Chapter 35
VINE LEAVES
Ada
I made him dinner.
It sounds so small, so ordinary, so painfully human — but that was the point.
Somewhere beneath the cold stranger who had taken up residence in Hakan's body, the man I loved was still breathing.
I had to believe that. If I stopped believing it, then my father was dead for nothing, and I was alone in this palace of whispers with nothing but grief and a fox who watched me with eyes too old for any creature.
So after we'd spoken that morning — after he'd looked through me with those empty green eyes and dismissed my grief like an inconvenience — I went to the kitchens myself.
I prepared his favorites: stuffed vine leaves rolled tight the way his mother had taught me, flatbread still warm from the oven, pomegranate seeds scattered through yogurt with honey drizzled on top.
I sliced peaches — the last of the season, their skins blushed pink and gold — because he'd once told me they reminded him of my light.
Back when he still said things like that.
Back when starlight was a promise and not a weapon.
I arranged everything in the woven basket he'd bought me at the border market during our golden days, when we'd wandered through the stalls hand in hand and he'd haggled with a merchant over the price with such theatrical outrage that I'd laughed until my ribs ached.
He'd carried it home for me, swinging it between us, and said, This is yours.
For all the picnics we're going to have when we're old and boring and still can't keep our hands off each other.
The memory burned. I pressed my knuckles against my sternum and breathed through it.
Melo sat on the kitchen table, watching me with that particular quality of attention she'd never bothered to disguise — the gaze of something far older than either of us, something that had been watching the world since before the Light Court had a name.
I knew what she was. I had known for years.
What I didn't know — what she had never told me, no matter how many times I'd asked — was everything else.
"You're wasting your time," she said quietly.
"I'm making dinner."
"You're making a sacrifice. There's a difference." Her tail swept across the wood. "Ada, listen to me. Something is wrong with him. Not just grief, not just stress — something else. The way his shadows move now, the way his scent has changed —"
"He's grieving, Melo. We both are." I tucked a cloth napkin into the basket with hands that only trembled slightly. "My father is dead. Hakan loved him too. People change when they lose someone."
"Not like this." Her turquoise eyes bore into mine with a ferocity that made my skin prickle. "This isn't grief. I've seen grief in a thousand forms across more centuries than you can fathom. This is something being done to him. Ada, please —"
"Enough." The word came out sharper than I intended.
I softened it with a hand on her head, fingers sinking into the warm fur between her ears.
"I know you're trying to protect me. But he's still in there, Melo.
Last week, when I was crying about Baba, Hakan reached for my hand in his sleep.
He didn't know he was doing it. His fingers found mine in the dark and he held on so tight it hurt.
" My voice cracked. "He's still in there. "
Melo said nothing. But her ears flattened, and she turned her face away from me — and I had seen every expression she was capable of, across every year she had spent beside me, but I had never once seen her afraid.
That was what it was. That was the thing I didn't have a name for until I saw it.
Fear. On Melo's face. Which meant whatever was coming was something she couldn't fight, couldn't outrun, and couldn't protect me from.
I should have listened. Gods above and below, I should have listened.
The walk from the palace to the Academy took twenty minutes through the evening air, the setting sun painting everything in shades of amber and rose. I held the basket against my hip and rehearsed words I'd practiced a hundred times since that morning.
Hakan, we need to talk. Really talk. Not the silence you've been giving me, not the cold shoulder and the empty bed and the way you look through me like I'm made of glass. I need you to see me. I need you to remember who we are.
The Academy corridors were quiet at this hour, most students and masters gone for the evening meal.
I was on the second landing when I heard footsteps above me. Milan appeared on the stairs, coming down from the upper corridor, a document folded under his arm. He saw me and his face warmed.
"Ada." A smile — easy, fond, the one that had always made me feel like family. His eyes dropped briefly to the basket. "You've been cooking."
"Vine leaves," I said.
"He loves those." He stepped aside to let me pass, already moving on. "Goodnight."
I continued up the familiar staircase to his rooms, which had once been ours, before I'd stopped being able to sleep beside someone I no longer recognized.
The door was slightly ajar. Candlelight spilled through the gap, warm and golden, and for one aching moment I let myself imagine that he was waiting for me.
That he'd remembered what day it was — the anniversary of our first kiss in the library, when I'd pulled him behind the restricted section and pressed my mouth to his and felt the entire universe rearrange itself around the axis of his lips.
I pushed the door open.
The first thing I saw was the hair. Blonde — pale and shining in the candlelight, cascading across my pillow in waves of silk, spread out across the sheets where I had slept, where I had dreamed, where I had pressed my face into the linen and breathed in the scent of cedar and shadow and him until my heart slowed enough to let me rest.
Then the rest of the scene assembled itself in pieces that my mind fought to reject.
Hakan's mouth was on hers.
His hands cradled her face the way he cradled mine — with that devastating tenderness that had always made me feel like the most precious thing in existence.
She was half-naked beneath him, her bodice unlaced and discarded on the floor, her skirt bunched at her waist, and his bare chest pressed against her skin while he kissed her slowly, deeply, with an intimacy that wasn't performative.
It was practiced. Comfortable. His shadows curled lazily through her blonde hair, dark tendrils playing through the strands with the same unconscious possessiveness they'd always shown with mine.
He pulled back from the kiss and turned his head.
And his face showed nothing.
I searched his face for guilt, for shock, for any flicker of the love that had once blazed so bright between us it had shattered windows and set the sky on fire. All I found was mild irritation. I'd interrupted something pleasant with something tedious.
"Ada." His voice was flat. Bored. "You should have knocked."
The basket slipped from my fingers. I heard the clay pot of yogurt crack and shatter.
Heard peach slices scatter across the tile.
The vine leaves I'd rolled that morning — tight and careful, the way Elif taught me, the way his mother taught me because she'd loved me like a daughter — tumbled across the floor and came to rest against his discarded shirt.
The blonde woman turned. She was stunning — kohl-rimmed eyes, lips swollen from his mouth, a smirk already forming before she'd fully registered who I was. She looked at me the way one might look at a servant who'd entered without permission.
She knew who I was. And she smirked.
"You brought another woman into our bed?"
Hakan didn't even look at me. He traced a lazy finger down the woman's arm. "Why shouldn't I? She's beautiful. Doesn't waddle when she walks. I don't have to pretend the lights are off to touch her."
The woman's smirk widened.
Something hot and bright and furious roared to life inside my chest.
"Get out."
The words came from me like a whip crack, aimed at the woman, and my light flared with them — gold blazing around my fists, sparking across my skin, filling the room with the unmistakable authority of Gün Ata's bloodline.
The woman's smirk dissolved into alarm. She scrambled upright, clutching her bodice to her chest.
"I said get out of my bed." I advanced a step, and the air around me shimmered with heat. "Before I burn you where you lie."
"Ada." Hakan's voice cut through the room, cold and sharp. "Don't be dramatic."
"Dramatic?" I rounded on him, and I could feel my light flaring dangerously, throwing sharp-edged shadows across the walls. "You're in our bed with another woman and you're calling me dramatic?"
The woman flinched. Good.
Hakan didn't flinch. He swung his legs over the side of the bed with deliberate calm, reaching for the goblet of wine on the bedside table.
His trousers were unlaced, his chest bare, and he looked at me the way you'd look at a fly buzzing near your ear — a minor annoyance, barely worth the effort of swatting.
"She's not just anyone. She's the daughter of Lord Karadeniz. And she's been far more entertaining company than you've been in weeks."
"I have been grieving." My voice shook with fury, not tears. Not yet. I would not give him tears. "My father is dead, Hakan. He is dead, and I have been drowning, and every time I reach for you —"
"Yes, I know. You reach and you cling and you cry and you need." He set the goblet down. His eyes were green glass — beautiful and completely empty. "It's exhausting, Ada. Do you know that? You are exhausting."
The words landed like a blade between my ribs. I absorbed the impact and stayed standing.