Chapter 14
MINE
Ada
Hakan walked ahead of me through the Border Forest, sunlight cutting through the canopy in long golden shafts that turned his blond hair almost white.
I watched the way he moved — that loose, predatory stride, shoulders rolling, as though the world was something he intended to walk straight through if it didn't get out of his way.
Three days since our first night in the tower. Three days of stolen hours and tangled limbs and the kind of hunger that didn't fade after it was fed — only sharpened, only deepened, until I couldn't look at him without my pulse doing something reckless.
He stopped on the path ahead. Pushed his sleeve back without thinking — the way he'd been doing all morning, an absent gesture, as though something at his wrist itched. I watched him look down. Watched him go still.
His thumb brushed the inside of his wrist. Once. Twice. Tracing something I couldn't see from this distance.
"What is it?" I closed the gap between us.
He pulled his sleeve down. Too fast. "Nothing."
"Hakan."
"It's nothing, Ada."
I caught his hand before he could shove it into his pocket. He resisted — not hard, not really — and I turned his wrist over in my grip.
The mark sat just below the bone.
A crescent, curved like a sickle moon laid on its back.
But it wasn't simply dark — the edges glowed faintly, a luminous rim of pale light that pulsed with something living.
Purple-violet energy curled around it like smoke, wisps of shadow magic that drifted and coiled, never settling, as though the mark itself was breathing.
And at its center, nested inside the dark curve of the moon — a single point of gold, steady and warm, burning like a tiny sun caught inside an eclipse.
My breath caught.
I knew what this was. I'd read about bond marks in the old texts, the ones my father kept locked in the restricted archives — marks that appeared when two souls recognized each other at a level deeper than choice, when magic itself decided that two people were bound.
They were supposed to be legends. Stories the elders told to explain why some loves survived wars and centuries and the deliberate cruelty of gods.
My free hand went to my sternum. Beneath my dress, my own seal pulsed — warm, insistent, answering something it recognized.
The full seal I'd carried since the night our magic first merged.
The six-pointed star at its heart, gold and amethyst. The sun above it.
The shadow moon below — his darkness cradled inside my light.
The three constellation dots. The compass points marking all eight directions of both realms. Everything he was, mapped onto my skin.
And now this. His mark answering mine. A crescent moon with my light at its center.
Two halves of the same language.
"When did this appear?" My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"The morning after." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the mark as though it might bite him. "I woke up and it was just... there."
"You've had it for three days and you didn't tell me?"
"I don't know what it is." There was a rough edge to his voice — not anger, something closer to unease. The kind of discomfort that came from encountering something he couldn't fight or argue with or shove into a box. "It just appeared. I thought it might fade."
It wouldn't fade. It would never fade. I knew that with a certainty that went deeper than the texts I'd read — I felt it in the way my seal burned in response, reaching for his mark the way a river reaches for the sea.
I pressed my thumb to the gold dot at its center, and the mark flared — the violet wisps surging, the glow at the crescent's rim brightening, and something warm and vast moved through the connection between us. Hakan made a low sound in his throat, something between shock and want.
"Ada." His voice had gone hoarse. "What is that? What did you just —"
"It's a bond mark." I pulled my hand away, but the warmth lingered, humming between us. "They're in the old archives. I've read about them but I never thought — Hakan, they're not supposed to be real. They're legends."
"What do they mean?"
I looked at him. At those green eyes, guarded and searching and afraid of the answer. At the mark on his wrist still glowing faintly, the violet wisps still curling, my gold still burning at its center.
"It means we're tethered," I said. "Not by choice. Not by politics. By something older than both of us."
He stared at me. Then at the mark. Then back at me. And I watched the war play out behind his eyes — the part of him that wanted to believe it fighting the part that was terrified of what it meant.
He pulled his sleeve back down. Took my hand. Started walking again without a word, his fingers tight around mine.
We walked in silence for a while. The forest thickened around us, branches weaving together overhead until only thin shafts of light penetrated. The air grew heavy with the scent of moss and old magic — the kind that predated courts and treaties and the careful divisions between light and shadow.
I noticed the way Hakan's shoulders loosened in these spaces. The way his breathing deepened. As though something in him recognized the in-between places of the world as home, even if he couldn't explain why.
He steered us onto a narrower path, and I let my attention drift toward a patch of wild strawberries growing in a spill of sunlight between the roots of an old birch. My hand was already reaching before my brain caught up.
"Ada."
I looked down at my own fingers, then at the strawberries, then at him — and had the decency to look sheepish. "I wasn't going to eat them."
"You were absolutely going to eat them. You do this every single time."
"They're so pretty, though. And they smell —"
"Like three days of your face swelling up and your throat closing shut.
" He caught my wrist and pulled me gently away from the patch.
"I had to carry you to the healer when you were still little because you couldn't breathe.
Your aunt nearly killed me for letting it happen, as though I was the one who shoved a fistful of wild strawberries into your mouth. "
"It wasn't a fistful. It was two."
"It was enough." He laced his fingers through mine, steering me back onto the path with the ease of someone who'd been doing it for twenty years. "And then you tried again a few decades later because you'd decided you'd 'grown out of it.'"
"In my defense, I genuinely thought —"
"You went purple, Ada."
I huffed, but my mouth was twitching. "Fine. No strawberries. You'd think you'd get bored of this routine after two decades."
"You'd think you'd stop reaching for them."
His hand squeezed mine. The tension from the bond mark conversation still lived in his grip — too tight, slightly desperate — but the banter had eased something between us.
This was what we did. We pushed, we pulled, we circled the dangerous things with sharp words and sharper silence, and then we found our way back to each other through the small, stupid rituals that two people build over twenty years of knowing each other too well.
The strawberries. The staring. The way he freed my hair when it caught on things. The way I let him.
That evening, he took me up to the tower roof.
The air was sharp and cold, carrying the scent of night-blooming jasmine from somewhere far below. The sky was thick with stars — the kind of sky that only existed this far from the court center, where the light magic didn't bleed upward and wash everything pale.
I leaned against the low stone wall, letting the cold bite through the thin silk of my dress, and felt him watching me from across the rooftop.
He'd been quiet since dinner. Not his usual quiet — the thoughtful kind, where I could almost see the gears turning behind his green eyes.
This was something tighter. Something coiled.
The bond mark conversation had never really ended — just gone underground, the way things did with Hakan, burrowing beneath the surface where it could fester.
"Levent's nephew was looking at you tonight," he said.
I almost laughed. "Aslan? He was being polite."
"He was looking at your mouth." I heard him move — boots on stone, deliberate, unhurried. "He was imagining what it would feel like to kiss you. I could see it in his pathetic fucking face."
"Hakan —"
"Don't." The word was a growl against my throat, because he was behind me now, his chest pressed to my back, his hands on my hips, fingers curling into the silk hard enough to wrinkle it. "Don't tell me I'm being unreasonable. Don't tell me he's harmless. I don't care."
He spun me around. My back hit the cold stone, and the shock of it against my heated skin made me gasp.
Before I could draw another breath, his hands were around my wrists, dragging them up, pinning them above my head in one brutal grip.
The stone pressed into my spine — cold, unyielding — and his body caged me from the front, all hard muscle and barely leashed violence.
His green eyes burned into mine. Not soft.
Not loving. Something far more dangerous — desire so dark it bloomed behind his irises like ink dropped in water, spreading, consuming.
His jaw was clenched tight enough that a muscle jumped beneath the skin, and his chest heaved against mine with every breath.
"You have no idea," he said, his voice dropping to something guttural, barely human, "what it does to me. Watching someone else look at you. Watching them think they could have even a fraction of what's mine."
"I'm not a possession, Hakan."
His laugh was dark and humourless. "No. You're worse.
You're the only thing in this world that could bring me to my knees, and every man in that room can sense it.
" He pressed closer, his hips grinding against mine, and I felt him — hard, straining, furious with want.
"They see you and they think, maybe. Maybe she'll smile at me.
Maybe she'll let me close. Maybe one day she'll spread those pretty thighs for someone who isn't him. "
The crudeness of it should have made me angry. Instead, heat flooded my core so fast it made me dizzy.
"And I have to sit there," he continued, his mouth hovering over mine, sharing my air, "and pretend I'm civilised. Pretend I wouldn't gut every last one of them for the crime of breathing the same air as you."
"You're insane," I whispered, but my voice came out breathless, wrecked.
"For you?" His teeth scraped my jaw, dragging down to the sensitive skin below my ear. "Absolutely. Completely. Irreversibly fucking insane."
His free hand slid up my thigh, rough and proprietary, bunching silk as it went, fingers digging into the soft flesh hard enough to bruise.
I should have pushed him away. Should have reminded him that I wasn't something to be claimed, that I had my own power, my own name, my own light that could reduce him to cinders.
Instead, I arched into him.
"Look at me." A command, not a request. When my eyes met his, what I saw there made my breath catch — raw, feral devotion. Not gentle. Not kind. The kind of love that would sooner watch the world burn than lose what was his. "I need you to hear this, Ada. I need you to remember it."
"Then say it."
He released my wrists only to seize my jaw, tilting my face up, holding me still so I couldn't look away. His thumb pressed against my lower lip, dragging it down, and his eyes tracked the movement with a hunger that made my thighs clench.
"You are mine." Each word was bitten off, deliberate, carved into the air between us like a blood oath.
"Every part of you. Every breath, every sound, every inch of skin that's ever going to be touched — it belongs to me.
And if another man ever puts his hands on you — if another man even dreams of knowing what you taste like, what you sound like when you come, what you look like underneath me —" His voice dropped to a snarl, his grip on my jaw tightening until it bordered on pain.
"I will rip his still-beating heart from his chest and I will make you watch it pump its last. Do you understand me?
I will tear it out with my bare hands and hold it in front of your face so you never — never — forget what happens when someone touches what's mine. "
The words hit me like a shockwave. Savage.
Obscene. So far beyond anything a sane woman should find arousing that it terrified me — not because of what he said, but because of the dark, twisted part of me that wanted it.
That heard the violence in his promise and felt it like a caress between my legs.
"You're sick," I breathed.
"I'm yours." He kissed me then — brutal, consuming, all teeth and tongue and the copper-sweet taste of the wine he'd been drinking. His hand slid from my jaw to my throat, not squeezing, just resting there — feeling my pulse hammer against his palm like a caged thing. "And you're mine. Say it."
"I've always been yours." The words spilled out before I could stop them, raw and honest in a way I hadn't intended. "Since the first time you looked at me. You know that."
Something cracked behind his eyes. He lifted me onto the stone ledge, pinning me there with his hips, and my legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, drawing him against the aching heat between my thighs.
"Again," he rasped against my mouth. "Say it again."
"I'm yours, Hakan. Only ever yours."
He pulled back just enough to look at me.
And the expression on his face — gods. Beneath all that possessive fury, beneath the crude promises and the feral hunger, there was something achingly vulnerable.
Something terrified. As though he knew, on some instinct deeper than thought, that he was going to lose me.
That this — the cracked stone, the stars, my body pressed against his, the taste of mine still burning on his tongue — was borrowed time.
"Remember this," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word. "Remember what I said tonight. Because I meant every fucking syllable, Ada. I will burn this world to ash before I let another man have you."
I kissed him. Poured everything into it — my love, my fear, the golden light that lived in my veins, all of it crashing against his darkness. And on that rooftop, under stars that had watched a thousand lovers make promises they couldn't keep, I believed him.
I believed every word.