Chapter 20 #2
"That's Sevda. She was one of my favorites, once.
Extraordinarily beautiful, very devoted — or so I thought.
" He clicked his tongue. "Turned out she was passing information to a rival.
I broke all her bones. Every single one.
And then I put them back together." A small, regretful smile.
"Incorrectly. And then I prevented her from healing.
She can't die, you see. That's the elegant part.
She just — continues. About sixty years now. "
He paused.
"Sevda, darling, you're making our guests uncomfortable."
She turned her head toward his voice, and I caught a glimpse of her face through the curtain of hair — eyes that had seen too much and forgotten how to close properly, a mouth stretched permanently open by a jaw that no longer sat right.
She made no sound. Just watched him with the absolute stillness of something that had burned through every possible response to its situation and arrived, finally, at nothing.
I thought of my mother. Two hundred years of running from the man who made this. I thought of Milan — who had stepped between us and this monster without hesitation and been ripped away like paper. Milan, who wasn't my father but had chosen to be.
Sevda dragged herself back into the dark. The clicking faded. The screaming continued its distant, endless chorus.
My mother stepped out from behind me. She stood straight. She always stood straight. It was the only thing she had left to control.
"He wants nothing to do with you. He never will."
Erlik's attention shifted to her, and something darker moved behind those black eyes. "Elif. Still so fierce. The sheer arrogance of a mortal woman thinking she could outrun a god."
"I managed for two hundred years."
"You stole my son," he said, and for the first time the amusement was entirely gone, replaced by something colder. "Hid him for two centuries. Suppressed his true nature until he was too ashamed of his own power to use it."
"I saved him from becoming you."
"You crippled him." The words came out flat, stripped of theater.
"He should have manifested at puberty. Should have been trained in shadow magic from childhood.
Instead you raised him in terror, taught him to hate what he is.
And now he's a grown man with the power of a god and the control of a toddler.
Do you have any idea how dangerous that makes him? "
"I'm not weak," I said.
"No." He looked at me, and for one moment the performance dropped entirely and there was just a god looking at his son with something I didn't have a name for.
"No, you're not. Which is precisely why I'm interested.
" He stepped back, shadows swirling around him.
"I could force this. Strip your mind, bend your will, reshape you into whatever I need. I've done it before."
My shadows flared, sluggish but present.
"But that produces damaged goods. I learned that lesson with my firstborn.
" Something complicated crossed his face — pride and disappointment and a rage so old it had calcified into something almost like grief.
"Kaan. A thousand years old, power to rival my own, raised from birth to rule at my side. Do you know what he did?"
“Let me guess, he must have seen through you and decided to leave.”
"Worse. He rejected everything. Walked away from Kara Cehennem, from his birthright, from me. Fell in love with some light-bearer and decided he'd rather play house than claim his throne." Erlik spat the words like they tasted of poison. "Love. The weakness that corrupts every son I've ever sired."
"Maybe the problem isn't your sons."
The darkness around us thickened. The full weight of his power pressed down — ancient, vast, utterly inhuman. The screaming in the Galleries rose to a fever pitch.
Then he laughed.
"Spirit. I like it." The pressure eased.
"Here's my offer, Hakan. Not a demand — an offer.
Come with me. Learn what you are, what you could become.
I'll teach you to master your power instead of fearing it.
When you've seen what the Shadow Court truly is, when you've tasted real strength — then you can decide. "
"And my mother?"
"Stays here. As my guest." His smile didn't waver. "To ensure you return when summoned."
"No."
"You haven't even thought about it."
"I don't need to think about it." I stepped forward, letting my shadows writhe despite their weakness. "I don't want your throne. I don't want your power. I don't want anything from you."
Something flickered in Erlik's eyes — surprise, maybe. The displeasure of something that has never been refused. Then his smile turned cold.
"Defiance is charming in small doses, my son. In larger ones, it becomes tedious." He raised one hand, almost lazily. "Perhaps a demonstration is in order. So you understand exactly what you're refusing."
Shadow erupted from his fingers.
Not at me — at my mother.
The darkness wrapped around her throat, her chest, her mind.
Her scream was brief, cut off as the darkness poured into her, and I felt it — felt him rifling through her memories like pages in a book, careless and cruel.
Two hundred years of her life, everything she'd hidden and survived and carried, and he was picking through it like it meant nothing.
"STOP!" I lunged for him, but shadows caught me, pinned me in place with iron strength. "STOP IT —"
Erlik didn't even look at me. His attention was fixed on Elif, his expression one of clinical interest as she convulsed in his grip.
"Fascinating," he murmured. "The prayers she used to suppress you. The light magic she wove into your food, your clothes, your bedding. Two centuries of desperate dedication, all to keep you small and safe." He smiled. "How sweet. How utterly futile."
"LET HER GO —"
"In a moment." He twisted his hand, and my mother screamed again — a sound I would hear for the rest of my life, in every quiet moment, in every dark room — "I just want you to understand something, Hakan.
This? This is mercy. This is me being gentle.
If you refuse me, if you try to run, if you do anything other than exactly what I tell you —"
He released her.
She crumpled to the floor, gasping, shaking. Alive. Still alive. But something in her eyes had fractured — some piece of her that had been intact through everything, through the cage and the running and two hundred years of fear, had finally broken.
"— then next time, I won't stop." Erlik stepped over her body like it was debris on the floor. "I'll break her mind completely. Trap her consciousness in a prison of eternal darkness while her body stands hollow and breathing. And I'll make you watch."
The shadows holding me dissolved. I dropped to my knees beside her, pulled her into my arms, pressed my face into her hair. She was shaking so hard I could feel it in my own chest.
"Hakan, please," she whispered. Her voice was raw, barely recognizable. "Don't... whatever he wants... don't..."
"Shhh." I stroked her hair the way she'd stroked mine during childhood nightmares, when I'd woken screaming from dreams I couldn't describe and she'd held me in the dark and said *I've got you, I've got you, you're safe.* "I've got you."
She had said those words to me a thousand times. I had never understood what they cost until now.
"I'll give you until sunrise to reconsider." Erlik's voice came from somewhere behind me, already fading. "That should be enough time to say goodbye. Or to make the smart choice and save everyone a great deal of unpleasantness."
I didn't turn around.
"Think about it, my son. Power. Knowledge. A kingdom of shadows. All of it yours, if you simply stop fighting the inevitable." His laugh echoed through the hall as he dissolved into darkness. "And do try to keep the melodrama to a minimum. The Screaming Galleries are quite loud enough already."
He was gone.
I knelt on the cold obsidian floor and held my mother and didn't speak.
There wasn't anything to say. She wept quietly, the way people weep when they've used up all their composure and there's nothing left to hold the grief back with, and I held on, and the screaming never stopped, and somewhere above us the obsidian ceiling stretched up into darkness with no end.
Somewhere in the Light Court, Ada was standing outside her father's door with the truth in her hands, hoping he would be the man she believed him to be.
Somewhere on the other side of a sealed portal, Milan was already standing.
Already thinking. I knew that the way you know things about people you've trusted for a very long time — without evidence, without reason, just the bone-deep certainty of it.
He would find a way. He always found a way.
Not because he was my father by blood — he wasn't — but because he had chosen to be my father by everything else, and men who make that choice don't stop when a god throws them out of a room.
"We'll find a way out," I told my mother. Told myself. "We always find a way out."
But my voice echoed hollow against the obsidian walls, and the screaming never stopped, and I held her tighter and waited for sunrise and tried very hard not to think about what I was going to have to decide when it came.