Chapter 32 #2
Then gone. The veil sealed. And I broke apart in an entirely different way — not from grief but from grace. From the knowledge that love survived death. That my father had heard me across the divide.
Hakan held me while I shook. His breathing was unsteady too.
"Did you feel—"
"Your father." His voice was wrecked. "Through the bond."
We stayed like that for a long time, neither of us speaking, the darkness around us soft and still.
Eventually he lay back and drew me with him, and I tucked my face into his neck, and he pulled the covers over us both, and somewhere in the space between grief and exhaustion I felt something in me finally, mercifully unknot.
"You gave me back his voice," I whispered.
"It was always yours. I was just holding it for you."
I fell asleep like that, in his arms, for the first time in four days.
* * *
I woke in the deep of the night to darkness and the sound of his breathing.
I lay still and listened to it for a moment — steady, even — and felt the particular quality of quiet that only exists in the small hours, when the world narrows to the warmth of a shared bed.
The grief was still there. Would always be there.
But it had shifted while I slept, settled from something crushing into something I could hold.
I turned toward him.
His eyes were already open. Watching me in the dark the way he sometimes did — as though he'd been waiting, and was too honest to pretend otherwise.
I reached out and touched his jaw. He turned his face into my hand, that involuntary thing he always tried to hide and never managed to.
"Hakan."
"I know," he said quietly. And then he reached for me.
He kissed me slowly at first, one hand cradling my jaw, thumb tracing my cheekbone, and I felt the deliberate patience of it — the way he was reading me, calibrating — before I pulled back and looked at him in the dark.
"Don't be careful with me," I said. "I don't want careful."
Something shifted in his eyes. The patience didn't dissolve so much as transform — still controlled, but differently now. His thumb moved from my cheekbone to my lower lip, pressing lightly, watching his own hand do it.
"You want me to take care of you," he said. "That's different from careful." He tilted my chin up. "I know the difference, Ada. I always know."
He kissed me again and this time there was nothing tentative about it — deep and unhurried, thorough in a way that made my toes curl, his hand sliding into my hair to angle me exactly where he wanted me. By the time he pulled back I was breathless and the slight curve of his mouth said he knew it.
He undressed me slowly. Every time he uncovered skin he paused — not to tease but to look, genuinely look, with that dark focused attention that had always made me feel like the only solid thing in a room.
When he finally had me bare beneath him he sat back slightly, taking his time, and I resisted the urge to reach for the sheets.
"Don't," he said immediately, catching my wrist. His eyes moved over me without apology.
"You're so beautiful it makes me angry sometimes.
Did you know that? That I can't look at you without it feeling like something is being done to me.
" He pressed my wrist back to the mattress, leaned down, and kissed the curve of my breast slowly. "Don't ever hide from me."
His mouth closed over my nipple and I gasped — his tongue circling, slow and deliberate, teeth grazing just enough to make my back arch off the bed — before he moved to the other and did it again with the same maddening patience.
His hand slid down my stomach, not rushing, mapping, like he had all night and intended to use it.
When his fingers finally found me, slipping through the slick heat of me, he made a low sound against my breast that vibrated through my skin.
"Ada." He lifted his head to look at me, fingers moving in slow, devastating circles. "You're soaked." Not a question. Not a tease. Just a man stating a fact and making no effort to hide how deeply it pleased him. "Is this all for me?"
"You know it is," I breathed.
"I know." He pressed his lips to my sternum, moving lower. "I just like hearing you admit it."
His mouth replaced his hand and I stopped being able to think in full sentences.
He worked me with focused, unhurried attention — reading every sound I made, every shift of my hips, adjusting with infuriating precision — and when I tried to move against his mouth his palms pressed down on my hips with a firmness that was not unkind but was absolutely immovable.
"Stay still," he said against me. "Let me."
"Hakan—"
"Let me." His tongue moved in long, deliberate strokes.
"You always try to rush this. I never understand it.
I could spend hours here, Ada. I have thought about spending hours here.
" He did something with his mouth that made me cry out and I felt him smile against me. "There. That's what I was looking for."
He brought me to the edge slowly, methodically, backing off every time I got close — until I was shaking, fingers fisted in the sheets, completely at his mercy and aware of it — and then he finally pushed me over with his fingers curling inside me and his mouth exactly where I needed it, and I came apart with his name on my lips and his hands holding me through every wave of it.
He rose over me while I was still shaking.
"Good girl," he said quietly, looking down at me — flushed, undone, breathing hard — and the softness in it hit me somewhere behind the ribs. Not condescension. Something else entirely. Pride, maybe. The kind that doesn't diminish. "That's it. Look at you."
He stripped his shirt off and settled between my thighs, his cock hard and hot against me, and I reached for him but he caught my hands and pinned them gently above my head, both wrists held loosely in one of his — not roughly, just holding, maintaining something — and looked down at me with that expression that made me feel like he was reading every thought I'd ever had.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
"I want you inside me."
"I know you do." He didn't move. "How much?"
"Hakan—"
"How much, Ada."
"Desperately," I said, and hated how true it was, and loved that he needed to hear it. "Please."
He pressed into me slowly — slowly enough to feel every inch, slowly enough that I had to breathe through it — and when he was fully seated he stopped, his forehead dropping to mine, his exhale long and controlled, like a man exercising extraordinary restraint.
"You feel—" He stopped. Tried again. "Every time. I don't have words for it. Every time it's like the first time and I still don't have words for it."
"Move," I said. "Please move."
He moved. Long, deep strokes that dragged against every nerve, his mouth finding my jaw, my throat, my ear — and then his voice, low and close, meant only for this room:
"You take me so well." His hips rolled and I gasped. "Every time. Like you were made for this. Like you were made for me specifically." Another stroke, deeper, and my nails found his back. "Are you going to be good for me tonight?"
"Yes—"
"Yes what?"
"Yes," I said, and pulled him closer by his shoulders, "don't stop—"
"I won't stop." He picked up the pace and I felt it everywhere, felt the bond opening wider between us, his pleasure layering over mine until they were inseparable, until I couldn't tell where I ended and he began.
"I'm never going to stop. Do you understand that?
I will take you apart all night if that's what you need.
Whatever you need. Anything." His voice was fraying at the edges now, that careful control beginning to slip.
"You're so perfect. You're so — Ada, look at me —"
I looked at him. His jaw tight, eyes dark and wholly focused on my face, shadows curling across the sheets around us like they couldn't help themselves.
"There," he said roughly. "Stay with me."
His hand slipped between us and I choked on a sound that was half his name and half nothing at all, and he watched my face while he worked me toward the edge again — intent, relentless, whispering against my mouth: *that's it* and *good girl* and *I've got you* and *let me feel you, I need to feel you—*
When I came the second time it hit differently — deeper, longer, my whole body arching hard against him — and he groaned and buried himself to the hilt and held there, shuddering, his hands gripping my hips with a reverence that contradicted their firmness, like he wanted both things simultaneously and couldn't choose between them.
He came with his face pressed to my neck and my name in his mouth, and for a long moment afterward neither of us moved.
We lay tangled together in the dark, his breathing gradually slowing against my shoulder, his hand moving in slow absent circles along my spine.
"Ada," he said eventually, voice still rough.
"Mm."
He pressed his lips to my hair. Didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to.
I reached up to touch his face — tracing his jaw, the soft skin below his ear — and stopped.
A ridge beneath the skin. Subtle but unmistakable. The skin was hot. Almost feverish.
"What's this?"
He flinched. Caught my hand. Kissed my knuckles. "Nothing. Training."
"It doesn't feel like—"
"Ada." Soft. Final. "Leave it."
I should have pushed. Should have flooded the spot with light and demanded an answer. But I was wrung out and hollowed clean and he had just given me the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given me.
So I let it go.
I would hate myself for it later.
"Promise me," I said. "If anything changes. If something feels wrong. Tell me."
The silence lasted one beat too long.
"I promise," he said.
His shadows tightened around me. Not a caress. A grip.
I chose not to notice. I closed my eyes and let his heartbeat carry me back toward sleep.
But I heard the rumours in the Academy in the past several days.
The ones I'd been collecting like stones in my pockets, each one small enough to ignore, heavy enough to drown me if I ever stopped to count them.
The servants said a student named Demir had been arrested.
A scholarship student who'd once shaken Hakan's hand at a court gathering and told him he was proof that bloodline wasn't destiny.
They said the shadow testing Hakan had authorized had flagged his grandmother's blood.
They said Serkan was pushing for a formal hearing.
I'd asked Hakan about it. Found him in his study. Said Demir's name.
Nothing behind his eyes. Just blankness.
*The protocols are clear,* he'd said, not looking up. *I'm handling everything so you don't have to. When you're ready, you'll take your father's seat and none of this will be your burden.*
Caring words. The right words. But his voice had been a stranger's voice — flat, efficient, scrubbed clean of the man who had just given me back a lullaby through shadows.
Perhaps I was wrong about Demir. Perhaps leadership required a hardness I couldn't yet understand. I pushed the thoughts away. I could ask again tomorrow. Tonight I had felt, for the first time in four days, something close to peace, and I was not ready to surrender it.
His breathing evened out beside me. In sleep he looked impossibly young — like the boy behind the pillar, watching a father sing to his daughter and aching with the want of it.
"I love you," I whispered into the dark. "Whatever's coming."
His shadows pulsed. Warm.
And somewhere beneath sleep, something whispered back — but the words dissolved before I could catch them.
Like a melody half-remembered.
Like a promise already breaking.