Chapter 30
A FATHER’S BLESSING
Hakan
I found it while washing blood from my hands.
Not my blood. I didn't know whose. That was the part that should have concerned me — the not knowing, the gap in my memory where an explanation should have been — but my attention had snagged on something else entirely.
A mark behind my left ear, visible only when I tilted my head at the right angle in the small mirror above the basin.
A single line of black script, no longer than my little finger, sitting beneath the skin like a vein that had turned dark and learned to write.
The letters were angular. Sharp. Kara Dil — the dark tongue — though I didn't know that name yet. They shifted when I looked directly at them — not moving, exactly, but rearranging, as if something was being transcribed in real time onto the surface of my body.
I touched it. The skin was hot.
I stared at it. Tried to think.
Where had it come from? I searched for the beginning — the moment something had gone wrong, or been done to me — and the memory that surfaced wasn't the tower, wasn't last night. It was older. It was the funeral.
The divine fire had consumed Gün Ata's body at sunset. I'd held Ada's hand and felt her grief pour through the bond like boiling water, and I took it all because that was the only thing I could give her.
Then she'd asked for water. She was dizzy, pale, the heat of the pyre pressing against skin already flushed with crying. I let go of her hand and crossed to the colonnade.
I was reaching for a cup when the air changed.
I knew before I turned. The shadows in the courtyard shifted — not the way they shifted when Kaan was near, not the controlled dark of trained shadow magic. This was something older. Something that made the shadows themselves afraid.
I turned.
He was already in front of her.
I almost didn't recognize him. In Kara Cehennem, my father was disappointingly ordinary — sharp cheekbones and graying temples, the face of a prosperous merchant, the kind of man you'd trust with your money and regret it later.
But the figure standing before Ada bore almost no resemblance to that man.
He'd shed the gray entirely. Made himself younger, sharper, devastatingly handsome in the way that predators are beautiful.
Dark-haired. Unscarred. Dressed in mourning black that made every other robe in the courtyard look like a costume.
He'd reshaped himself the way you'd reshape a weapon — refined, polished, designed to slip unnoticed into a crowd of grieving mortals and draw no suspicion.
It almost worked. But I knew his shadows the way you know your own pulse, and no amount of borrowed beauty could disguise what lived beneath them.
He was standing in front of Ada with his hand extended and his mouth forming words I couldn't hear.
She took his hand.
She didn't know. Couldn't know. She saw a beautiful stranger in mourning clothes and her grief answered before her mind caught up.
And he lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to her knuckles and I felt something inside my chest tear open so wide I thought the shadows would pour out right there in the courtyard.
*Move. Run. Kill him. Rip his hand off her skin and break every finger and —*
I didn't move toward her. I moved toward Kaan.
He was already watching. I could see it in the rigid set of his shoulders, the way Nesilhan's hand pressed white-knuckled into his forearm. His eyes tracked Erlik. Calculating. Still.
I reached him in four strides. My voice came out low, barely controlled.
"He's touching her."
"I see." Kaan's jaw was clenched, but his tone was steady. Clinical. He'd been dealing with Erlik for a thousand years and it showed. "Don't run to her. Don't look at her the way you're looking at her right now."
"Kaan —"
"Listen to me." His hand closed around my arm — not comfort, command.
"She is the Princess of Light. You are her Light Lord.
That is all you are to her. That is all he sees.
Do you understand? If you go over there with your shadows coiling and your eyes burning and rip her out of his hands like she belongs to you, he will know.
And once he knows, nothing you or I do will be enough to protect her. "
The words landed like a fist to the sternum.
Because he was right. Every screaming instinct in my body was telling me to run, to throw myself between them, to put my mouth on her skin where his had been and burn his touch off her — and every single one of those instincts would hand her to him on a silver plate.
"Walk with me," Kaan said. "Slowly. Two brothers approaching the Princess to offer their respects. Nothing more."
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood and I let the pain anchor me and I walked beside my brother toward the woman I loved and the god who'd put his mouth on her hand.
Kaan reached them first. He bowed — formal, measured, the precise bow of one Shadow Lord acknowledging the heir of a dead god.
"Princess." His voice carried the weight of a thousand years of court diplomacy. "You should sit. The heat from the pyre is considerable."
Ada blinked. She was still dazed, her eyes red-rimmed, not quite processing the transition from one stranger to two.
Erlik's hand was no longer on hers — he'd released it when we approached — but I could see the faint redness on her knuckles where his cold had bitten into her skin and I couldn't react. I could not react.
"Nesilhan will take you to the shade," Kaan continued, already guiding Ada's elbow toward where Nesilhan waited at the edge of the colonnade. "You've been standing too long."
Ada let herself be led. She glanced back at me once — a look that asked *are you coming?* — and I gave her a small nod that said *in a moment* and watched Nesilhan fold her arm through Ada's and steer her away.
She was safe. Away from him. Nesilhan would guard her with her life.
Which left me standing three feet from my father with blood in my mouth and every shadow in my body screaming.
Erlik watched Kaan's manoeuvre with faint amusement. His gaze slid from Ada's retreating form to Kaan, then to me, measuring, calculating. Trying to read what had just happened — whether we'd intervened out of duty or something deeper.
"My sons," he said. "Together. That's a rare sight."
"A rare occasion," Kaan replied, his tone giving away nothing. "A god has died."
"Indeed." Erlik's expression shifted to something that might have been genuine, if he were capable of genuine.
"Gün Ata and I had our differences, but we were of the same order.
His passing diminishes us all." He glanced back toward the pyre, then at me.
"You look well, Hakan. Stronger than the last time I saw you. The darkness suits you."
I opened my mouth to respond — to tell him to leave, to threaten, to snarl — and I felt Kaan's presence beside me like a wall. Steady. Warning.
"Thank you for your condolences," I said. My voice came out even. I don't know how. "The Princess is overwhelmed. If you'll excuse us."
Something moved behind his face. Frustration. He'd come here for an answer and I hadn't given it to him. Kaan hadn't given it to him. Two sons, composed and formal, offering nothing he could use.
"Of course," he said. He inclined his head.
Then he was beside me. I didn't see him move — one moment he was three feet away, the next he was at my shoulder, his mouth close to my ear, his hand finding my shoulder in a grip that looked paternal and felt like iron.
Kaan tensed but didn't intervene. He couldn't — not without making the gesture look like more than it was, not without revealing that we thought there was something to fear from a father touching his son's shoulder at a funeral.
"You look well, Hakan," Erlik murmured again, softer this time. Just for me. His thumb brushed the skin just below my ear.
Something stung. Brief and bright. I flinched — the only crack in the mask, lasting less than a second — and by the time I registered the pain, his hand was already dropping away.
"A father's blessing," he said softly. "At a difficult time."
Then he stepped back into the colonnade's deeper shadow, and was gone.
I stood with blood in my mouth from where I'd bitten through my cheek, the fading sting behind my ear already dissolving into nothing. Already being forgotten. Already slipping beneath the surface of my awareness like a stone sinking into dark water.
Beside me, Kaan finally exhaled.
"Did he touch you?"
"My shoulder. Just my shoulder."
Kaan's eyes searched my face, my neck, the skin behind my ear. Looking for something. But the sting had already faded, and there was nothing to see.
"Watch yourself," he said quietly.
I nodded. And did not think about the fading sting behind my left ear, because it was nothing.
Because it had to be nothing.
* * *
They left the next morning.
Nesilhan held Ada for a long time at the Academy gates, her arms tight around Ada's shoulders, and when she pulled back her golden eyes were bright with tears she didn't try to hide.
"I lost my mother young," she said quietly. "I know what this emptiness feels like. And I know nothing I say will fill it." She pressed her forehead to Ada's. "But you have people who love you. Don't forget that when the grief tries to convince you otherwise."
Ada couldn't speak. She nodded, and Nesilhan squeezed her hands once before stepping back to Kaan's side.
Kaan studied Ada for a moment, then gave a single nod — not sympathy, but acknowledgment. The kind of respect one gives an equal walking into a war.
"The Light Court just lost its god," he said flatly. "Every lord on that council is already calculating how to fill the void. Don't let them move faster than you."
Ada straightened. Her jaw set the way it did when the princess in her woke up and shouldered the weight that the grieving daughter wanted to set down.
"I won't."