Chapter 16 #2
"And he was funny. That's the thing nobody tells you about monsters, Hakan.
He made me laugh so hard I choked on my drink the first night.
He was crude and sharp and he said things about the nobles in the market that would have got anyone else executed, and he said them with this deadpan expression as if he was simply describing the weather.
I'd never met anyone like him. I'd never met anyone who looked like he could tear a building down with his bare hands who made a joke about the barmaid's cooking that had me crying into my sleeve. "
I said nothing. The shadows beneath my skin had gone still, listening.
"He courted me. Properly. For months. Silk dresses and dinners in places I didn't know existed and conversations that lasted until dawn.
" Her fingers traced the edge of the table.
"It wasn't the silk or the money. It was the danger.
I should be honest about that, at least. He scared me, and I liked it.
He'd tell me stories about things he'd done — terrible things, wars and vengeance and old cruelties — and his voice wouldn't change, wouldn't soften, and he'd watch my face while he spoke to see if I'd flinch.
Testing me. Seeing how much I could stomach.
And when I didn't flinch, when I looked him in the eye and said 'that was a stupid way to handle it' or 'you could have just talked to him instead of ripping his arms off' — he'd stare at me like I'd grown a second head.
And then he'd laugh. This enormous, startled laugh, like he'd forgotten that someone could just — disagree with him.
Tell him he was wrong. Call him a brute to his face and mean it as a compliment. "
She looked at her hands.
"Later I understood that's exactly what I was doing.
He'd lived so long. Thousands of years in that place, surrounded by fear and worship and creatures who said what he wanted to hear.
He'd forgotten what it felt like to sit across from someone who didn't know what he was.
Someone who just — talked to him. Laughed at his jokes.
Told him when he was being an idiot." A ghost of a smile.
"I told him he was an idiot quite often. He seemed to like it."
"You loved him." I didn't mean it as an accusation. It came out as one anyway.
"Yes." No hesitation. No shame. She met my eyes and the look in hers was the most complicated thing I'd ever seen — grief and tenderness and fury and loss, all of it alive, all of it present.
"I loved him, Hakan. Not the god. Not the power.
The man underneath all of it — the one who sat on the floor of my tiny apartment and ate burned flatbread because I couldn't cook and told me it was the best meal he'd ever had.
The one who fell asleep with his head in my lap and looked — for the first time since I'd known him — like he wasn't carrying the weight of an entire realm on his chest."
She stood. Moved to the window. Not running from the story — gathering herself for the next part.
"He took me to Kara Cehennem after two years.
Said he wanted to show me his true home.
His real self. That he trusted me enough to share everything.
" She stared out at the dark. "I wasn't afraid.
That's the thing people never understand.
I walked into the Dark Hell holding his hand, and I wasn't afraid, because the man beside me had spent two years being the funniest, most terrifying, most honest person I had ever known.
He hadn't lied about what he was. He'd told me every awful thing he'd done. He just hadn't told me his name."
"And?"
"And for a while, it was extraordinary. He showed me his realm the way a child shows you a drawing they're proud of.
Every cavern, every river of shadow, every impossible structure built from darkness and will.
He wanted me to see it the way he saw it.
Not as a hell. As his home. As something he'd built.
" Her voice dropped. "And I did. I saw beauty in it.
I saw him in it — the loneliness that had shaped every corridor, the hunger for something he couldn't name carved into every wall. "
"He made me his partner. Not publicly — he couldn't, I was human, mortal, nothing by his court's measure.
But privately. He brought me problems he couldn't solve.
Asked my opinion on disputes between his lords.
Listened — actually listened — when I told him his methods were cruel.
I'd say, 'You can't just tear someone's tongue out because they disagreed with you,' and he'd give me this look — half offended, half genuinely confused — and say, 'It's efficient,' and I'd say, 'It's barbaric,' and he'd say, 'Those aren't mutually exclusive,' and somehow we'd end up arguing about it for hours and by the end he'd be laughing and the lord in question would still have his tongue.
Not always. But more often than before."
She turned from the window. Her eyes were bright. Not with tears — with the particular shine of someone revisiting a version of their life where they were happy and knowing it's gone.
"We had years, Hakan. Good years. He laughed with me.
He cooked for me — badly, horribly, because he'd never had to cook a single thing in his entire existence and he burned everything he touched and then got furious at the pan as if the pan had betrayed him.
He held me at night and told me things he'd never told anyone.
About his son. About the wars. About Kaan's mother, who he'd loved before me and lost. About the emptiness that lived inside him no matter how much power he consumed.
" She swallowed. "I thought I was saving him.
I thought if I loved him hard enough, if I stayed long enough, the man I knew in private would become the man he was in public. "