Chapter 6 #2
I drew back into the tree line without thinking — instinct, the reflexes of a boy raised to be invisible.
The shadows came without my asking, flattening against my skin like they'd done it a thousand times, dampening my presence in a way that still made my breath catch every time it happened.
I hadn't told them to do that. I hadn't even known they could.
"— couldn't have been easier." Tahir's laugh, low and confident. "One dance and she practically melted. The princess is starving for attention. Father was right — with the scholarship mutt out of the picture and that fool Sarp playing lapdog, she's completely exposed."
I pressed my back against the trunk. Didn't breathe.
"Serkan's timeline?" A second voice — younger, nasal. Emre's son. I didn’t remember his name, but he always hung out with Tahir.
"Six months. Maybe less, depending on how fast the old god deteriorates. Gün Ata's getting weaker by the day. Once he's gone, Ada inherits — and Ada is a girl who thinks mercy is a governing philosophy. She'll need a husband with real authority."
"And that someone is you?"
"Who else? I've got the bloodline, the connections, Serkan's backing. All I need is access." Another laugh. "And access to the princess is easier than you'd think. She's lonely. Desperate. Did you see her tonight? Pathetic. A few dances, a bit of attention, and she'd spread her —"
My fingers dug into the bark until it crumbled.
Under the gloves, something was happening.
Cold pooling in the cup of my palms. A pressure pushing out from my fingertips like a word demanding to be spoken.
I hadn't felt it this strong before — not at this intensity, not threatening to come through fabric and leather and sheer will all at once.
I pressed my hands flat against the tree and held them there.
Not yet. Not with a witness. Wait. Think.
Emre's son said something I didn't catch. Then footsteps — two sets diverging.
"See you at the council session tomorrow," Tahir called.
One set of footsteps faded north. The other continued east, deeper into the forest. Alone.
I counted to sixty. Then I followed.
Tahir took the long path home — the scenic route through the oldest part of the forest, where oaks formed a canopy so thick the moonlight barely reached the ground.
He walked with his hands in his pockets, whistling, as though nothing had ever lurked between the trees.I kept my distance.
Let five minutes pass until the sounds of the ball faded entirely. Then I stepped out in front of him.
"Evening, Tahir."
He stopped. Blinked. The moonlight caught his face — handsome, composed, that practiced smile assembling itself.
"Hakan. Didn't expect to see you out here." His eyes swept me once. "Leaving the ball early?"
"Something like that." I didn't move from the center of the path. "Lovely ball. I particularly enjoyed watching you dance with Ada."
Something flickered behind his eyes. "The princess was gracious enough to accept."
"She is. Remarkable. Lonely. Desperate. What were the other words you used? I want to make sure I'm quoting accurately."
The smile died.
"I don't know what you —"
"Pathetic, I think. And something about spreading her legs. I was behind the oak tree, Tahir. I heard every word."
He ran.
Smart, actually. He was fast — light-magic trained, athletic.
He made it twenty feet before I caught him.
Not with the shadows — I didn't trust them, not yet, not when I couldn't be certain what they'd do if I let them loose.
I caught him the ordinary way: my hands, my body, momentum.
I tackled him into the undergrowth, drove my knee into his spine, wrenched his arm behind his back.
"Get off me — do you have any idea who my father —"
I slammed his face into the dirt. Once. Hard enough to daze. Then I hauled him off the path into the deeper trees.
The rope was the rational part. I'd carried it since the exhibition — a precaution, something with no magical signature that couldn't be traced.
I bound his wrists behind his back, then his ankles, then ran a length between the two and secured it to a low branch so he was kneeling with his arms wrenched upward, immobilised.
"This is — you can't — I'm Lord Tahir of House —"
"I know exactly who you are. I've been watching you for weeks.
Three meetings with Serkan. Eastern colonnade, his private study, the lower gardens.
" I crouched in front of him. "So you're going to tell me everything.
The faction. The members. The timeline. What you intend for Ada after her father dies. "
"You're insane. When my father finds out —"
"Your father won't find out. Because if you tell anyone about tonight, I'll make sure the court learns Lord Tahir was conspiring to overthrow the Light God's heir. Treason, Tahir. You know the penalty."
"It's not treason. It's politics —"
"Serkan is using you. You're the bloodline he needs and the face he wants on the throne. You get Ada, he gets the council. And Ada gets what? A husband who thinks she's pathetic?"
"I was performing — for Emre's son. You know how it is —"
"You said she'd spread her legs for anyone who whispered something sweet."
"I didn't mean —"
Don't, my mother's voice whispered inside me. Walk away. You have what you need. Leave him tied, let someone find him in the morning.
I looked down at my hands. At the gloves I was still wearing in the middle of a forest in the dark.
I had no idea what I was doing.
That was the thought that moved through me, cold and clarifying.
I had no idea what lived under this leather.
I had no idea whether it would listen to me, whether I could stop it once I started, whether the thing I'd been testing in my room alone at midnight bore any resemblance to what would happen out here where I was furious and something had just said she'd spread her legs and I couldn't get the image of Ada's face out of my head — that careful, giving-nothing-away expression while Tahir's hand sat on her waist.
Let us out, something whispered. He deserves it. You heard what he said about her.
I closed my eyes. For one moment I was standing at a crossroads I could feel with absolute clarity. Behind me — quiet, hidden, safe. Elif's good son, the invisible boy who survived by never being seen.
Ahead — I didn't know. That was the honest answer. I didn't know what was ahead.
I pulled off my gloves.
The shadows came immediately, faster than they ever had when I was alone testing them, and for a horrible second I thought they were going to do it on their own — just erupt, just take over — but they stopped at my fingertips. Black tendrils curling in the night air, waiting. Asking.
I was breathing too fast. My heart was hammering. I had no idea if I could stop this once it started.
I let one thread brush Tahir's cheek.
He recoiled like I'd touched him with a brand, a sound tearing out of him that wasn't quite a scream. His eyes went enormous. "That's — shadow magic. You can't be —"
"The entrance exams missed a lot of things." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Serkan. Start talking."
He talked. Haltingly at first, the words coming in jagged pieces while he flinched away from every movement of my hands.
I didn't know what I was doing — that was the truth I kept having to steady myself against. I was following instinct and whatever the shadows showed me when I paid attention to them, a thread around the wrist tightening when the words stopped, a brush against the throat when he started to go vague and evasive.
They seemed to know things. Where to press.
How hard. It frightened me in a way I couldn't afford to look at directly.
Steady. Focus. Listen.
Serkan's faction was larger than I'd suspected.
Six council members, a dozen minor lords, two Academy professors who administered shadow-blood testing.
They'd been building for years — since Gün Ata first showed signs of weakening.
The purification expansion wasn't just zealotry; it was infrastructure.
Every new registry, every half-blood catalog was another brick in a system designed to be ready when the old god fell.
And Ada was the centerpiece. Not as a ruler — they'd never allow that. As a vessel. A wife. A divine bloodline to be bred with the right family.
"Those were Serkan's words," Tahir gasped. "Not mine. I respect the princess —"
"You called her pathetic."
"I was —"
I moved my wrist. I didn't think about it, didn't plan it — the shadow surged and I didn't stop it in time and Tahir's arm wrenched upward, the joint going wrong with a sound that echoed through the trees.
His scream sent birds erupting from the canopy.
And something in me responded to that sound. Not the horror I should have felt. Something lower. Older. A pulse of dark satisfaction that ran through my blood like heat, that made the shadows swell and thicken and push outward, and I stumbled back a step from the sheer force of it —
No.
I yanked my hands in, pressed them flat against my thighs. The shadows pulled back with a resistance that felt physical, like trying to hold something against a current, and I stood there shaking for a full four seconds while Tahir sobbed into the dirt.
"Lord Cevdet," he gasped. "The old one. He's the real architect. Please — please, I've told you everything —"
I believed him. That was the rational assessment. I believed him and I needed to walk away right now, before I did something I hadn't planned and couldn't take back, before the thing under my skin made another decision I hadn't consciously reached.
I was my father's son. I didn't know what that meant yet. I was beginning to suspect it meant something terrible.
STOP.
The word came from somewhere deep — Elif's son, surfacing at last, clawing through the darkness with everything he had.
Stop. A man is kneeling in front of you, broken and weeping, and you are enjoying it. This is not who you are. This is not who she would want you to be.
I wrenched the shadows back.
The effort was physical — like tearing something from my own chest. The darkness resisted. It didn't want to retreat. It wanted Tahir's fear, his pain, wanted to press deeper and take more. And the terrifying thing was how much of me agreed with it.
But Elif's son held. Barely. By his fingernails. Shaking and sick and horrified by the satisfaction still echoing through his blood.
Tahir had stopped screaming. His head hung forward, chin on his chest, breathing shallow and ragged. The pain had done what pain always did eventually — taken him somewhere the mind goes when the body can't cope anymore. His eyes were open but unfocused, seeing nothing.
Unconscious. Or close enough.
I stood over him and breathed. In. Out. Counted the breaths the way my mother had taught me when I was small and the nightmares came — breathe, my love, just breathe, the dark can't hurt you if you breathe.
She'd been wrong about that. The dark could hurt. The dark could do terrible, precise, exhilarating things, and the worst part wasn't the doing.
It was that I hadn't known. I still didn't know — what I was, where this came from, whether it had always been in me waiting or whether Ada's hands on my face in that garden two weeks ago had cracked something open that couldn't be closed again.
The shadows had shown up and I had used them and I had no idea what that made me.
I pulled on my gloves. Checked the rope — secure, tight, but not tight enough to kill.
He'd be found in the morning. Some servant taking the forest path, some early rider.
They'd find a lord's son bound between trees with a dislocated shoulder and no memory of who did it, and they'd blame the Shadow Court because that was what the Light Court did.
Everything dark, everything violent, everything that shattered the golden illusion — it was always the Shadow Court.
I walked away.