Chapter 33 #2
"Common for—Hakan, I've never seen anything like this.
The script looks old, really old, and it's pulsing.
Can't you feel that? It's hot to the touch.
" She tried to meet my eyes. I looked past her, at the wall, at anything that wasn't the concern in her face.
"Let me look at them properly. Maybe if I use my light I can—"
"Don't touch me with your light."
The sharpness of it stopped her cold. She stood there with her hand suspended between us, fingers still reaching, and I watched the hurt bloom across her face like ink in water—slow, spreading, impossible to take back.
"I'm trying to help you," she said, very quietly.
"I don't need your help. What I need is for you to stop fussing over things you don't understand and let me handle my own affairs.
" I pulled a sleeping tunic from the wardrobe and dragged it on, covering the runes.
"I've told you—everything with my mother is fine.
She's recovering. The testing is under control.
The council is functioning. You don't need to worry about any of it. "
"You keep saying your mother is recovering, but recovering from what? I've asked three times now and you give me a different answer each time—"
"Because it's none of your concern." I turned on her, and something in my expression must have been terrible because she took a physical step backward, her light flickering the way it did when she was frightened.
"My mother is my responsibility. The council is my responsibility.
This court, these people, the testing, all of it—mine.
Not yours. You couldn't even stand before the council to claim your father's seat, Ada.
You handed it to me because you were too consumed by grief to function.
So perhaps trust me to do the job you asked me to do, and stop second-guessing every decision I make. "
The words hung between us like smoke.
I had never spoken to her like that. Not even in our worst arguments—not even in the early days at the Academy, when we'd been tearing each other apart after years of childhood closeness had curdled into something uglier, when she'd looked at me like I was a stranger and I'd let her.
I had just gone through the floor.
Ada's chin trembled. One tear escaped, tracking down her cheek. She wiped it away furiously, her jaw tight, and when she spoke her voice held the particular composure of someone who is holding themselves together through sheer will.
"My father trusted you," she said. "He gave you his seat because he believed you were worthy of it. He believed you would take care of this court—and take care of me." She met my eyes. "Was he wrong?"
The question should have broken me. The part of me still drowning beneath the fog—the real Hakan, small and trapped and screaming—heard her words and shattered, because yes, Gün Ata had trusted him, had looked at a shadow-wielding half-blood from the Border District and seen something worth believing in, and that Hakan had sworn on everything sacred that he would be worthy of it.
But the fog swallowed the shattering before it could reach my face.
"Go to bed, Ada," I said. "I have reports to finish."
She stood there for a long moment. Then she turned, climbed into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and faced the window.
I sat at the desk and pretended to read. The runes pulsed against my neck—warm, approving—and a new line of script began to form, creeping toward the hollow of my throat.
Hours passed. The dying palace light cast faint, erratic patterns across the ceiling—gold and shadow chasing each other like ghosts.
Eventually I moved to the bed. Lay on my back, staring upward, and listened to Ada breathe.
She wasn't sleeping. I could tell from the quality of her stillness, the careful regulation of her breathing, the way she lay with her body held in the particular configuration of someone who is pretending to be unconscious because the alternative—acknowledging the silence, acknowledging what has been broken—is worse than the pretence.
She moved first.
Her hand crossed the distance between us beneath the sheets and found mine.
Her fingers were cold—she'd always run cold, even in the warmth of the Light Court, and I used to tease her about it, used to wrap her frozen hands inside mine and breathe on them until she laughed and called me ridiculous and kissed me with a mouth that was always warm even when the rest of her was ice.
Her fingers curled around mine. Tentative. Trembling.
"Hakan." Barely a whisper. "Please. Whatever's happening. I'm here."
She shifted closer. Her arm crossed my chest, her face pressed against my shoulder, and she clung to me the way she had in the first days after her father died—desperate, drowning, reaching for the only solid thing left in a world that had crumbled beneath her.
Her light leaked into my skin where she touched me. Faint. Golden. Warm in a way that should have felt like coming home.
The rune burned.
Not a pulse—a burn, sharp and searing, as if her light was acid and the marks on my neck were recoiling from it. I felt that vast, patient presence flare with displeasure, felt the fog thicken and press down, and with it came a wave of revulsion so acute I had to clench my jaw to keep from gagging.
I took her arm and removed it from my chest. Not gently. I lifted it away with the careful detachment of someone handling something unclean and placed it back on her side of the bed.
"I can't deal with your neediness right now," I said. "I have things to think about that matter more than this."
Then I rolled over. Faced the wall. Put my back to her like a door closing.
The sound she made was small. A breath caught on something sharp. Not a sob—she was too proud for sobbing, had always been too proud—but something fractured and quiet that lived in the space between breathing in and breathing out.
She didn't try again.
She lay there in the darkness on her side of the bed, and I lay on mine, and the silence between us stopped breathing.
And there, in the deepest part of the night, in the smallest room left inside me, the real Hakan opened his mouth and screamed.
It was a silent thing. It moved nothing in the world.
It changed nothing in the fog. It reached no one—not Ada, lying an arm's length away with her heart breaking for the second time in a fortnight.
Not Sarp, awake somewhere in the palace with his faith in ruins.
Not my mother, hollow and breathing in Kara Cehennem with my father's shadows nesting in the spaces where her memories used to live while I told Ada she was recovering from an illness, everything is fine.
The scream was a small animal in a shrinking cage, and the cage was getting smaller, and the animal was getting quieter, and someday soon—maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, maybe the moment Erlik's final order came—it would fall silent entirely.
But not yet.
Not yet.
The rune pulsed. Warm. Approving. The new line of script inched toward the hollow of my throat, and somewhere beneath the layers of carefully constructed nothing, a thought surfaced—involuntary, treasonous, belonging to a man who no longer existed except in the dark behind his own eyes:
If I can't save her from what I'm becoming, I'll make her hate me enough to save herself.
It was the last clear thought the real Hakan would have for a very long time.
The fog closed over it like water over a stone.
By morning I wouldn't remember thinking it.
By morning I would wake with the runes burning fresh and the council waiting and Ada's side of the bed cold and empty, and I would feel nothing at all, and the nothing would feel like power, and the power would feel like survival, and Erlik's satisfaction would hum through my blood like a lullaby sung in a language I was only just beginning to learn.
I don't know if she reached for me in the night.
I'd like to think she did — that some part of her, the part that existed below grief and fury and the slow, careful process of learning to stop loving me, reached across the sheets the way she always had in sleep.
The way her body had always known where I was before her mind caught up.
I don't know if her fingers stopped just short of touching me.
I was already gone.