Chapter 37
THE SKY TOWER
Ada
The silk cushions were faded now and dusty.
The low table still stood where he'd placed it, the surface filmed with neglect.
But the ceiling — the enchanted ceiling — still showed the sky with impossible clarity, and as I stood in the center of the room where he'd first laid me down and whispered my name like a prayer, I watched the golden-tinged stars fade and silver ones take their place.
Two skies, overlapping. Two realms bleeding into each other.
Beautiful. Indifferent. Exactly as they'd been the night he brought me here.
I moved toward the open archway where the ceiling gave way to true sky — the observation platform at the tower's edge, where the enchantment ended and the real stars began.
The night air hit my face like cold water.
I braced my hands against the ancient stone railing and tilted my head back and let the sky swallow me.
This was the place. The only place in all the realms that had been ours. He'd found it. Restored it. Given me the iron key and said for us with a vulnerability that had cracked something open in my chest that I'd never been able to close again.
If we do this, I'm not going to be able to let you go. You understand that?
My throat closed. I gripped the railing and stared at the Lover's Crown — seven stars arranged in a circle, visible only when both realms' skies aligned — and I let the grief come.
Not gracefully. Not with dignity. The ugly, heaving, animal grief of a woman who had walked into a room and found the man she loved in bed with someone else while he looked at her with empty eyes and said close the door on your way out, starlight.
A pleasant distraction.
That's all I'd been.
I wept for every promise he'd made in this very tower, under these very stars, while his body moved above mine and his shadows wrapped around us both like we were something worth protecting.
For the woman who'd climbed these stairs with her heart ablaze and believed with every fibre of her being that she'd found the one person in all the realms who would never hurt her.
That woman was dead now. Hakan had killed her with his beautiful mouth and his empty eyes.
I turned from the railing and walked back inside.
I sank to the floor — the same floor, the exact same place — and I lay on my back and stared up at the Lover's Crown through the shimmering enchantment and let the stars fill my vision until there was nothing else.
Just seven silver-gold points of light burning in the infinite dark, and the slow, terrible understanding that I was completely alone.
The stars blurred. My eyelids grew heavy. I thought about how easy it would be to sleep here, on this floor, in this place where I'd once been so safe that I'd—
Something hit me across the face so hard my skull bounced off the stone floor.
The world split open. White light — not magic, just pain — exploded behind my eyes.
I tried to gasp but a hand was already clamped over my mouth, grinding my lips against my teeth hard enough to draw blood, and then shadows — cold, thick, living shadows — poured over my face and down my throat and sealed me shut.
I couldn't scream. Couldn't breathe. My jaw was pinned so tightly the shadow gag forced my tongue against the roof of my mouth and all that came out was a strangled, animal whine that died in my chest.
Weight slammed down on top of me. A body — heavy, male, pressing me flat against the stone with a force that drove the air from my lungs.
Shadows coiled around my wrists and wrenched them above my head, slamming them against the floor.
My ankles — pinned, spread. I was flattened against the stone like a sacrifice on an altar.
My vision was still white. Fractured. I couldn't see — the blow had turned the world into a smeared, pulsing blur. I blinked and blinked and the enchanted ceiling swam above me, the stars splitting into doubles and triples, the Lover's Crown fragmenting into pieces I couldn't reassemble.
Shadow magic.
The realization split the pain clean open. Shadow magic — in this tower. The tower no one knew about. The tower Hakan had said everyone believed was destroyed in the Sundering. No one had ever been here except Hakan and me.
A thought split through the panic, jagged and incomplete — how, how does he know about this place, no one knows about this place, only Hakan knew, only Hakan— — and then the shadows slammed tighter and the thought dissolved before it could finish forming, swept under by a wave of terror so absolute it left room for nothing else.
Hakan?
For one wild, fracturing moment I thought it was him — some new cruelty, some extension of the betrayal.
But the weight above me was wrong. Wrong height.
Wrong breadth. Wrong energy. Hakan's shadows had always carried a signature I knew as well as my own heartbeat — dark and dangerous but threaded with something that felt like coming home.
These shadows were different. Colder. Emptier.
Not Hakan. A stranger. A stranger with shadow magic powerful enough to find this place, to hide his face, to pin down the daughter of a god.
These shadows were unlike anything I had encountered — not the cultivated darkness of a Court wielder, not the learned craft of a trained mage.
They felt ancient. Pre-Sundering, the way certain buried stones feel older than the earth around them.
Whatever power moved through this man had roots that went deeper than training, deeper than bloodlines.
It had the weight of something given, not earned.
Something divine at its source. The divine light of Gün Ata's blood had never once been extinguished — not in battle, not in grief, not in anything I had ever faced.
Until now. I couldn't hold the thought. It dissolved in the terror with everything else.
I thrashed against the restraints. My light magic flared in desperate, useless bursts that the shadows swallowed like a sea swallows sparks.
I tried to summon the fire my father had given me — the divine light that had once been strong enough to illuminate battlefields — but I'd been weeping for hours, hadn't slept in days, hadn't eaten, had poured everything into the grief — and my magic sputtered and died like a candle drowned in water.
He hit me again. The back of his hand cracked across my cheekbone with a force that snapped my head sideways and sent fresh stars blooming across my vision — not the ones above me, not the beautiful ones, but white-hot bursts of agony behind my eyes.
I felt the skin split. Felt blood slide down my temple into my hair.
My left eye began to swell immediately, the flesh puffing and tightening until the enchanted ceiling narrowed to a slit.
He liked it. I could feel it in the way his body shifted against mine — a tremor of excitement, of pleasure, at the sound of his hand connecting with my face.
He hit me a third time — this time a closed fist against my jaw — and something cracked and my mouth filled with blood and the world tilted sideways and I almost went under.
Almost lost consciousness right there. The edges of my vision darkened and the stars above me stretched into long, smeared streaks of light, and I thought please, please let me pass out, let me not be here for this—
But the shadows tightened around my throat and the sudden pressure dragged me back, gasping, choking, fully present in my ruined body on the cold stone floor.
He leaned close. I couldn't see his face — the darkness around it was so dense it consumed the light from the enchanted ceiling.
A void where features should have been. Through my one functioning eye, through the blood and the swelling and the tears, I saw nothing. Just darkness in the shape of a man.
He spoke in a voice warped and distorted by the same shadow magic — rendered completely unrecognizable.
You smell good. He didn't deserve you, my beautiful goddess.
A sound tore from behind the gag. Muffled. Broken. He laughed — low and wet and terrible — and his hand closed around the collar of my dress and tore.
Fabric screamed as it ripped from neck to navel, baring my skin to the cold air.
I jerked against the bindings so violently something in my wrist popped, but the restraints held.
His hand found my breast and he squeezed — not touched, not gripped — squeezed, his fingers digging into the flesh until I felt the bruise forming in real time, until the pain was white-hot and constant and I was bucking against the stone floor with everything I had, screaming behind the gag, screaming into the shadows that swallowed the sound and gave back nothing.
Be still. I've waited so long.
His mouth was on my neck. Biting. Not kissing — biting down with enough force to break skin, sucking hard enough to leave marks that would darken to black over the days to come.
His other hand ran down my stomach, over my ribs.
I could feel him savoring it, mapping my body with deliberate attention.
Cataloging a possession. Then lower. His fingers shoved between my thighs, rough and probing and dry, and the pain was so sudden and so sharp that my back arched clear off the stone and a howl pressed against the shadow gag and came out as silence.
Don't fight it. Be prettier for me.