hadn't captured the stillness of him. The way he held himself like everything around him was simply weather happening at a distance. He was speaking to one of the guards, his voice a low, resonant murmur that you felt more than heard, vibrating somewhere behind your sternum.
Nefertari pressed a hand to the small of your back â warm, grounding â and guided you forward. A few servants who had been attending to incense braziers along the periphery quietly stepped aside, melting into the columns like they'd rehearsed it. The guard Anubis had been speaking to bowed deeply and retreated.
And then those eyes found you.
Golden. Burning gold, like the desert at high noon, like amber caught in the moment between solid and liquid. They traveled over you â not quickly, not slowly, but with a kind of deliberate, measured attention that made the skin beneath the linen prickle with heat you were absolutely not going to acknowledge. You held your ground, even though every instinct in your body was screaming to either bow lower or run. Possibly both.
The silence stretched. It pooled between you like honey dripping from a spoon â thick, slow, almost unbearable in its sweetness.
Not a request. An observation, almost. Like he already knew the shape of your name and was simply waiting for you to fill in the sound of it. His voice was deeper than you expected â rich and dark, the kind of voice that didn't need to raise itself to fill a room. It simply did.
You swallowed. Straightened your spine. Felt Nefertari's hand withdraw from your back and resisted the urge to grab for it again.
"(Y/N)," you said. Your voice came out steadier than you expected, which was a small mercy. "My name is (Y/N)."
Something shifted behind those golden eyes. Something that might have been interest, might have been recognition, might have been the particular stillness of a predator that had just noticed something it hadn't anticipated in its territory. The jackal head tilted â just slightly, just enough â and the corner of what you could only describe as his mouth curved upward by the most incremental degree.
"(Y/N)," he repeated, and the way your name sounded in his mouth was dangerous. Like a spell being cast. Like a door being opened that you weren't entirely sure you wanted to walk through.
The linen shifted against your skin as the air in the throne room seemed to contract â or maybe that was just your lungs forgetting their job again. The light caught the gold of his eyes, and you realized, with a certainty that settled into your bones like morning warmth, that this was going to be complicated.
The shift was subtle. One moment the throne room hummed with its usual quiet activity â servants tending braziers, the distant whisper of linen against stone, the low murmur of guards stationed in shadowed alcoves. The next, Anubis raised a hand, and it all stopped like someone had pressed pause on the world itself.
Two words. No heat, no impatience, no explanation. Just a quiet command that carried the weight of something that had been decided long before he'd opened his mouth. Nefertari caught your eye as she turned to go, and there it was again â that knowing look, the slight upturn of her lips, the ghost of a told you so dancing in her expression. She pressed her hands together in deference and melted away with the others, bare feet silent against the obsidian floor.
And then it was just you, and him, and approximately eleven million square feet of ancient Egyptian stone and a silence so complete you could hear your own pulse doing something deeply inconvenient against your eardrums.
You stood there. He sat there. The air between you felt like taut wire â humming, vibrating, dangerous if touched.
Again â not a request. His voice had dropped half a register, and the word resonated somewhere in your chest, in the pit of your stomach, in places you were absolutely not cataloging. You took a step forward. Then another. The obsidian floor was cool through the thin soles of your sandals, and each step felt deliberate, ceremonial, like walking toward something inevitable.
When you were near enough to count the gold flecks embedded in the onyx armrests of his throne â near enough to catch the scent of him, which was myrrh and desert sandalwood and something underneath that was purely animal in the oldest, most primal sense of the word â he leaned forward.
His hand rose. Long fingers, dark-skinned, tipped with nails that gleamed like polished hematite. You held very, very still. His fingers found your chin â gentle, shockingly gentle, considering who this was, considering what those hands did for a living â and tilted your face upward.
Your breath hitched. You couldn't help it. His palm was warm against your jaw, and his thumb traced a line along the edge of your chin that sent a shiver skittering down your spine like a dropped stone rippling through still water.
"You're trembling," he observed, golden eyes holding yours with an intensity that bordered on devouring.
"Good observation," you managed, because apparently your mouth had decided that now was the time for dry humor. "Very astute. Ten out of ten."
The sound he made was low, almost a laugh, vibrating through the hand still cradling your face. "You continue to surprise me, (Y/N)."
It wasn't hesitant. It wasn't questioning. It was the kiss of someone who had weighed every outcome and decided that this â you â was the answer. His mouth was warm and firm against yours, and the taste of him was strange and addictive, like spiced wine and something electric that you had no frame of reference for. His other hand found the back of your neck, fingers threading into the hair at your nape, and he pulled you closer with a sureness that made your knees forget they were supposed to be load-bearing structures.
Then his tongue traced the seam of your lips, and every coherent thought you'd ever possessed evacuated your skull like rats from a burning building.
You opened for him â instinctively, desperately, completely â and he deepened the kiss with a slowness that felt worshipped. His tongue swept against yours, tasting, claiming, mapping the inside of your mouth like a cartographer charting territory he intended to annex. The heat of him was overwhelming â not just his mouth but his presence, the way it pressed against your senses like sunlight through stained glass, colorful and inescapable.
Your hands found his shoulders without your permission, fingers curling into the rich fabric of his robes, gripping like he was the only solid thing in a world that had gone liquid and dangerous. The linen across your chest did absolutely nothing to hide the fact that your heart was staging a full percussion solo, and you blushed â a full-body, all-over, nuclear-grade blush that you were certain was visible even in the dim throne room light. Heat flooded your cheeks, your neck, the exposed skin of your chest, and you made a small, mortified sound against his mouth that he swallowed like it was a gift.
He pulled back slowly. Too slowly. His lips dragged against yours like he was reluctant to release them, and when the kiss finally broke, you were left standing there with your lips still parted, your breath ragged, your hands still fisted in his robes like your fingers had forgotten how to let go.
The smile he gave you was devastating.
Not kind. Not cruel. Something in between â the smile of a predator who had just caught something exquisite and knew exactly what he planned to do with it. His golden eyes were half-lidded now, heavy-lidded, and there was a satisfaction in them that made your stomach flip so violently you thought you might actually ascend to the afterlife right here, right now, no weighing-of-the-heart required.
"My quarters," he said. His voice was rougher than before, scraped raw around the edges, and the effect it had on you should have been studied by scholars. "Tonight. I expect you."
He released your chin. His fingers lingered for a moment, trailing down the line of your jaw, the column of your throat â a fleeting, featherlight touch that burned hotter than any fire â before withdrawing entirely.
You blinked. Swallowed. Opened your mouth, closed it, opened it again. Your brain was running on approximately twelve percent capacity, and the remaining eighty-eight was devoted entirely to replaying the last sixty seconds on a loop that showed no signs of stopping.
"Is thatâ" you started, your voice cracking spectacularly. You cleared your throat, attempted dignity, failed spectacularly. "Is that an order, orâŠ?"
His smile widened. The golden eyes glittered.
"I think you know the answer to that."
You did. You absolutely did. And that was the most terrifying part of all.
The corridor to his chambers was a throat. Long, narrow, lit by torches that burned without smoke or sound, their flames bending inward toward you as you passed as though the darkness itself was curious about what you carried. The stone was cool beneath your bare feet â you had removed your sandals three corridors back, some instinct telling you that stone wanted contact, wanted to feel the weight of you pressing into it, wanted to remember you'd been here. You're attributing consciousness to architecture now. Wonderful. Three weeks in the House of the Dead and you've already lost your mind. The clay jar of blue lotus oil sat warm in your palms, the heat of your grip slowly working through the terracotta, and you could smell the oil already â sweet, heavy, almost narcotic â seeping through the imperfect seal of the lid. Each breath carried it deeper into you, settling behind your sternum like a second heartbeat.
The door was not a door so much as a slab of limestone that had been persuaded into a rectangular shape and hung on bronze hinges older than most living dynasties. Hieroglyphs crawled across its surface in bands and columns, and if you looked at them straight on they held still â ibises and ankhs and reed leaves carved with a precision that suggested the artisan who had made them had very strong feelings about straight lines. But in the periphery, in the uncertain margin where your vision faltered, the glyphs moved. Not dramatically. Not alarmingly. They simply shifted, rearranged themselves, told and retold their stories in an endless, silent loop. Don't look at them sideways, Nefertari had told you. They'll show you things you're not ready for. You kept your eyes forward and pressed your palm flat against the stone. It was warm. Warm in the way that skin is warm â not the heat of fire or sun, but the heat of something alive.
The door swung inward without sound.
Steam hit you like a wall. Not unpleasant â the opposite, in fact â a wall of rose-scented, mineral-thick humidity that wrapped around your body and clung to every exposed inch of skin. The chamber beyond was larger than it had any right to be, hewn from the living bedrock beneath the palace, its ceiling disappearing into a darkness that the steam only half-illuminated. The walls wept with condensation, each droplet catching the amber glow of oil lamps hung in bronze brackets at intervals, and the air was so saturated with heat and moisture that breathing felt like drinking. The floor sloped downward toward the center, where the bath â a great, natural pool fed by a hot spring you could hear burbling somewhere beneath the stone â sat like a wound in the earth filled with rose-gold water. Oils floated on its surface in iridescent sheens: myrrh, cedarwood, something sharper underneath â frankincense, maybe, or the resin of some tree that only grew in the dreams of gods.
And in the water, up to his chest, was Anubis.
He had been reclining, you realized â his back against the stone edge of the pool, his arms spread along the rim, the dark fur of his jackal ears sleeked flat against his head by the water. At the sound of the door he raised himself, and the water sluiced off the planes of his shoulders, the sharp architecture of his collarbones, the edges of the nemes headdress that even here, even in the privacy of his chambers, he had not fully removed. Water caught in the hollows of his throat, pooled in the divot above his sternum, traced the lines of muscle that shifted beneath skin that was not quite human in its texture â smoother, tighter, drawn over bone and sinew with a precision that felt less biological and more designed. His ears rose from the water, tall and expressive, and they rotated toward the door with a mechanical alertness that sent a shiver racing down your spine despite the suffocating warmth of the room. Those ears have probably heard the dying breaths of pharaohs, you thought, and immediately wished you hadn't. That is not helpful. That is the opposite of helpful.
"Come closer, dear." The words were warm, lazy, carrying the amused cadence of someone who had been waiting and was not at all troubled by the wait. His mouth curved â slow, deliberate, the smile of someone who had already read the end of the story and found it deeply entertaining. "I don't bite."
He absolutely bites, a voice in the back of your skull insisted, and it sounded remarkably like Nefertari. He is a jackal-headed god of death and embalming. His entire domain involves teeth.
But you moved forward anyway, because you had been moving toward this moment since the throne room, since the linen, since the moment Nefertari's hand had pressed against your back and guided you toward those impossible golden eyes. Your feet found the smooth stone ledge surrounding the pool, and you set the clay jar down with a small, deliberate click that echoed in the wet acoustics of the chamber. Your fingers trembled as you reached up and found the single bronze pin holding the gauzy fabric at your left shoulder. It was warm from your body. The fabric shifted, sighed, and began to fall.
It did not fall quickly. The linen â gossamer, almost weightless, dyed the color of pale honey â seemed to reluctantly release your skin, peeling away in layers. First your shoulder, then the slope of your breast, then the curve of your waist, each newly exposed inch meeting the humid air like a confession. Don't think about it. Don't think about how you look. Don't think about the steam or the light or the way the air feels againstâ The fabric caught at your hips for one excruciating moment, clinging, then surrendered to gravity entirely and pooled at your feet in a whisper of cloth against stone.
You stood bare before a god.
The heat of the room was instant and total, pressing against every surface of your body â the curves and planes and soft places that had never known air this warm, this thick, this attentive. Gooseflesh rose across your arms and thighs despite the temperature, and your skin prickled with a sensation that was not quite cold and not quite fear but something in between, something that lived in the space between vulnerability and want.
Anubis went completely still.
Not the stillness of a predator â you had seen that in the throne room, the coiled, electric tension of something about to move. This was different. This was the stillness of a man struck, frozen in the act of breathing, every faculty of attention narrowed to a single burning point. His golden eyes â those eyes that had watched souls weigh themselves against the feather of Ma'at, that had measured the hearts of the unworthy and found them wanting â traveled. Not quickly. Not hastily. With the patient, reverent thoroughness of a scribe copying sacred text onto fresh papyrus, each line deliberate, each stroke precise.
He saw your throat, the delicate architecture of cartilage and tendon, the pulse hammering visibly beneath the skin. He saw your shoulders, the slope of them, the way they tensed and released with each ragged breath you couldn't quite control. He saw your breasts â oh god, he saw your breasts â the swell and fall of them, the way they rose with your inhale and dipped with your exhale, the flush that was spreading across the skin of your chest like sunrise mapped onto flesh. His gaze dragged lower, past the narrow valley of your waist, the soft plane of your belly where your muscles clenched involuntarily under the weight of his attention. Lower still, to the dark hair between your thighs, the place where your legs pressed together on instinct â not hiding, not anymore, but presenting, as if your body had made a decision your mind was still catching up to. He saw everything. He missed nothing. His long tongue â wet, dark, impossibly long, the kind of anatomical feature that existed in a space between nightmare and fantasy â slipped past his lips and traced a slow, deliberate arc across his lower palate.
That tongue was in my mouth this morning, you thought, and the memory alone was enough to make your knees tremble.
You stepped into the water.
It was hot. Not scalding, not painful, but a deep, penetrating warmth that wrapped around your ankles, your calves, your thighs as you descended the smooth stone steps carved into the side of the pool. The water was silk against your skin, thicker than water had any right to be, saturated with oils that made it feel like liquid devotion. Rose-gold, you realized â the water was genuinely rose-gold, the color of dawn caught in amber, the color of something sacred diluted into something intimate. You sank to your chest, then your shoulders, the heat seeping into muscles you hadn't realized were clenched, loosening knots of tension that had been living in your body since you'd first walked through the palace gates. The stone beneath your feet was smooth, worn by centuries â millennia â of use, and the spring burbled somewhere below, audible but unseen, filling the pool with a gentle current that pressed against your body like the hands of something patient and affectionate.
You were close to him now. Close enough to see the individual drops of water clinging to the fur of his ears, close enough to count the gold flecks in his irises â there, and there, and there, like a constellation mapped onto the eye of a god â close enough to feel the heat that radiated off his body, separate from the water, a different kind of warmth entirely. Older. His shoulder was six inches from yours. The distance felt mathematical, calculated, like he knew exactly how much space to leave to make the proximity * unbearable.*
His hand rose from the water â his arm catching the lamplight, water streaming in rivulets down the dark skin, each droplet catching gold as it fell â and found the curve of your jaw. His palm was warm and rough, calloused in places you didn't expect, and his fingers curved behind your ear with a gentleness that made something crack open in your chest. His thumb traced the line of your cheekbone, and the touch was so specific, so precise, that you felt it in every nerve ending below your collarbone simultaneously. He's touching me the way you handle something that might break, you thought. He's touching me like I'm valuable.
Then his mouth found yours.
This kiss was different. The throne room had been a door slamming open â claiming, declarative, an announcement to the universe. This was something else entirely. This was careful. His lips moved against yours with a slowness that bordered on worship, pressing and releasing, pressing and releasing, a rhythm as deliberate and inexorable as the tide. He tasted of the mineral water, of myrrh and cedarwood and something underneath that was uniquely him â dark and wild and ancient, the taste of desert nights and unburied secrets. His other hand found the small of your back beneath the water, and his fingers spread wide, pressing you forward, pulling you into the space between his body and the water's warmth until there was nothing between you but heat and current and the impossible softness of his mouth.
Not aggressively. Not urgently. It slid past your lips with the same unhurried patience as everything else â long, impossibly long, warm and slick and skilled in a way that bypassed every rational thought in your brain and went straight to the animal part of you that understood nothing except more. It swept against the roof of your mouth, curled behind your teeth, stroked along the length of your tongue with a pressure and rhythm that made a sound escape your throat â a small, broken, desperate sound that you had absolutely no control over and that echoed off the wet stone walls and came back to you like an accusation.
Your hands found his chest beneath the water. The muscle beneath your palms was dense, compressed in a way that human muscle wasn't, and his heart â he has a heart, of course he has a heart, why is that surprising â beat against your fingertips with a rhythm that was not quite human: too slow, too deep, the pulse of something that operated on a different timescale entirely. Your fingers curled into the skin of his shoulders, your nails pressing crescents into flesh that yielded only slightly, and you pulled yourself closer because the distance between your bodies was offensive and needed to be corrected immediately.
Your hands flat against his chest, your palms pressing hard enough to feel the slow, impossible drum of his heartbeat, you broke the kiss and dragged air into your lungs like a drowning woman surfacing. The steam filled the space where your mouths had been, and for a moment the world consisted entirely of sensation: the water lapping at your collarbones, his breath warm against your wet face, the taste of him still coating the inside of your mouth, the frantic, arrhythmic pounding of your own heart doing its level best to escape your ribcage.
"Wait." Your voice was barely recognizable â ragged, breathless, scraped raw at the edges. You inhaled. Deep. The air was thick with steam and oil and him, and you pulled it into your lungs like medicine. Another breath. Another. Your hands were still flat against his chest, and they were shaking â you could feel them trembling against the solid wall of muscle beneath them, could feel the faint tremors running through your wrists and into your shoulders. Get it together. Get it together. You are a grown woman standing in the bath of a literal deity and you are falling apart like wet parchment.
"What's going on?" The words tumbled out before you could arrange them neatly, landing in the steam between you like stones dropped into still water. You stared at him â this impossible, beautiful, terrifying creature â and gestured vaguely at all of him: the jackal head, the golden eyes, the body that was neither fully human nor fully animal but something else entirely, something that existed in a category for which your language had no adequate word. "Why are you so you?"
Brilliant. Eloquent. He's going to be so impressed with your vocabulary.
The sound he made was not quite a laugh. It was deeper, rougher, a vibration that started in his chest and traveled through the water between you, pressing against your submerged skin like a warm current. His hand â still at the small of your back â flexed, his fingers spreading wider, pressing you infinitesimally closer, and the movement was so small, so controlled, that it felt less like a gesture and more like a statement.
"I'm claiming you." He said it the way another man might say I'm having tea or the sun rose this morning â simply, factually, without pretense or elaborate justification. His golden eyes held yours, and in the lamplight they were not simply gold but a spectrum: deep amber at the edges, molten yellow at the center, flecks of something almost white-hot near the pupil. "Before you can say no."
Before you can say no. The words landed in the center of your chest and stayed there, warm and heavy, and you felt them propagate outward like ripples from a stone dropped into still water. Before you can say no. Not so you can't say no. Not you won't have the chance to say no. The difference was razor-thin but absolute, and you felt it acutely â the distinction between a man who takes and a man who offers, the razor edge between captivity and something that walked and talked and tasted like surrender but was, in truth, a choice.
"Though of course," he added, and here his voice shifted â dropped, softened, the lazy confidence giving way to something quieter and far more dangerous in its honesty â "you could say no."
He said it like he meant it. His hand at your back did not tighten. His body did not press forward. His golden eyes did not narrow or demand. He simply waited â patient, ancient, a being who had watched civilizations rise and crumble into sand and who was perfectly willing to wait for your answer with the same infinite calm he'd waited for everything else since the dawn of the afterlife. The steam curled between you. The spring murmured below. The lamps flickered, throwing dancing shadows across the wet walls.
And you understood â with a suddenness that was almost violent in its clarity â that the choice was real. That he would let you walk out of this chamber, untouched, unclaimed, and he would return to his bath and his oils and his eternal work and he would wait. However long it took. He had, after all, been waiting for things since before the pyramids were built. He had developed an exquisite patience for them.
He's giving me the choice, you thought, and the realization moved through you like the hot water moving over your skin â slow, total, transformative. He could take. He is a god. But he is choosing to offer.
The steam swirled. His thumb traced a slow circle against your lower back.
His golden eyes flickered. Just barely â a contraction of the iris, a shift in the quality of the gold, something that in a human face would have been a flinch. There it is, you thought. He didn't expect that. For all his patience, for all his ancient, divine composure, he had not expected you to say no, and the realization that you could â that you did â had landed somewhere vulnerable.
You smiled. Small, slightly unsteady, but real.
"No, I won't say no." Your hands were still flat against his chest, and you felt his heartbeat shift beneath your palms â a fractional change in rhythm, a quickening so subtle that only someone touching him, holding him, could have detected it. "I'm just â I needed a minute. To understand that it was actually a choice." You exhaled, slow and shaky, and let your forehead rest against his collarbone, just for a moment, just long enough to gather yourself. The water lapped gently against your jaw. His chin came to rest on the crown of your head, and his hand â that careful, devastating hand â slid from your lower back to rest against the nape of your neck, fingers curling into the wet hair at your nape with a possessiveness that was the opposite of the restraint he'd shown a moment ago. Now, you thought, feeling the shift in his grip like a change in weather, now he knows I'm staying.
His voice was a murmur against your hair, rough and warm, scraped down to something almost raw: "Good."
His hand left your neck and disappeared beneath the water, his fingers moving with purpose through the rose-gold current, reaching for something you couldn't see â something resting on the stone ledge of the pool, hidden beneath a fold of discarded linen. The water displaced around his movement, tiny wavelets lapping against your collarbone, warm and rhythmic, and you watched the surface ripple and distort the reflected lamplight into fractured amber patterns. When his hand resurfaced, it was closed, his long fingers curled protectively around something small that gleamed faintly in the humid, low-lit air. Water streamed between his knuckles, catching gold, and for a moment he simply held it â suspended between the bath and the air, between giving and keeping, between the man and the god.
The medallion was small â no larger than a scarab beetle, no wider than the base of your thumb â but the moment it caught the lamplight, something in your chest lurched. It was white. Not the pale, uncertain white of bone or ash, but a living white â the white of moonlight on still water, of new lotus petals before the sun has touched them, of the first breath of winter morning. The metal â if it was metal at all, because it seemed to shift in the light, to breathe, to exist in a state somewhere between solid and liquid â was worked into a shape you didn't recognize at first. A flower, perhaps. A star. Something with curves and angles that seemed to rearrange themselves depending on where you looked, as though the craftsmen who had forged it had not worked in three dimensions but in meaning.
What is that? The thought rose unbidden, and with it came a strange, pulling sensation â not in your body but somewhere behind your body, in the space between your thoughts where dreams lived. The medallion seemed to recognize something in you, to call to something dormant, and the recognition was mutual and instantaneous and deeply, profoundly unsettling.
"This," Anubis said, and his voice had changed again â stripped of the lazy amusement, the confident seduction, the practiced charm. This was his real voice, you realized. The one beneath all the layers. Quiet. Old. Careful in the way that people are careful when they are handling something that has broken them before. "Was my mother's."
His mother's. The words landed with a weight that had nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with the way he held the small white thing â not displaying it, not presenting it, but cradling it, the way you hold something that is irreplaceable, something that survived the person who made it precious. He doesn't have a mother anymore, you thought, and the thought was not pity but understanding, sudden and sharp, because you had your own empty spaces where parents should have been, your own questions that no amount of palace luxury had answered. Or maybe he does, in some way that humans don't understand. Maybe she's somewhere in the afterlife, watching her son give away her medallion to a handmaiden he kissed this morning. Maybe she's furious. Maybe she's delighted. Maybe she's both.
"You know who my father is."
It wasn't a question. His golden eyes lifted from the medallion to your face, and in them you saw something you hadn't expected â testing. Not suspicious, not threatening, but curious, in the way of a creature that has lived long enough to know that most surprises are unpleasant ones and is genuinely, cautiously interested in whether this one will be different.
You nodded. Of course you knew. Everyone knew. Every child who had ever been told stories by firelight, every handmaiden who had whispered mythology in the servant quarters after dark, every priest who had studied the old texts â they all knew. Osiris. King of the Underworld. Lord of the Dead. Father of Anubis in the oldest, strangest, most complicated family tree in the history of either pantheon. A god who was murdered, dismembered, and reassembled by his wife, you thought. And people wonder why this family has issues.
His fingers moved to the delicate chain attached to the medallion â fine links of the same living white metal, so thin they seemed woven from moonlight rather than forged â and he leaned toward you. The water shifted between your bodies, warm currents pressing and pulling, and you felt the movement against your bare skin with an acuity that made your breath stutter. He's going to put it on me. The realization was not frightening. It was heavy. Heavy in the way that being handed something sacred is heavy, something that has been carried by someone else's love and grief and devotion and is now being transferred to your keeping.
He reached around your neck. His arm was warm and wet, and the proximity of it â the way his chest pressed against yours as he leaned in, the way his breath moved through the damp air near your ear â made the world narrow to a single, blazing point of awareness. The chain settled against the back of your neck first, cool where it touched your wet skin, and then the medallion itself came to rest in the hollow of your throat, and the sensation was electric. Not painful. Not burning. But present â a weight and a warmth simultaneously, as though the small white thing was not merely hanging around your neck but nesting there, finding a place in the architecture of your body and settling in like it had always belonged.
"I know that I go forward fast." His thumb traced the line of your jaw, the same motion from before but different now, weighted with something that went beyond desire. "But if I don't, then my brothers will claim you."
His brothers. The words settled into the warm water around you like stones dropped into honey â slow, inevitable, changing the shape of everything they touched. You had heard the whispers in the servant corridors. The other gods â his half-brothers, sons of Osiris by other mothers, other unions, other complicated theological entanglements â had noticed you. Had noticed you. The word carried a specific weight in the language of the divine, a meaning that went far beyond mortal appreciation or attraction. To be noticed by a god was to be seen â thoroughly, completely, in a way that stripped away every pretense and left only the raw, unvarnished truth of what you were. And what you were, apparently, was something worth fighting over.
Wonderful. I'm a contested resource in a divine custody dispute I didn't know I was part of.
"You are quite the delicacy, dear (Y/N)."
He said it with a small, almost apologetic smile â the smile of a man explaining something uncomfortable, something he wished were otherwise but couldn't change. The words delicacy hung in the steam between you, and they should have been objectifying, should have been reducing, but the way he said them made them sound less like a description of a thing to be consumed and more like the confession of a man who understood exactly how rare you were and was trying, in his own blunt, immortal way, to tell you so. Delicacy. Not possession. Not prize. Delicacy â something precious, something to be savored, something that would be ruined by rough handling.
His hand found your cheek. His palm was still damp, still warm, and the touch was impossibly tender â a contrast to the weight of what he was saying, to the casual, devastating way he was reshaping your understanding of your own existence with every sentence.
"You are the daughter of Aphrodite."
He said it the way he'd said I'm claiming you â simply, factually, as though he were telling you the sky was blue or the Nile ran north. As though it were the most obvious thing in the world, and your confusion, your shock, was a source of gentle amusement rather than concern.
Your mother is Aphrodite.
The words didn't land. They shattered. They came into your mind like a stone thrown through stained glass, and for a moment there was nothing but sound and color and the sensation of everything you thought you knew about yourself flying apart into irretrievable fragments. Your mother â your mother â was not the mortal woman who had raised you, who had braided your hair and sung you to sleep and pressed cool cloths to your forehead when you were feverish. Your mother was Aphrodite. Goddess of love and beauty and desire. The Cyprian. The one who had emerged from sea foam and never looked back. She's the reason I look the way I look, you thought, and the realization cascaded through you like the hot water cascading over stone â she's the reason Nefertari said I was perfect, she's the reason Anubis noticed me, she's the reason his brothers noticed me, every single thing about my face and my body and the way people look at me is because I am the daughter of a goddess who was born from the ocean and I neverâ I never knewâ
Your breath came faster. The medallion pulsed against your throat â warm, rhythmic, as though it was responding to the upheaval inside you, amplifying it, syncing with it. The rose-gold water lapped against your chest. The steam curled. Anubis watched you with those ancient golden eyes, patient as bedrock, and waited for the tremors to pass.
"My brothers," he continued, his voice low and careful, "could never stop mixing with the Greeks."
The word mixing carried layers â alliances, affairs, wars, marriages, the long and bloody history of Egyptian and Greek pantheons entangling themselves in ways that had reshaped both cultures for millennia. His brothers â his brothers, the sons of Osiris, gods with their own dominions and desires and hungers â had always had a taste for Greek blood. Greek beauty. Greek divinity. And here you were, the daughter of Aphrodite herself, standing bare in his bath, wearing his mother's medallion, trembling like a reed in a river current, and every single one of those brothers would have wanted you.
This is why he kissed me in the throne room, you thought, and the understanding was a door opening onto a landscape you hadn't known existed. This is why he moved so fast. This isn't just desire â it's strategy. It's defense. He saw what I am and he knew what would happen if he didn'tâ
You looked down at the medallion resting in the hollow of your throat. The white metal caught the lamplight and seemed to glow from within â not reflection but emanation â and you understood, with the quiet certainty of someone who has finally heard the truth they've been waiting for their entire life without knowing it, that this was not jewelry. This was a claim. This was his name written on your skin in a language older than hieroglyphs. This was the god of death marking you as his before anyone else â mortal or divine â could make the attempt.
You reached up and touched the medallion. It was warm under your fingertips. Almost warm enough to be body temperature. Almost alive.
My mother is Aphrodite, you thought again, and this time the words didn't shatter. They settled. They settled into the warm water and the humid air and the golden gaze of the man who had claimed you before you even knew there was something worth claiming, and they felt, for the first time, less like a loss and more like a beginning.
His golden eyes held yours, and there was something in them now that hadn't been there before â something unguarded, something that lived beneath the layers of divine confidence and predatory stillness and the practiced ease of a being who had worn power like a second skin for millennia. Searching. That was the word for it. Not looking â looking was passive, casual, the thing you did when you glanced across a room. Searching was deliberate, was desperate in its own quiet way, was the act of someone who had been turning over stones and peering into shadows and calling out into silence for a very, very long time.
"I hope I'm not going too forward."
The words were soft â softer than anything he'd said to you yet, softer even than you could say no, and that softness was a revelation. A god, softening. A being of death and judgment and eternal, unyielding patience, uncertain about whether he'd overstepped. He's nervous, you realized, and the thought was so absurd, so impossible, so fundamentally at odds with every image you'd ever carried of the jackal-headed god of the underworld that it nearly made you laugh. The God of Death is nervous. About me. About whether I think he's being too forward. After he kissed me in his throne room this morning and told me to come to his chambers tonight. This man â this god â has no sense of irony and I adore him for it.
"But I've been looking for you for years, my dear."
He sighed when he said it â a real sigh, the kind that comes from somewhere deep in the chest, the kind that carries weight. Not theatrical, not performed for effect, but the exhale of someone setting down something they've been carrying so long the shape of it has become part of their posture. Years. The word expanded in the humid air between you, swelling outward like the ripples from a stone dropped in still water. Not days. Not weeks. Not a passing fancy or a momentary attraction that had flared in the throne room and burned through his composure. Years. He had been looking for you â searching, waiting, watching â for years.
I am a needle, you thought, and he has been sifting through haystacks made of eternity.
"I am usually more patient." A rueful tilt of his head, water cascading from the sharp edge of his jaw, and there it was again â that dry, self-aware humor that surfaced unexpectedly beneath the divine gravity. "The most patient of us all, in fact."
Us all, he said, and the us encompassed brothers and fathers and a pantheon of squabbling, territorial immortals who apparently spent their endless existence fighting over the same things mortals fought over â love, land, legacy, and the right to possess something beautiful. The most patient of us all, and he'd lasted approximately twelve hours between first contact and I've been looking for you for years. Incredible. Truly. A masterclass in restraint.
You smiled â a real one this time, not the small, unsteady thing you'd offered earlier, but something wider, warmer, something that surfaced from a place inside you that you hadn't known existed until this moment, a place that had been quietly, stubbornly waiting for exactly this kind of absurdity. You leaned back against the smooth stone edge of the bath, the warm water rising to accommodate the shift in your posture, and you were acutely, painfully aware of your body in the water â the way your breasts displaced the rosy-gold surface, the way the liquid lapped at your collarbone, the careful, instinctive way you'd angled yourself so that everything remained submerged. Discretion, Nefertari would have called it, and you could almost hear her approving hum. Modesty in the presence of a god is not weakness, little one. It is strategy.
"I understand," you said, and your voice was steadier now, warm and clear and threaded with the particular kind of calm that comes after a storm has passed and you realize the house is still standing. "Let's just not rush to â" You paused, choosing your words with a care that would have impressed the scribes in the palace scriptorium. "â sex yet, okay?"
The word landed in the steam between you and you watched it travel â watched his ears rotate forward a fraction of an inch, watched the golden eyes sharpen with something that might have been surprise or might have been respect or might have been both tangled so tightly together they were indistinguishable. He expected me to say yes, you thought. He braced himself for yes. He was ready for yes. And I gave him okay.
It was a genuine laugh â full-throated, unrestrained, the kind of sound that seemed too large for the enclosed space of the bath chamber, bouncing off the wet stone walls and multiplying in the humid acoustics until the room itself seemed to vibrate with his amusement. His dark eyes â dark because the pupils had expanded, swallowing the gold to thin burning rings â were warm, crinkled at the corners with a joy that seemed almost childlike in its unguardedness. Water sloshed around his chest as his body shook with the laughter, and droplets flew from his fur-tipped ears, catching lamplight and scattering like tiny, molten stars.
"Yes," he said, still laughing, still shaking his head as though you'd told him the single funniest joke in the history of the Egyptian afterlife. "I understand."
Good, you thought, settling deeper into the hot water, feeling the tension in your shoulders finally, completely release. He thinks I'm funny. A god thinks I'm funny. Add it to the list of impossible things that are apparently just Tuesday now. The medallion pulsed gently against your throat â warm, rhythmic, synced to something you couldn't quite identify â and you let your eyes close for just a moment, just long enough to feel the water hold you, the steam breathe around you, the presence of him beside you â vast and ancient and amused â settle into the architecture of the moment like it had always been there.
Then his ears snapped upright.
Both of them â simultaneously, violently â rotating toward the doorway with a mechanical precision that was nothing like the lazy, expressive twitches from before. His nostrils flared, pulling apart, widening, and a sound rumbled up from somewhere deep in his chest. Not a growl, not yet â something before a growl, the low, subsonic precursor of a threat, the sound a large cat makes when it has scented something in its territory that doesn't belong. The gold in his eyes ignited â his pupils contracting to pinpoints, the amber and yellow blazing outward like fires being stoked â and his entire body went rigid beneath the water, every muscle locking into place with a suddenness that made the surface of the pool tremble.
Nefertari's voice. Nefertari's very flustered, very apologetic, very clearly-mortified voice, coming from the doorway where she stood frozen, one hand still on the limestone slab, her dark eyes approximately the size of dinner plates. She had seen â oh gods, she had seen â and the blush that erupted across her face, her neck, the exposed skin of her chest was so immediate and so total that it was almost its own light source, a flare of mortified crimson that seemed to radiate outward from her like heat shimmer. Her gaze had landed on Anubis â half-naked, wet, golden-eyed and snarling â and then, disastrously, had skittered to you, and then had snapped back to the ceiling, the wall, the floor, the lamp bracket, anywhere and everywhere except the two naked bodies currently occupying the bath in front of her.
"I â uhh â" She stammered, her hands fluttering at her sides like startled birds, her composure â usually so immaculate, so untouchable â crumbling into a pile of awkward vowels and consonants. "I came to retrieve (Y/N). To her room. We have â lots to do tomorrow. Preparations. Things. Many things."
She's going to pass out, you thought, and a bubble of entirely inappropriate laughter rose in your throat and you had to physically bite the inside of your cheek to suppress it. She's going to pass out in the doorway of the death god's bathroom and I'm going to have to explain this to someone.
"I'll let her get to bed when I want."
Anubis's voice had dropped an octave. The warmth was gone â stripped away like skin from a bone, leaving only the cold, smooth architecture of divine authority beneath. The words were not loud. They were quiet, precisely quiet, the kind of quiet that is infinitely more threatening than any shout because it implies that the speaker is so confident in their power that volume is unnecessary. His ears were flat against his skull now â not in submission but in warning, pressed down by the same current of territorial instinct that had produced the growl. His lip had curled, just slightly, just enough to reveal the edge of teeth that were not remotely human in their sharpness, and the golden eyes were fixed on Nefertari with an intensity that made the air in the chamber feel heavier.
You felt the shift in the water around you â felt the way his body had angled, almost imperceptibly, positioning itself between you and the doorway. Protective, you realized. He's positioning himself between me and the interruption. Like a guard dog. Like a â Oh. That's exactly what he is.
Nefertari's voice was barely a whisper. She bowed â deep, immediate, reflexive, her forehead nearly touching her knees â and the speed of it suggested that her survival instincts were functioning at peak capacity despite the nuclear-level embarrassment still radiating off her skin in visible waves. She straightened, kept her eyes firmly locked on the floor, and backed out of the doorway with the careful, deliberate pace of someone who knew that sudden movements in the presence of a predator were inadvisable.
Silence returned â heavy, steam-thick, punctuated only by the gentle burble of the spring and the soft drip of condensation from the ceiling. Anubis's ears remained flat for three more heartbeats â yours, not his, his were far too slow and steady for counting â before slowly, gradually, rotating back to their upright, alert position. The growl in his chest subsided like a tide pulling back from shore, leaving behind the quiet, mineral-scented air and the rose-gold water and the lingering electricity of a god who had just reminded everyone in earshot who exactly owned this particular territory.
That was terrifying, you thought. That was also, objectively, the hottest thing I've ever witnessed, and I need to examine my life choices.
You turned to look at him â at the tension still lingering in his jaw, at the way his shoulders had not quite relaxed, at the golden eyes that were slowly, grudgingly losing their predatory edge and returning to something warmer. The water rippled around you both, the steam curled, and somewhere in the depths of the palace, you could hear Nefertari's footsteps retreating at a pace that suggested she had broken several land speed records.
"You scared her half to death," you said, but there was no accusation in it. Only observation, and perhaps the faintest thread of impressed.
"She interrupted." His ears twitched â a small, dismissive motion, the equivalent of a human waving a hand. Then, quieter, the authority bleeding out of his voice like water draining from a basin: "She'll recover. She's resilient."
She's going to tell everyone, you thought. Every servant in this palace is going to know by sunrise that (Y/N) was in the Lord of Death's bath chamber tonight, and they're going to draw their own conclusions, and none of those conclusions are going to involve a polite conversation about boundaries and patience.
You leaned your head back against the warm stone and closed your eyes, and for a long, quiet moment, the only things that existed were the water, the heat, the pulse of the medallion against your throat, and the steady, ancient, impossibly slow heartbeat of the god sitting beside you in the dark.
