Chapter 3 #2
I closed my fingers around the small wounds and walked out of the room on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else.
* * *
I went to my father.
I did not think about it, did not plan it. I simply moved through the palace corridors with the single-minded desperation of a child running home after a nightmare, because that was what I was—Gün Ata's daughter, and my father was a god, and surely a god could stop this.
The guards outside The Golden Throne Hall crossed their spears when I reached the doors.
"My lady." Cem would not meet my eyes. "The Divine Council is in session. His Radiance has requested no interruptions."
"I need to see my father."
"The session may continue for several hours, my lady. I'm sorry."
Behind the doors, I could hear the murmur of men deciding things that would affect thousands of lives while the doors stayed shut and the guards stayed loyal and the system continued to function exactly as it was designed to.
I pressed my palm flat against the gilded wood.
The gold hummed faintly against my skin.
"Tell him I need to speak with him. Tonight."
"Of course, my lady."
I turned and walked away, and the tears came before I reached the end of the corridor. Hot and furious and utterly useless—the tears of a girl who had just watched a child be tortured and then been told to wait her turn to complain about it.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to force them back.
"The great Light Princess. Crying in corridors." A pause. "How very human of you."
Everything in my body tightened at once.
I knew that voice the way I knew the sound of my own breathing—low, unhurried, carrying the particular brand of lazy arrogance that made my jaw clench and my pulse kick and my magic rise to the surface of my skin without my permission.
I hated that voice. Hated the way it curled around words like it owned them.
Hated the way it moved through my body like warm liquor, pooling in places I refused to name.
I hated him.
I had been telling myself that for months.
Ever since the day he'd pinned me against the library stacks and told me that no one would speak to me that way while he was breathing, and I'd felt the heat of his body through both our clothes and realized with a sick, plunging certainty that the boy I had grown up with had become something else entirely.
Something I could not look away from. Something that made me press my thighs together under the covers at night, alone in the dark with his name caught between my teeth, my fingers doing what I would never, never let him do—
I hated him for that most of all.
Hakan was leaning against one of the marble columns, arms folded across his chest, one shoulder pressed to stone.
He wore the dark gray of Lord Kaya's apprentices, his sleeves pushed to his elbows, forearms corded with lean muscle.
The late-afternoon light caught the line of his jaw, the column of his throat, the shadow in the hollow beneath his ear.
He looked bored. He looked devastating. I wanted to slap the indifference off his face and then do something far worse.
"Go away, Hakan."
"No." He said it the way you'd decline a second cup of tea.
Mild. Uninterested. "I heard what happened in Selim's class.
The new detection technique." His gaze drifted over my face—the tear tracks, the blotched skin—and one corner of his mouth tugged upward.
Not a smile. Something meaner. "Tell me, princess. Did you clap at the end? I'm curious."
"Fuck you."
"There it is." He unfolded his arms and took a step toward me. "The mouth your handmaidens don't know about. I do enjoy that mouth." His eyes dropped to it, slow and deliberate, and stayed there a beat too long. "Among other things."
Heat flooded my face. My neck. Lower. I clenched my teeth against it.
"You don't know what it was like there."
"I know exactly what it was like." All the amusement drained from his face in an instant—one moment lazy and taunting, the next, cold as the stone at my back.
"I know they chained a girl to the floor and burned the shadow out of her blood while your classmates took notes.
I know she's in the purification wing right now, and she won't come out alive.
And I know you sat there with your hands in your lap and your pretty mask on and did nothing. "
He said it once. He did not need to say it again. The word nothing landed in my chest and stayed there, a stone dropped into still water.
"What was I supposed to do?" My voice cracked. I hated that too. "Stand up in front of forty-three students and challenge an instructor? Get myself expelled? Get myself—"
"Yes." He closed the distance between us, and I backed up instinctively, my shoulder blades hitting the corridor wall.
He didn't stop. He planted his palm on the stone beside my head and leaned in, and the air between us compressed into something thick and charged and almost impossible to breathe.
"That is exactly what you were supposed to do.
Because you are the only person in this court with enough power to make them listen and enough name to survive the consequences.
And instead—" His gaze dropped to my clenched fists, then back to my face.
"You made fists in your lap and bled quietly, like a good girl. "
Like a good girl. The words did something filthy to me.
I felt them in the base of my spine, in the pit of my stomach, in the sudden slick heat between my thighs that I absolutely could not be feeling right now, not here, not with tears still wet on my face and a girl dying two floors below us.
But Hakan's body was a wall of heat, and his arm was caging me in, and his mouth was right there—close enough that I could see the faint scar on his lower lip from a training yard brawl, close enough that if I tilted my chin up our mouths would touch.
"Back up," I said.
He didn't.
"I said back up, Hakan."
"You have to make me." His voice had dropped to that register—the low, rough one that scraped against something raw inside me. "You just watched a girl burn and did nothing. Prove to me you're capable of doing something."
My light crackled at my fingertips. He noticed. His eyes went to my hands, then back to my face, and his pupils were blown wide, the green almost swallowed by black.
"Go on, princess." Barely a whisper now.
His breath ghosted across my mouth. "I know you want to.
I can feel your magic rising. I can feel—" He inhaled, sharp, through his nose, and something in his expression fractured.
Just for a second. Just long enough for me to see the hunger he kept locked behind the cruelty—vast, desperate, barely contained—the hunger of months of starving with a feast finally spread before him and no permission to touch.
His breathing had changed. Harder. Faster.
His chest was rising and falling in a rhythm that matched mine.
He closed his eyes. When he spoke, his words sounded as he had a knife imploded in his chest.
"You smell like light and jasmine. You have always smelled like that." A breath. Unsteady. "Like something sacred. Like something that was never meant for me. And I have spent half my life learning how to stand next to you and act like it means nothing."
He opened his eyes.
"It has never meant nothing."
I stopped breathing.
He caught himself. I watched it happen—watched the vulnerability slam shut, watched the walls go up, watched his expression rearrange itself into something cruel and careless and utterly untouchable. He smiled, and it was a vicious thing, all teeth and sharp edges.
"But what would Gün Ata's golden daughter want with a nobody from the borders?
" He reached out. His fingers found the strand of hair that had escaped my braid, and he wound it slowly around his index finger, tugging—gently, then not gently, tipping my head back until my throat was exposed and his eyes were on the pulse hammering beneath my jaw.
“A nobody who doesn't even have the right bloodline to breathe the same air as you.
" He released the strand. Dragged his fingertips along my jaw on the withdrawal—a slow, deliberate graze that left fire in its wake.
"Although I wonder…" His hand dropped. His expression was all predator.
"If you think about bloodlines when you're alone at night.
In your chambers. With the candles out."
My heart stopped.
He couldn't know. There was no way he could know.
But the look in his eyes said he did. Or suspected. Or had imagined the same thing I imagined, in his own small quarters in Lord Kaya's household, and the thought of Hakan lying awake in the dark thinking about me the way I thought about him—
I could feel the heat blazing across my cheeks, my throat, my chest. I could feel other things too — the ache between my legs, the tightness in my nipples, the way my body was leaning toward him even as my mind screamed at me to pull away.
Every inch of me was traitor. Every nerve ending was defecting to the enemy, and the enemy was standing six inches away smelling like sandalwood and something darker, something male and warm and his, and looking at me like he wanted to ruin me.
"You're disgusting," I whispered.
He didn't smile. Didn't deflect. Something flickered across his face — there and gone — and when he spoke his voice had lost all its edges.
"I know."
His hand hung at his side, fingers curled tight into his palm, knuckles bloodless with the effort of it.
He wasn't looking at my face anymore. He was looking at my throat, at the pulse he'd just exposed, and his jaw was locked like a man doing sober arithmetic on something he very much wanted to do.
"Go," I said. "Right now. Before I do something neither of us can walk away from."
"Like what?" He tilted his head. His eyes were burning. "Hit me? Burn me? I'm curious what Gün Ata's daughter does when she's pushed past her precious limits."
My light erupted.
Not a slap. Something more primal—a flare of raw magic that burst from my palm and grazed his jaw, leaving a line of searing gold across his skin. The smell of singed flesh bloomed between us, brief and acrid.
Hakan's head snapped to the side. When he turned back, there was a welt rising along the line of his jaw—angry red, already blistering. He touched it with two fingers.
And laughed.
Low. Dark. Satisfied.
"Fuck, that's good," he breathed. He was looking at me with an expression that was equal parts rage and reverence, and his chest was heaving, and his pupils had devoured the green entirely, and I realized with a jolt that went straight through me that burning him had turned him on.
"The princess bites. I was starting to think you'd let them breed it out of you. "
We stood there. Breathing. The corridor was empty. The silence roared. His arm was still braced beside my head, and his mouth was close enough that I could taste his breath—warm, faintly sweet, laced with something that made my head swim.
He leaned closer. His lips grazed my temple—not a kiss, not quite, just the press of his mouth against my skin, lingering, devastating. I felt the shape of his smile against my hair.
"You are the only person in this court worth a damn, Ada," he murmured into my hairline. "So stop acting like you aren't."
Then he pushed off the wall.
The cold rushed in where his body had been. I almost gasped at the loss of it—the heat, the pressure, the impossible gravity of him. He was two steps away, then three, then four, and each step felt like something being torn.
He paused without turning around. I could see the rigid line of his shoulders, the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides. The deliberate rhythm of his breathing.
"Stay away from me, princess." His voice was rough. Quiet. "I'm not the kind of mistake you can undo."
He walked away. He did not look back.
I stayed where he left me, pressed against cold stone with bloodied palms and a hammering heart and the ghost of his mouth still burning against my temple. His scent clung to my skin. The welt on his jaw would scar—light magic always scarred when thrown in anger.
I had not controlled it.
I had not wanted to.
In the distance, muffled by stone and corridor, I could still hear screaming. Faint now. Fading. The girl from Selim's class, being cleansed in the purification wing. Being made thorough.
I uncurled my fingers and stared at the crescent wounds in my palms—eight small moons of broken skin, rising red with blood that was pure, unblemished, divine.
I closed my hands and walked in the opposite direction from the one Hakan had taken.
The screaming stopped before I reached the end of the corridor.
I did not know if that meant the cleansing was finished.
Or if the girl was.