Chapter 23
RETURN TO LIGHT
Hakan
I took her to the only place I could think of — a room above a tanner's workshop in the western quarter that Milan had shown me months ago.
If things ever go wrong, he'd said, and you can't go home, come here.
Low-ceilinged, windowless, smelling of chemicals and cured leather.
Not the kind of place anyone would think to look for a god's son and his mother.
Three days. According to the position of the sun, we'd only been gone three days. It had felt like weeks.
My mother sat in the single chair with her broken fingers cradled against her chest, staring at the far wall with the careful blankness of someone who had decided which memories to keep and which to bury.
The lie Erlik had planted inside her mind had settled like silt — smooth and seamless, replacing the horror of Kara Cehennem with a comfortable fiction.
She believed we'd been hiding in the mortal realms. Believed a misfired portal had taken us somewhere disorienting.
Believed she'd broken her fingers in a fall she couldn't quite remember.
She kept glancing at her hand with a faint, bewildered frown, the way you might frown at an injury acquired in a dream.
I hadn't corrected her. There was nothing to correct her with that wouldn't destroy her.
Milan found us within the hour.
He came through the door with his dark hair disheveled, clothes rumpled like he hadn't slept in three days — which, I realized, he probably hadn't. The moment he saw us, relief cracked across his face — raw and genuine in a way that made something twist in my chest.
"Elif." He reached her in three strides, pulling her into an embrace that she returned with fierce strength. "Thank the gods. The portal closed and I couldn't follow and I've been searching every shadow path I know —"
"You worry too much." My mother pulled back, cupping his face in her hands, studying him with that penetrating gaze that had always seen through every lie I'd ever told.
Then Milan's eyes dropped to her hand.
He caught it before she could move — gently, carefully, two hundred years of tending other people's injuries in the way his fingers closed around her wrist. He turned her hand over in his and went very still.
"Elif."
"It's nothing. I fell somewhere in the mortal realms."
"These are broken." His voice was quiet. Not accusatory. Just stating it, the way you state a fact that has implications you haven't finished working through yet. He looked up at her face, then at me. Something didn't add up, and he knew it.
I held his gaze and gave him nothing.
He looked back at my mother.
"The mortal realms," he repeated, his voice carefully neutral.
"The portal went sideways," she said. "We ended up somewhere completely —"
"I know, I know." He was already guiding her toward the building, his hand supporting her elbow, his eyes still doing that quiet, private calculation.
"We'll get this splinted properly. I have what I need upstairs.
" He shot one more glance back at me over her shoulder — not angry, not demanding.
Just watching. Filing. Storing it away for a conversation that would happen later, away from her.
"Come. You look like you haven't eaten in days. "
My mother's apartment was exactly as we'd left it, though dust had accumulated on the surfaces in our absence.
Milan sat her down at the table with a firmness she didn't bother arguing with and began working on her hand — splinting the broken fingers with the quiet calmness of long practice, wrapping them with strips of cloth from the kit he kept in his coat.
My mother watched him do it with an expression that was half gratitude and half something she couldn't quite name, softened by whatever Erlik had taken from her.
I stood in the doorway and watched Milan bind my mother's fingers — fingers broken in a room she would never remember, under a cage she could no longer picture — and I kept my face completely still.
"The carrots still need washing," my mother said to me, nodding toward the basin.
"I know."
"Then stop standing there looking brooding and wash them."
Milan caught my eye over her head. Something passed between us — not understanding, not yet, but the acknowledgement that understanding was coming and that we would get to it without her present.
I went to the basin and washed the carrots.
"Milan says the warrant's been dropped," I said, keeping my voice even. "Ada went to her father while we were gone. Whatever she told him, it worked. We're not being hunted anymore."
My mother was quiet for a moment. Then: "And Ada? You and she —"
"Still together. Still approved. Gün Ata gave his blessing weeks ago, you know that."
My mother's knife paused mid-chop. "Did he."
"Before we left. Ada was going to speak with him, but apparently he'd already—"
"Gün Ata doesn't give blessings without expecting something in return." Her voice was flat, dangerous. "That man has been playing games with courts and kingdoms since before I was born. What does he want from you?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then find out." She resumed chopping with controlled violence. "And be careful. The Light Court's smiles hide sharper teeth than the Shadow Court's snarls. At least in Kara Cehennem, they're honest about wanting to destroy you."
The words landed heavily. She didn't remember Kara Cehennem — didn't remember the cage, didn't remember the thorns, didn't remember what it had cost her to keep standing — but some part of her still knew. Some part of her always knew.
"I will be," I said.
She studied me for a long moment, that penetrating gaze seeing more than I wanted it to. Then she nodded, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"Go." Her voice brooked no argument. "Ada's probably frantic. Milan can help me finish here."
"I want to—"
"Go." She pointed the knife at the door without looking up.
"And Hakan? Whatever happened in those human realms, whatever you're not telling me — I trust you have your reasons.
But don't keep secrets from Ada. That girl loves you more than you deserve, and secrets will destroy you both faster than any enemy.”
I kissed her forehead, breathed in the familiar scent of herbs and home, and turned to Milan.
"What happened while we were gone?"
"Three days of chaos." Milan kept his voice low, one eye on the doorway where my mother was settling into the chair.
"Serkan pushed through an emergency decree the morning you disappeared — shadow-wielders to be purified on sight, no trial.
Ada went to her father. I don't know exactly what she said, but by the second day Gün Ata had overruled the decree and issued a warrant of protection.
Serkan's furious but he can't move against you openly. Not yet."
"Ada — is she —"
"She's been at the palace. Waiting for you." Something softened in his expression. "She's been waiting for three days, Hakan. She didn't sleep the first night. Melo had to physically sit on her to stop her trying to open a portal herself."
My shadows were frantic, moving with the anxious need of destroying something. Three days. She'd spent three days not knowing if I was alive.
"Go," Milan said. "I'll stay with your mother."
"There are things I need to tell you. About where we were. About what happened."
"I know. I could see it the moment you walked through that door.
" His eyes moved to the doorway where my mother was cradling her splinted hand against her chest. He looked at it for a moment with an expression that was working very hard to stay neutral and not quite managing it.
"But right now she needs someone here, and you need to be somewhere else. "
"She thinks we were in the mortal realms. Erlik planted the memory. She doesn't remember any of it — not him, not what he did to her. She thinks she broke her fingers in a fall."
Milan went pale. "Erlik."
"Later. When she can't overhear." I gripped his shoulder, hard enough to make my point. "Keep her believing the story. And have someone look at those fingers properly — a healer she trusts, not a court physician."
"Later," he said. Not a question. A promise.
I stepped out into the fading afternoon light.
* * *
The Academy hadn't changed in three days, but my relationship to it had shifted irrevocably.
I walked through the halls without bothering to hide what I was.
Shadows trailed behind me like loyal hounds, curling around my boots, reaching toward the light-magic lanterns that lined the corridors.
Students I'd trained beside for years pressed themselves against walls as I passed, their fear a living thing I could almost taste.
Good. Fear kept people at a distance. Fear kept them from asking questions, and I was done hiding my true nature. I was from Shadow Court, and I wasn't ashamed of it.
I found Sarp in the training yard, running drills with a group of younger students. The moment he spotted me, he dismissed them with a wave and jogged over, wiping sweat from his forehead.
"Well, well." He stopped a few feet away, looking me up and down with exaggerated concern. "Three days of unexplained absence and you come back looking like death warmed over and forgot to finish warming. Should I be concerned, or is this just your new aesthetic?"
"Hello to you too."
"Because I have to say, the whole 'brooding shadow prince' thing you've got going is very dramatic, but the under-eye circles aren't doing you any favors.
Have you slept? Eaten? Contemplated the futility of existence while staring into the void?
Actually, scratch that last one — knowing you, that's a daily occurrence. "
Despite everything, something loosened in my chest. This was what I needed — Sarp's relentless humor, his refusal to treat me like a bomb about to explode.
"I'm fine."