Chapter 20
THE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD
Hakan
"Your friend is fine, if that's what you're worried about. Bruised, perhaps. Winded. But alive." A pause. "For now."
The darkness shifted. Coalesced. Took form.
The man who emerged was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of presence that made the air itself seem to lean toward him.
He was frightening. That was the honest word.
Built like something designed for damage — not lean, not graceful, just big in a way that made the space around him feel smaller.
His hair was dark and silver-threaded, falling past his jaw.
His face was wrong — not ugly, worse than ugly.
A crooked nose, badly set. A scar cutting through his upper lip.
Jaw like a battering ram. Cheekbones that belonged on a statue and eyes that belonged on nothing human — black, all the way down, the kind of dark you could fall into and never find the bottom of.
He was smiling.
And I understood, with a sick lurch, where my own smile came from. The particular curve of the mouth, the way one corner pulled higher than the other. I'd seen that smile in mirrors my whole life and never known its origin.
"Welcome to Kara Cehennem," he said, spreading his arms like a host greeting guests at a party. "I'd apologize for the abrupt relocation, but honestly? I'm not particularly sorry."
My mother made a sound — not quite a gasp, not quite a whimper. A name, whispered like a curse.
Erlik's smile widened. He turned to her, and something happened to his face that I wasn't prepared for. The performance didn't drop — it shifted. Softened at the edges. His eyes moved over her the way you'd look at a painting you'd thought was lost.
"You still tuck your hair behind your left ear when you're frightened," he said. Almost to himself. "You always did that. Even when you were trying to look brave. I used to watch you do it and think — she doesn't know she's telling me everything."
My mother exhaled. A long, controlled breath. When she spoke, her voice was flat.
“I've erased you from my memory Erlik," she said through her gritted teeth. "Whatever you think you remember about me, I don't carry it anymore. It's gone."
Erlik's mouth twitched with amusement.
"Liar," he said. Warmly. Almost fondly. "You always were a terrible liar, Elif. Best pickpocket I ever met, worst liar. Remember that time you tried to convince me you hadn't finished the rose lokum? You had powdered sugar on your lip. I could see it from across the room."
"I don't —"
"You wiped it off with your sleeve and looked me dead in the eye and said 'what lokum?' and I nearly choked laughing. You remember. Don't insult us both."
The warmth in his voice was real. That was the horror of it.
It wasn't performance. He was genuinely enjoying the memory, genuinely pleased to be standing in front of the woman who'd eaten his last rose lokum two centuries ago.
Mother was beautiful, and even now after two hundred years she was radiating with light magic.
It was obvious how she caught attention of a God.
My mother said nothing. Her jaw was set. But her eyes — her eyes were bright and there was longing in them.
"Do you know what I did after you left?" The warmth was gone from his face now.
He didn't wait for an answer. "I tore my own realm apart looking for you.
Personally. On my hands and knees in passages I hadn't crawled through in centuries.
My court thought I'd gone mad — they weren't wrong.
Three servants tried to calm me down. They're still in the Galleries.
I broke them because I needed to break something and they were closest." He shrugged.
"Not my finest moment. But then, I wasn't at my best. You'd stolen my son and my dignity in the same night, and I've always handled loss badly.”
"You didn't lose me," my mother said. "You never had me. You had a girl too young to know the difference between love and captivity, and when she finally learned it, you couldn't stand it."
Erlik went still. For a fraction of a second something naked crossed his face — not rage, not cruelty. Injury. The wound of hearing the truest thing about yourself from the one person whose opinion still reaches you.
Then it was gone. Buried beneath ten thousand years of practice at not being touched by anything.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then his gaze moved past her. To me. And the wounded look was replaced by something sharper. Hungrier.
"And you must be my wayward son. Hakan, isn't it? I have to say, you're taller than I expected. Must be your mother's side."
"His name," my mother said, "is the only thing of yours he carries. And he doesn't want that either."
Erlik looked at her. Really looked — a slow, thorough appraisal that moved from her face to her feet and back again, and his expression did something I didn't want to see. Appreciation. Not of a memory. Of what was standing in front of him right now.
"Two centuries," he said. "And you're still the most striking woman in any room you walk into.
The Light Court breeds beauty like cattle but you were always something else.
Something that had nothing to do with bloodlines.
" His mouth curved. "I gave you silk and jewels and a throne beside mine. You wore them well."
"I burned them when I left."
"I know. I found the ashes." Something moved behind his eyes. "I kept them."
My mother's jaw tightened. She said nothing. There was nothing to say to a man who kept the ashes of your burned dresses for two hundred years and saw no contradiction between that and breaking a woman's bones.
I stepped between them.
"I'm not your son."
"Biology disagrees, I'm afraid. You have my shoulders and my temper.
You're welcome for both." His eyes narrowed with something that might have been approval.
"Twelve men torn apart by shadow magic in the Border Forest in Gün Ata territory.
I felt it all the way here — that beautiful eruption of power after two centuries of suppression.
Magnificent work, really. Messy, but magnificent. "
"I was protecting someone."
"I know." He said it easily. No pretense. "I sent them."
The words landed in the pit of my stomach.
"I was tired of waiting. Two hundred years is patient, even for me. I needed to know if the power was there or if your mother's suppression had killed it entirely." He tilted his head. "It hadn't. Clearly."
"They tried to —" I stopped. Locked it down. Talking about what they did meant talking about who they did it to. I nearly gave Ada away.
Erlik noticed the shutdown. His eyes sharpened.
"Tried to what?" Softly. The softness of a predator that's spotted movement.
"Doesn't matter. They're dead."
"Yes, they are. Spectacularly dead. Which tells me everything I need to know about what they threatened." He smiled. "Or rather, who."
I said nothing. Thought nothing.
"Wise. Keep your secrets. For now." He studied me. "Though I can smell light magic on your shadows — a woman from the Light Court."
He laughed — a genuine, startled bark.
"Unbelievable. Another one. My first son falls for a light-bearer and throws away his throne.
Now my second does the same thing." He looked at the ceiling as if appealing to some higher authority.
"Is this a curse? Is there a prophecy I missed?
Do my sons see a woman who glows and lose every functioning brain cell simultaneously? "
My mother's voice came from behind me, quiet and sharp: "You fell for one too."
Erlik's mouth opened. Closed. For the first time since he'd materialized from the darkness, the God of the Underworld had nothing to say.
It lasted about two seconds.
"That," he said, "is entirely different."
"How?"
"Because I'm me." He straightened his robes with the dignity of a man who had just walked into a wall and was pretending it was a door. "The rules don't apply."
"They applied when I left."
"You are making this evening considerably less enjoyable than I'd planned, Elif."
"What did you do to Milan?" I demanded.
"Returned him." Erlik glanced toward where the portal had been, utterly unbothered. "He doesn't belong here. Neither do you, technically — but you're a special case." He tilted his head. "He'll be on his feet already. Loyal creature. He'll spend the next several hours trying to find a way back in."
His smile sharpened.
"He won't manage it."
And underneath it all, woven through the silence like threads of pain — the screaming. Distant, endless. The kind that never stopped because the throats making it could never die.
Erlik caught me listening and smiled. "Atmospheric, isn't it? The Screaming Galleries. Souls who displeased me over the centuries." He cocked his head. "Though I admit the soprano section has been a bit pitchy lately. I really should address that."
Then I heard something else.
Closer than the screaming. A wet, rhythmic sound — like something dragging itself across stone. I turned toward it before I could stop myself.
She emerged from the shadows between two pillars, moving in a way that made my stomach turn before my mind could fully process what I was seeing.
A woman. Or she had been. She wore the shredded remains of what might once have been fine clothes, silk now black with old blood and years of filth.
She moved on her hands and knees, but wrong — every joint bent at an angle it wasn't made for, elbows pointing skyward, knees twisted outward, her spine curved in a direction that should have been impossible.
Each movement produced a soft, wet clicking sound, like knuckles cracking underwater.
She stopped when she reached the edge of the light. Just stopped, and crouched there, trembling.
My mother's hand found my arm. Her fingers dug in hard enough to bruise.
"Who is that?" she whispered. Then, quieter: "What did you do to her?"
Erlik's gaze passed over the woman and kept going.