Chapter 15 #2
The last was young. His mask had fallen away. Barely more than a boy. Tears cutting tracks through the blood on his cheeks.
"Please," he whispered. "I have a family —"
A blur of russet fur.
Melo landed between us, turquoise eyes blazing, her small body rigid with something I had never seen in them before.
"Enough, Hakan."
The voice came from the fox's mouth. Human words. I stared.
“You can fucking talk?” I asked.
"Yes, I can talk. I've always been able to talk." Her ears were flat against her skull. "He'll be dead in minutes. Step back."
The shadows churned around me, restless, wanting. The pleasure of the killing still hummed through my nerves like the afterglow of something obscene. I wanted more. The honest part of me — the part that was going to keep me awake for weeks after this — wanted more.
Behind me, Ada's breathing. Ragged. Uneven. The sound cut through everything.
I turned.
She had pulled herself up against the stone, holding her dress closed with one fist. Blood ran from her split lip and from a gash along her hairline where her head had hit the ground.
The bruise on her cheekbone had spread, her left eye swelling.
Her arms were scored with cuts from where she'd fought them.
And on the skin of her stomach and chest — red marks. Finger-shaped. Already darkening.
The pleasure in my blood curdled into something else entirely.
My knees gave out. The shoulder wound opened fresh and hot and I went down hard. The world grayed at the edges.
"He's losing too much blood." Melo was beside Ada, pressed against her leg. "Bind the shoulder. Tight."
Ada crossed to me. Her hands shook but her grip was steady when she tore a strip from what remained of her dress and pressed it against the wound. I hissed through my teeth.
"Hold still."
She bound it tight, her face close to mine, her breath hitching every few seconds in a way she was trying to hide. The bruise on her cheekbone was inches from my face. The handprints on her skin visible above the torn fabric.
I reached for her face. She flinched — a tiny, involuntary thing — and then held still while my fingers hovered over the bruise without touching it.
Something shifted beneath my skin. Not the violent, consuming shadow of the fight — something quieter.
The darkness in my fingertips warmed. Changed.
It moved through the binding Ada had tied and I felt the wound in my shoulder close — not heal, not fully, but knit enough that the bleeding stopped and the bone-deep ache dulled to something bearable.
The cracked ribs settled. The swelling in my hand went down.
Ada stared at my shoulder. "How —"
I didn't answer. I pressed my palm gently against her bruised cheek and let the warmth move through me into her.
I didn't understand what I was doing. But the shadow seemed to.
It found the split in her lip and sealed it.
Found the gash on her hairline and closed it to a thin line.
The bruise beneath my hand faded from purple to yellow to nothing.
I couldn't reach the handprints on her body. Couldn't bring myself to touch those marks. But the shadows moved on their own — thin tendrils, gentle as breath, sliding across her skin where those fingers had been, and where they passed, the redness faded. Erased. As if his touch had never happened.
Ada watched the shadows move across her skin. She didn't flinch this time.
"Hakan," she whispered. "Your eyes."
I didn't ask. I knew. I'd seen them in the pool of blood. Green going black.
Melo had been watching in silence. Now she stepped forward.
"Whatever bloodline this comes from, it isn't anything the Light Court has seen in a very long time. And your mother knows more than she's told you."
Silence.
"The rifts," Melo continued, quieter now.
"Someone will have felt them tear open. The shadow magic.
By morning the entire court will have a version of what happened here, and it won't be the truth.
" She looked at Ada. "Your father needs to hear this from you.
Not from Serkan. Not from the priests. From you. "
"And if I go to him," Ada said slowly, “What about Hakan?"
"No one. He goes to his mother alone." Melo held Ada's gaze. "She owes him answers she's been hiding for two hundred years. She won't give them with an audience."
Ada looked at me. I could see her fighting it — every instinct telling her to stay, to refuse, to plant herself beside me and face whatever came next as a pair.
"She's right," I said.
Ada's eyes snapped to mine. "Hakan —"
"Go to him." I covered her hands with mine, held them there one moment longer.
Her knuckles were split from the fight, dried blood dark in the creases.
I wanted to press my mouth to every wound and instead I just held on.
"You go to your father. You tell him what happened, what those men tried to do.
You control what he hears. If he learns it from you first, if he sees your face and knows you're safe and you chose to come to him yourself —"
"What if he doesn't listen?" Her voice had gone raw. "What if he decides you're not worth hearing out?"
"Then at least we'll know." I turned her hands over in mine, pressed my lips to her palms — one, then the other. "And you'll find me, and we'll face it together. But we have to try this first. We have to give him the chance to be the man you believe he is."
She stared at me. The war was all over her face — love and fury and the particular helplessness of someone being asked to do the right thing when every instinct says stay.
"I hate this," she said.
"I know."
"Don't do anything stupid."
"The definition of stupid is subjective."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh. Then she pulled her hands from mine and stepped back, and I felt the loss of her warmth like a physical thing — a door shutting, a light going out.
"Melo," she said without looking at me. "Get me to the palace."
The fox fell into step beside her. They moved toward the far edge of the clearing, Ada not looking back, her spine straight with the effort of not looking back.
She stopped at the tree line.
Didn't turn. Just said — quietly, fiercely, into the shadows of the forest:
"I love you. Whatever you find at your mother's door. Whatever the truth is." A pause. "That doesn't change."
Then she walked into the trees and didn't look back.
I stood in the center of the ruined clearing and watched until the last flash of her dark hair disappeared between the branches. Melo's russet tail followed, and then the forest swallowed them both, and I was alone.
Alone with twelve bodies.
Alone with the blood on my hands, still wet in the creases of my knuckles. Alone with the shadows still stirring inside my chest, lazy and content, like beasts that had fed well and were only resting. They would want more. I already knew that. They would always want more.
I looked at the ancient stone at the center of the clearing. The symbols carved into it — the ones I'd recognized without understanding why — seemed darker now, as if the blood that had soaked into the ground around its base had fed something sleeping in the rock.
My mother had lied. Not about everything — but about something fundamental. The magic that had erupted from me tonight didn't match the story I'd been told. Milan was Light Court. Half Slavian, half Light Court. That was the bloodline she'd claimed. That was why we ran.
But Light Court blood didn't do what I'd just done.
I thought of my father — his easy smile, his hand on the back of my neck, the way he called me son without hesitation. I thought of every sword lesson, every shared meal, every moment he'd been exactly what a father should be.
And I thought of my mother's face when she said *your father's bloodline runs strong*. The tightness around her eyes. The rehearsed quality of the words.
What if it wasn't Milan's bloodline at all?
I didn't have an answer. I had twelve bodies, a clearing full of blood, and a question that was going to change everything.
I turned away from the stone. Turned away from the bodies.
Pulled my hood against the blood on my face and walked toward the edge of the forest alone, my shoulder screaming and my darkness singing, toward a mother who had spent two hundred years building a lie that had just come apart in her son's hands.
Somewhere behind me — in the direction of the palace, in the direction of the light — Ada was already running.
Somewhere far below, in a realm of ash and bone, something that had been waiting a very long time smiled.