Chapter 35 #2
"That is grief speaking. Not you." I held his gaze, refusing to break.
I was Gün Ata's daughter. I did not bend for anyone, least of all a man who owed me the truth.
"Look at me, Hakan. Really look at me and tell me this is what you want.
Because I know you. I know you, and this —" I gestured at the disheveled bed, the blonde woman gathering her clothes with trembling hands, "— this is not who you are. "
Something flickered in his eyes. A shadow of a shadow — there and gone so fast I might have imagined it.
Then the flicker died, and what replaced it was worse than emptiness. It was amusement.
"You don't know me." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his shadows darkening across the floor like spilled ink.
"You knew a lovesick boy who was too stupid to see what was standing in front of him.
A fool who thought a woman's cunt and a pretty face were the same thing as destiny.
" His mouth curved into something that was not a smile.
"I've woken up, Ada. And the view from here is disappointing. "
"Don't you dare reduce what we had to —"
"What we had was a distraction." He spoke over me without raising his voice, which was somehow more devastating than shouting.
"A warm bed and a willing body while I figured out who I really was.
You were pleasant enough, starlight." He said the word — starlight — the way you'd describe the weather.
Casual. Meaningless. A term stripped of every tender moment it had ever held, every whispered confession, every desperate promise made in the dark.
"But a man needs more than sweetness. A man with real ambition needs someone who understands power. What it takes to rule."
"I am Gün Ata's heir." My light blazed brighter, and I saw the blonde woman shrink back toward the wall. "I am the most powerful light wielder in this court. Do not speak to me about power."
"You're Gün Ata's naive little girl playing dress-up with divine magic you don't know how to wield.
" He said it gently. Almost kindly. That was the cruelty of it — the tenderness in his voice while he eviscerated me.
As though he were explaining something simple to a child who couldn't quite grasp it.
"You were never going to be enough for a man with real ambition.
I just didn't have the heart to tell you while your father was still alive.
Seemed cruel." A pause. "Though I suppose this is cruel too.
" He glanced at the blonde woman, who had managed to pull her bodice back on with shaking hands. "Come here."
She hesitated. Looked at me. Looked at him.
Then she went to him, because people always went to Hakan, and he pulled her onto his lap with one arm around her bare waist and his mouth against her neck — slowly, deliberately, without breaking eye contact with me. An exhibition. A performance designed to destroy another person’s soul.
"You don't mean this." My voice came out steady. I was shaking — my whole body vibrated with the effort of holding myself upright — but my voice was steady and I clung to that. "You told me in the tower — under the stars — you said I was your everything. Your salvation."
"I said a lot of things." He pressed his lips to the blonde woman's shoulder while his eyes stayed locked on mine. "I was inside you at the time. Men will say anything when they're inside a woman. Surely you're old enough to know that."
The room went very quiet.
I felt it happen — felt the exact moment something fundamental inside me shattered.
Not bending, not cracking, but breaking apart with a violence that rippled through every cell, every thought, every memory I had ever built around this man.
My light — the divine light I'd inherited from my father, the light that should have been pure and eternal and untouchable — guttered inside my chest like a flame in a hurricane. Dimming. Flickering. Dying.
I opened my mouth and what came out was not words.
It was a scream.
Not of rage — I had no rage left. This was something more ancient and more terrible: the sound of a woman whose soul had been torn in half.
The scream filled the bedchamber and shook the candle flames and sent the blonde woman scrambling off Hakan's lap with her hands over her ears, and it went on and on because I couldn't stop it, couldn't close my mouth, couldn't do anything except stand in the doorway of the room where he had once held me like I was sacred and scream until my throat tore and my light flickered so violently the room strobed between gold and darkness.
Something shifted in Hakan's expression.
Just for an instant — a fracture in the mask, a flinch he couldn't quite suppress, as though my scream had reached through whatever cold armor he'd constructed and found something still alive beneath it.
His hand twitched at his side. His shadows shuddered.
Through whatever remained of our connection, I felt it — a crack, something splintering inside him, sharp and sudden and immediately buried.
Then his jaw set. His eyes went flat again.
He waited until the scream choked into ragged silence. Until I stood gasping in the doorway with my hands braced on the frame and my chest heaving and my light barely a flicker beneath my skin. Then he said, bored, patient, as though dismissing a servant:
"Close the door on your way out, starlight."
I ran.
I don't remember the corridors. I don't remember the stairs, the faces of anyone I passed.
I remember the sound of my own breathing — animal, wet, broken — and the cold evening air hitting my face when I burst from the Academy doors into the darkening grounds.
I remember my feet carrying me without direction, without purpose, driven by nothing except the need to put distance between myself and the image of his mouth on another woman's skin while his eyes held mine.
My father was dead. My love was a lie. Every promise, every kiss, every time he'd said *mine* and *always* and *together* — every time his shadows had curled around me in sleep like they couldn't bear to let me go — every time he'd looked at me with those green eyes and I'd felt the universe narrow to a single, perfect point of light —
Lies. All of it. Every word, every touch, every moment I'd built my life around.
I ran until my lungs burned and my feet bled and the last of the daylight drained from the sky. When my legs finally gave out — when my body simply refused to carry me further and I collapsed against ancient stone with my hands over my face — I didn't know where I was.
Then I looked up.
The Sky Tower.
Ancient stone, half-covered in vines, its windows dark but somehow expectant. The iron door stood slightly open, as it always had — Hakan had never locked it, had said he liked knowing it was always there, always waiting. Our place that existed outside the rest of the world.
Where he'd brought me one perfect night and shown me two realms' worth of stars bleeding into each other.
Where he'd told me he'd never been with anyone — that every time it got that far, he couldn't, because they weren't me.
Where his hands had trembled against my waist and he'd whispered, *If we do this, I'm not going to be able to let you go. *
I climbed the stairs. What was left of them.
I don't know why — perhaps because there was nowhere else to go, perhaps because some shattered part of me needed to stand in the place where we'd been real and test whether the ruins still remembered, even if he didn't. The walls had come down.
Whole sections of stone were missing, open to the night sky, and the steps crumbled at the edges where the explosion had taken chunks out of them.
I climbed carefully, testing each one before I trusted it with my weight.
It felt appropriate, somehow. Picking my way through the wreckage of something that used to hold.
At the threshold I stopped.
I didn't go to Melo. I couldn't. I couldn't bear the way she would look at me — that ancient turquoise gaze that always knew too much, that had watched me love him for years and never once warned me it would end like this.
So I did something I had never done before.
A small, shameful spell, barely a thought — the kind of thing that felt like a betrayal even as I cast it.
I closed myself off from her. Pulled every thread of myself inward and sealed them away.
I just needed to not be found. Not yet. Not until I had nothing left to hide.
The night was dark. I was alone. And the tower waited above me like an open wound.