Chapter 4 #2
"No," Sarp agreed. "You're not blind. You're something much more interesting.
" He stood, tossing his apple core into a bin with perfect accuracy.
"Well, this has been illuminating. I'll start at the Crowning Moon Festival next week.
Walk her through the gardens. Buy her something pretty from the night market.
" He paused, watching my face. "The jasmine stall near the eastern gate — the one at the border where the light and shadow traders set up side by side and pretend the law doesn't apply after dark.
She always liked jasmine, didn't she? I seem to remember her wearing it in her hair when we were young.
Before we decided she was beneath our attention. "
The word jasmine landed somewhere behind my ribs and stayed there.
"I wouldn't know," I said. "I don't catalog women's perfume preferences."
"Course you don’t." Sarp smiled — not the easy grin, not the sharp one. Something quieter. The kind that holds a mirror up to someone who refuses to look. "Any objections?"
"Why would I have objections?" I picked up a fresh training blade, testing the weight.
"You want to spend your evenings listening to a girl lecture you about half-blood welfare while she looks at you like you're something she scraped off her boot — go ahead.
Light Court women are all the same anyway.
Pretty and pious and completely fucking insufferable the moment you get past the silk.
" I rolled my shoulder, moved back toward the dummies.
"Just don't come crying to me when she bores you half to death. "
"Course not," Sarp said pleasantly.
I was already swinging.
Behind me, Sarp glanced at my father — eyebrow twitching upward, a silent question.
Milan gave the smallest shake of his head. Not yet.
"Alright then," Sarp said softly. He walked to the door. Paused. "Oh, and Hakan? That scar on your jaw." He nodded at it. "It suits you. Very rugged. Very 'I got too close to the woman I don't care about and she branded me for it.' The girls at court will love the mystery."
He left before I could respond, whistling something obnoxiously cheerful that echoed down the corridor like a taunt.
Baba and I stood in the silence. Four destroyed dummies. Blood on the floor. Dawn breaking through the high windows, painting the carved names on the walls in gold.
"Don't," I said, before he could open his mouth.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say something wise and infuriating, and I'm telling you now — don't."
Milan picked up his practice sword, returned it to the rack. Moved toward the door.
"I'll only say this," he said quietly. "I've watched Ada since I arrived this morning. The way she carries herself. The way she looked at the purification square from her window like it was breaking her apart." A pause. "She doesn't look at Sarp the way she looks at you."
"She looks at me like she wants to set me on fire. She literally did set me on fire."
"Yes," Milan said. "That's what I mean."
He paused at the door. "Your mother worries. Come home tonight. I'll cook." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Badly, as usual. But I'll cook."
He left.
I stood alone in the training hall with dawn turning the dust to gold and my hands wrapped in bloody cloth and the word jasmine sitting in my chest like a stone I couldn't swallow.
Four practice dummies. A dead girl named Elif. A best friend who'd just declared war on my self-control with a smile and an apple.
Ada was nothing to me. A childhood friend who'd outlived her usefulness, who I'd outgrown the way you outgrew toys and fairy tales. I'd been making that clear for years. Sarp had helped me make it clear.
The memory came the way it always did — unbidden, unstoppable, dragging me under like a current I'd never learned to swim against.
The Academy courtyard. Spring. Cherry blossoms drifting like pink snow.
I'd been avoiding Ada for months. Leaving rooms when she entered. Finding excuses not to walk the same corridors. She'd noticed — of course she'd noticed — but I let her think I was busy, or bored, or cruel. Anything was easier than the truth. I was a nobody.
A scholarship student with no family name, no fortune, no lineage.
The son of a woman who lived in a two-room apartment in the border district and flinched at her own shadow.
I'd clawed my way into the Academy on talent alone, and every day I walked those golden halls surrounded by lordlings who'd inherited what I had to fight for, the distance between what I was and what Ada deserved grew wider.
She was Gün Ata's daughter. The heir to the Palace of Light. Destined for a political marriage to some pure-blooded lord who could offer her armies and alliances and a future that matched the golden world she'd been born into.
Not a border rat who owned two shirts and whose mother removed every mirror from their home for reasons she wouldn't explain.
I'd tried to let her go quietly. Tried to drift, to stop appearing at the places I knew she'd be, to look through her instead of at her.
But Ada didn't let people drift. She pursued.
She cornered. She showed up with those golden eyes full of hurt and confusion and demanded to know what she'd done wrong.
Every time she got close, the wanting got worse. Not just her body — the wanting of a life I had no right to. A future where I woke up beside her. Where I was enough. Where the gap between a princess and a nobody didn't matter.
I knew it would never close. Knew that the longer I let her hope, the harder the fall.
So I decided to make her hate me. One devastating blow. Not slowly, not gently — surgery. Brutal, stupid surgery performed by a boy too thick to know there were kinder ways to cut.
I gathered the lordlings by the fountain. Told Sarp I was going to have some fun with the princess — harmless teasing, I let him think. He didn't know the full plan. Not until it was too late.
And then she walked across the courtyard. Cherry blossoms in her dark hair. Golden eyes bright with the hope I was about to destroy.
"Hakan. Can we talk? I just wanted to ask you something."
My name in her mouth. Breathless. Trusting.
I almost stopped. Almost told her the truth — that I was pulling away because I loved her, because loving her was a cruelty I couldn't inflict on either of us, because the world didn't let boys like me have girls like her.
But if I told her that, she'd argue. She'd say she didn't care about names or titles. She'd look at me with those eyes and I'd believe her, and we'd spend months pretending the world would bend for us before it broke us instead.
Better a clean cut.
"Did you think I was interested in you?" The words tasted like poison. Every syllable was a knife I was driving into myself. "Did you think because I was nice to the Light God's daughter, I wanted to fuck her?"
The way her face crumpled. The light dimming in her eyes — actually dimming, as if I'd reached inside and snuffed something out.
"I bet I could have her begging within five minutes. You know how these sheltered ones are. Starving for it."
The lordlings laughed. Sarp's face changed — I saw the exact moment he understood this wasn't a game. He tried to intervene. Too late. Because nobody knows how to stop a man determined to destroy himself.
And then I kissed her.
Three seconds. Her mouth soft and warm and open against mine, her fingers gripping the front of my shirt like she'd been waiting her whole life for permission to touch me.
She kissed me back without thinking — no guard, no calculation, just the raw, desperate honesty of a girl who'd finally got what she wanted.
I felt her smile against my mouth. Felt her heart hammering through the thin fabric between us.
Felt every wall she'd built come down at once because she trusted me, still trusted me, even now.
I memorized all of it. The taste of her. The sound she made. The way her body softened against mine like coming home.
I memorized it because I knew I would never have it again.
I pulled back. Looked into her eyes.
And laughed.
"Three seconds. Three seconds before she was moaning into my mouth like a tavern whore."
She ran. Cherry blossoms scattered behind her. The lordlings howled. Sarp stood very still, looking at me like he'd just watched something die.
After the courtyard emptied, he found me in the training hall. I was destroying practice dummies with my bare fists — not magic, just knuckles, because I needed my hands to hurt, needed the physical pain to match the rest of it.
"What the fuck was that?"
"A mercy."
"A mercy." He stared at me. "You just publicly humiliated the only person in this court who gives a damn about you, and you're calling it a mercy?"
"She deserves better than me, Sarp. She's Gün Ata's daughter.
And I'm —" I gestured at myself, at the blood on my knuckles, at the cramped quarters I shared with my mother in someone else's household.
"What am I going to offer her? What kind of future does a scholarship student with no name give a princess? "
"Maybe a future where someone actually loves her instead of using her for politics?"
"Love isn't enough. Not in this world."
He sat down on the floor of the wrecked training hall. Put his head in his hands.
"You're a fucking idiot," he said.
"I know."
"She's going to be destroyed."
"She'll recover. She'll marry some lordling who can give her the life she deserves."
"And you?"
I didn't answer. Because the answer was that I was already destroyed. Had been from the moment I opened my mouth and watched the light die in her eyes. The boy who'd loved Ada since he was old enough to understand what love meant had died in that courtyard along with her trust.
Whatever was left was something else. Something that could function without a heart, because it had just torn its own out and stamped on it in front of a cheering crowd.
The memory released me. I stood alone in the training hall with dawn turning the dust to gold and my hands wrapped in bloody cloth and the word jasmine sitting in my chest like a stone I couldn't swallow.
Before I turned on her, we'd been three children in the borderlands.
Running through the forests near the Boundary Quarter where my mother kept her tiny apartment, climbing trees and daring each other to cross the shadow line where the light faded and the air turned cold.
Ada with jasmine in her wild hair. Sarp with that laugh that hadn't learned to cut yet.
And me, watching her even then, before I knew what the watching meant.
The plan had always been the same. Push her away.
Keep her at a distance. Make her hate me so completely she'd never get close enough to discover what I was becoming — the dreams of darkness, the singed blankets, the ache in my hands that didn't feel like anything the Academy had taught me.
Whatever was wrong with me, whatever was stirring beneath the surface like something waking from a long sleep, Ada couldn't be near it.
The plan was working. She hated me. She should hate me.
So why did my hands shake when Sarp said her name?
I shoved them in my pockets and walked into the light.