Chapter 9
SHADOWS AND REGRET
Hakan
"Lady Mira called me harmless yesterday,” Sarp announced, and dropped into the chair across from me as though the fate of the realm hung on what came next. It didn't. "Harmless. Me. The terror of debutante balls across three provinces."
"You removed your gloves because you'd spilled wine on them. That's not seduction, that's laundry."
"She didn't know that. The effect was devastating." He took a piece of cheese from my tray. "My reputation is in ruins. Three years of careful cultivation — the mystique, the danger, the air of romantic unpredictability — reduced to harmless. I might as well become a priest."
"You'd make a terrible priest."
"I'd make a spectacular priest. The entire congregation would be in love with me within a week.
" He dunked the bread in my tea without asking.
"The problem is, word's got around that I took the Light God's daughter to the Moonlight Ball and she chose the brooding scholarship student instead.
It's been reframed as a rejection. As if I — Sarp Akay — was found wanting. "
There it was. The thing we hadn't talked about.
Three weeks of Ada and me together, and Sarp had said nothing. Not a word of resentment. He'd joked in the courtyard — *take care of her, you brooding bastard* — and carried on as if the kiss at the ball had never happened. As if he'd known before their lips had even parted that she wasn't his.
"Sarp."
"Don't." He pointed the remaining bread at me. "Whatever earnest, guilt-soaked speech you're composing behind those brooding eyes, I don't want it."
"I should have said something weeks ago."
"You should have done many things weeks ago. Years ago. You are, historically, quite bad at doing things when they should be done." He chewed. "But if you're about to apologize for being with Ada, save it. That would actually insult me."
"I'm not apologising for being with her."
"Good. Because I kissed her at the ball and she smiled at me the way you smile at a cousin who's given you a thoughtful birthday gift.
I knew then." Something real moved beneath the performance, just for a moment.
"A woman doesn't leave a perfectly charming man standing at a fountain to chase someone she hates into the dark.
Whatever's between you two — it was there before I entered the picture and it'll be there long after I've moved on to terrorising other women with my devastating good looks. "
"You're not —"
"If you say a better man than me, I will throw this tea in your face.
" The lopsided grin. The one that cost him more than he'd ever let on.
"I'm not a better man. I'm a different man.
One who knows when the game's over and has the good taste to exit gracefully.
Besides, I'm treating Lady Mira's assessment as a personal challenge. New horizons. Fresh victims."
He was deflecting. Always deflecting — burying whatever hurt beneath layers of charm and performance, the way he'd done since I'd first known him.
"For what it's worth," I said, "I don't deserve her either."
"Obviously. But she's chosen you anyway, which means either she's catastrophically bad at judging character or she sees something the rest of us are too sensible to look for.
" He leaned back. "Either way, I'm choosing to be magnanimous about it.
Write sonnets about my selflessness. Commission a statue. "
He paused to steal the last of my bread, and his tone shifted — still casual, still Sarp, but the way he brought it up told me it had been on his mind.
"Strange business about Tahir, though."
My hands didn't move. My expression didn't change. I'd had weeks to practice that.
"What about him?"
"Dead in the Borderland Forest. Tied to a tree.
Dislocated shoulder. No visible wounds." Sarp shook his head.
"The court's calling it a Shadow Court assassination.
Serkan's already using it to push for increased patrols and expanded purification.
" He glanced at me. "Were you still at the ball when they found him? I lost track of you that night."
"I left early. Went for a walk."
"A walk." He nodded absently, tearing the bread. "Terrible night for it. Cold. Dark." A beat. "Lot of forest between the Academy and the border."
"Since when do you care about politics, Sarp?"
"I don't. I care about the fact that a man I once shared a bench with in Advanced Light Theory is dead, and nobody seems particularly interested in finding out who actually did it.
" He brushed the crumbs from his fingers.
"But you're right. Not my business. I'm sure it was exactly what Serkan says it was — shadow assassins, very convenient, nothing to question. "
He let it hang there. That was Sarp's way — he'd lay the shape of the truth at your feet and wait for you to trip over it in your own time.
I said nothing.
I didn't need to. The guilt said it for me, silently, in the pit of my stomach where I'd been carrying it since the night I'd walked out of that forest with clean hands and the taste of power in my blood.
I'd left him alive. Checked the ropes. Told myself someone would find him at dawn.
But nobody had found him in time, and a young lord was dead because I hadn't been able to control what I was becoming.
"Anyway." Sarp stood, the heaviness vanishing beneath his usual easy charm like it had never been there. "I have a reputation to rebuild and a Lady Mira to re-terrify. Are you taking Ada to meet your mother today?"
"Tonight."
"Bold. The full family introduction. Give Elif my love. And tell your father I still owe him for that card game — but I intend to die before paying."
He walked away, whistling, and I sat with my cold tea and the weight of what he'd almost said.
Because Sarp knew. Maybe not the details — not the shadows, not the torture, not the dark singing satisfaction that had coursed through my blood as Tahir screamed. But he knew the shape of it. Knew me well enough to see the thing I was hiding, even if he was generous enough to let me hide it.
A man is dead.
And the worst part wasn't the death. The worst part was the memory of how it had felt — the shadows answering my rage, the power surging through me like something waking from a long sleep, the moment I'd stood over Tahir's broken body and the dominant sensation hadn't been horror. It had been satisfaction.
What kind of person feels satisfaction watching someone suffer?
The dining hall noise pressed in — laughter, clattering plates, the bright morning sounds of people living uncomplicated lives. I pushed my tray away and stared at my gloved hands.
Tonight. I was taking Ada to meet my parents. Properly. Not the stolen glances when she visited the border market, not the awkward nod across a crowded courtyard. A real introduction. *This is the woman I love. Please don't tell her I'm a monster.*
The thought of it — of sitting across from Elif with Ada beside me, of watching my mother read every secret on my face the way she always did — should have terrified me. It did terrify me. But underneath the fear was something else, something so unfamiliar it took me a moment to identify it.
Hope.
I didn't deserve hope. Not after Tahir. Not after the courtyard with the cherry blossoms and everything I'd done to push her away.
But hope didn't care about deserving. It just grew, stubborn and persistent, like the weeds that pushed through the cracks in the border district streets no matter how many times the priests burned them back.
I pressed my thumb against the scar on my jaw. The one she'd given me. It ached faintly, the way it always did when I thought about her.
And without warning, my mind slipped backwards — not to the courtyard this time, not to the cruelty. Further. All the way back to the beginning.
The Boundary Quarter. Summer. I was fifty-six years old — still a child by our reckoning, still small and knobby-kneed and young enough to believe a fort made of sticks could keep the world out.
The forest behind our apartment building was technically off-limits — a strip of ancient woodland that marked the border between the Light Court's jurisdiction and the unclaimed lands beyond, where the trees grew so thick the eternal light barely reached the forest floor.
My mother had forbidden me from going past the third oak. I went past the third oak every day.
It was mine, that forest. The one place in the Light Court where nobody watched me, nobody looked at my patched clothes and my mother's tiny apartment and decided what I was worth.
I knew every path, every hollow tree, every stream crossing.
I'd built a fort from fallen branches in a clearing where the canopy opened just enough to let a single column of light through, and I spent my afternoons there pretending I was something other than a border rat whose mother flinched at shadows.
I was sitting in that fort, whittling a stick into something that was supposed to be a sword but looked more like a sick snake, when I heard crashing through the undergrowth.
Not animal sounds — too clumsy, too loud, accompanied by the particular graceless stumbling of someone who'd never set foot anywhere wilder than a garden.
I had my stick-sword raised before the intruder burst through the bracken.
A girl. My age, maybe a bit younger — small, dark-haired, barefoot.
Her dress was white silk, the kind that cost more than my mother earned in a year, and it was destroyed — ripped at the hem, streaked with mud, a long green smear across the front where she'd clearly slid down something she shouldn't have been climbing.
There were twigs in her hair. Scratches on her arms. And her face — flushed, wild-eyed, lit with the most ferocious joy I'd ever seen on another person.
I knew that face, though. Everybody knew that face.