Chapter 7
BLOOD AND LIGHT
Ada
They found Tahir at dawn.
A servant taking the forest path to the northern estates stumbled across him — bound to a tree with rope, his left arm hanging at an angle that made the girl who found him vomit into the undergrowth.
No visible wounds. No magical residue. Just a lord's son tied between ancient oaks with a dislocated shoulder and eyes that stared at nothing, because the life behind them had already left.
Dead. Lord Tahir of one of the oldest families in the Light Court, dead in the Borderland Forest on the night of the Moonlight Ball.
The court erupted.
I stood in the great hall as the announcement was made, surrounded by three hundred nobles in yesterday's finery — some still wearing their ball clothes, summoned before they'd had time to change.
The High Priest spoke in measured tones about shadow infiltration, about the enemy at our borders.
Lord Serkan stood behind him with an expression of carved grief that didn't reach his eyes.
"A Shadow Court assassination," Serkan said. "No marks. No wounds. This is how they kill — reaching through the darkness, draining life without leaving evidence."
The court murmured. Security would tighten. Patrols doubled. The purification program expanded.
I barely heard any of it.
I was looking for him.
My eyes swept the hall the way they always did now — automatically, hungrily, searching for the one person I'd told myself I wasn't looking for.
I found him against the far column. Black clothes.
Gloves. The scar on his jaw catching the morning light.
He looked like he hadn't slept in days — gaunt, hollowed, his jaw set so tight I could see the muscle jumping from across the hall.
He felt me looking. He always felt me looking.
His eyes found mine and for one raw, unguarded second the mask dropped. I saw exhaustion. I saw hunger — the kind that had nothing to do with food. I saw two weeks of silence and distance compressed into a single look that said I know you're there. I know you're watching. Don't come closer.
I took a step toward him.
His gaze hardened. A fractional shake of his head — so slight nobody else would have caught it. Don't.
I stopped. Stood there with my pulse hammering and the space between us filled with three hundred bodies and none of them mattering, none of them real, the entire hall reduced to background noise around the axis of his face.
Sarp's hand found my elbow. "Ada? You've gone pale."
"I'm fine."
I wasn't fine. I was standing in a hall full of mourning nobles and all I could think about was the way Hakan's throat moved when he swallowed.
The way his gloved hands gripped his own forearms like he was physically holding himself together.
The way he looked at me like I was water and he was dying of thirst and the glass was poisoned.
The days that followed were their own kind of torture.
I saw him everywhere. In the corridors between classes — a flash of black at the far end, his stride long and purposeful, his face turned from me with the exact same angle every single time, as if he'd calculated the minimum amount of not-looking-at-me required to make his point.
In the training grounds — I'd pass the scholarship hall and hear the rhythmic crack of wood splitting, and I'd know it was him in there alone at dawn, destroying things because he couldn't destroy whatever was eating him alive.
In the library. Once. I'd turned a corner between the stacks and he was there — three feet away, close enough to touch, and we'd both frozen.
His eyes had dropped to my mouth. My fingers had twitched toward him.
The air between us turned thick and hot and electric, and for two heartbeats neither of us breathed.
Then someone coughed in the next aisle and he'd walked away without a word.
I'd stood there for five minutes afterward, gripping the shelf, my legs shaking.
Sarp noticed. Of course Sarp noticed.
"You're distracted," he said over dinner, watching me push food around my plate. "You've been distracted all week. Is it Tahir? The security lockdown?"
"Just tired."
"You keep looking toward the east wing."
"I'm not —"
"Ada." His voice was gentle. Knowing. The same voice he'd used the night of the ball, when they'd pulled apart from the kiss and looked at each other and both understood — without needing to say it — that whatever they were, it wasn't this.
He'd laughed first. She'd laughed second.
And that had been the end of it — no awkwardness, no grief, just the quiet relief of two people who liked each other enough not to pretend.
"If you need to talk to him, talk to him.
I'm not standing in your way. I never was. "
I couldn't explain that talking wasn't what I needed. That what I needed was so far beyond talking it didn't have a name — that every night I lay in my chambers with my body aching and my magic reaching for something dark that wasn't there, and the wanting was so acute it felt like illness.
A week after the ball, I couldn't sleep.
The palace was locked down — guards at every entrance, light-magic wards humming in the corridors. I lay staring at the ceiling, and all I could see when I closed my eyes was his face at the assembly. The hunger he'd let me see for two seconds before shutting it away.
I got up. Pulled a cloak over my nightgown. Took the servant passage behind my wardrobe.
I didn't decide to find him. My feet decided. Through the eastern wing, past the locked classrooms, up the narrow staircase to the abandoned tower where students weren't allowed.
The door was ajar. Faint light from inside — not lantern light. Something colder.
I pushed it open.
He was on the floor.
Shirtless, his back against the stone wall, legs stretched in front of him. A knife lay beside his right hand. His left forearm was laid open from wrist to elbow — not deep, not desperate. Precise. The cut of someone conducting an experiment.
His blood was wrong.
It pooled on the stone floor, and it wasn't fully red. The edges were dark — black, threaded with something that moved beneath the surface like living ink. He was staring at it the way a man stares at a death sentence written in his own handwriting.
"Hakan."
His head snapped up. For one unguarded second — terror, exhaustion, the raw desperation of someone watching himself become something monstrous. Then the mask. The cold.
"Get out."
"Your arm —"
"I said get out, Ada." He reached for his shirt, smearing blood across the fabric. "You shouldn't be here."
"You cut yourself open." I was already moving toward him. "Let me see —"
"Don't touch me." He pressed back against the wall. "I mean it."
"No."
"Ada —"
"I said no." I knelt in front of him. Close enough to see the cut — the blood that moved against gravity, crawling toward the shadow pooling on the floor like it wanted to join it. "How long has your blood been like this?"
"Does it matter?" His laugh was hollow. "My blood is turning black. My magic is — I can't control it anymore." He stopped. Jaw working. "Go back to Sarp. Go back to the light."
"Stop telling me where to go."
"You don't understand what I'm becoming."
"Then show me."
Something cracked behind his eyes. He held up his bleeding arm.
The darkness in his blood writhed on his skin, alive, reacting to his emotions.
“My blood is turning black. My magic is wrong, Ada.
It doesn't match Milan's. It doesn't match anything I've been taught.
My mother checks my hands while I sleep — she thinks I don't know but I do — and whatever she's looking for, she's terrified she'll find it.
Every day the darkness gets louder and I don't know what I am. "
I stared at him, thinking how to respond, how to comfort him.
"Hit me," he said, his tone commanding.
I blinked and then shook my head.
"Hit me." He was on his feet — too fast — and in my space, backing me toward the wall.
"Burn me. Brand me again. That's what you do, isn't it?
When I get too close, when I push too hard — you light up and you make me bleed.
" His face was inches from mine. Blood running down his arm, dripping onto the floor between us.
"So do it. Prove I can still feel something that isn't shadow.”
"I'm not going to hurt you —"
He grabbed my hand. Pressed my palm flat against his bare chest, right over his heart. The contact was immediate — my light surging to meet the darkness pouring off his skin, the collision that happened every time we touched, gold and black, a war that felt like drowning.
"Do it," he whispered.
My light flared where my skin met his — not in defense, not in warning.
It reached for him. Poured into the place where his heart hammered against my fingers as if it was trying to find something buried underneath all that shadow.
And for a second I felt it. Him. The real him, trapped under the black, screaming without making a sound.
I hit him.
His head turned. Stayed turned. I watched his chest heave. Watched the red bloom across his cheekbone. Watched his tongue press against the inside of his cheek where my palm had connected.
Then he looked back at me.
His eyes were black. Not green-going-dark. Black.
"Hit me like that again," he said, his voice low enough to scrape bone, "and I'll have you against this wall with your nightgown around your waist before you can take your next breath."
The words went through me like voltage. My hand was still raised.
Still stinging. And the heat that flooded my body had nothing to do with light magic and everything to do with the way his mouth shaped the word nightgown — like he'd been thinking about what was underneath it.
Like he'd been thinking about nothing else for weeks.
I hit him again.