Four to one. The numbers spin in my mind like a death sentence. I've read enough military histories to know what those odds mean. Massacre. Not a battle, but a slaughter. And at the head of that massive force will be my father—the man who raised me, who taught me to read by lamplight, who used to brush my hair when I was small. Coming to destroy everything I've built, everyone I've chosen to protect.
"And the Twilight Heir?" Kaan asks, his voice carefully neutral. I feel his gaze flick to me briefly, he knows what I've been dreading. What I confided to him that first night.
Zoran's expression shifts. Something painful crosses his features.
"That's why I called this meeting." He reaches into his coat and withdraws a small portrait—the kind Light Court nobles commission for formal occasions. "My spies managed to obtain this. It was being circulated among the Light Court nobility as proof of the heir's legitimacy."
He sets the portrait on the table.
For a moment, I don't understand what I'm seeing. The face in the portrait is feminine, not masculine. Young, my age, perhaps a year or two younger. Golden hair like mine, but darker. Eyes that shift between amber and something deeper, more shadowed.
But it's the shape of her face that stops my heart. The line of her jaw. The curve of her cheekbones.
She looks like me.
She looks like my mother.
"The rumors were wrong," Zoran says quietly. "The Twilight Heir isn't a man. It's a woman." He pauses, his voice dropping. "Nesilhan, I'm so sorry. It's her. It's our sister."
My sister.
The words steal the breath from my lungs.
"That's impossible," I hear myself say, but my voice sounds distant, disconnected. "She died. They said she died."
"There was no body," Zoran says gently. "I checked the records. The healers claimed she was too fragile to be viewed, that it would upset Mother too much. Father handled all the arrangements personally."
Personally. Of course he did.
"He took her," I whisper. The room is spinning. The portrait blurs before my eyes. "He took her and told us she was dead."
"The intelligence suggests she's been raised in a hidden facility in the northern mountains," Zoran continues, his voice heavy with grief yet he has managed to separate himself from this news, as if she isn’t his sister also. "Trained since childhood to wield both light and shadow magic. Father's been... shaping her. Molding her into exactly what he needed."
"A weapon," Kaan says quietly. His shadows have gone very still, the way they do when he's controlling something volcanic. "He forged her into a weapon to use against her own sister."
The nausea hits me without warning. One moment I'm sitting at the table, the next I'm stumbling to my feet, my hand pressed to my mouth as my stomach rebels against the horror of what I've learned.
"I need—" I manage to gasp, "I need air."
I barely make it out of the chamber before my body betrays me completely. In the hallway beyond the war room, I fall to my knees and retch, my stomach emptying itself as if trying to purge the poison of these revelations. My sister is alive. My father stole her. Everything I believed was a lie.
This can't be happening. This can't be real. But the cold stone beneath my knees, the bitter taste in my mouth, the way my hands shake as I try to steady myself, it's all brutally, inescapably real. My family isn't what I thought it was. My father isn't who I thought he was. My entire life has been built on foundations of sand and blood.
Footsteps echo behind me, and I know without looking that it's Yasar. Not Kaan, his footsteps are heavier, more deliberate. Not Elçin, hers have a different rhythm. Yasar's steps are almost silent, liquid, the way he moves when he's hunting or stalking. But right now, they sound gentle. Concerned.
"Nesilhan." His voice is soft, careful. "Let me help you."
He kneels beside me, one hand moving to steady my shoulder while the other gathers my hair away from my face. The gesture is so unexpectedly tender that it breaks something inside me. Fresh sobs tear from my throat.
"She's alive," I whisper. "My sister is alive, and they turned her into a weapon to use against me."
"I know," Yasar says quietly. "I'm sorry."
Sorry. As if that word could possibly encompass the magnitude of this betrayal. As if anything could make this better. But the kindness in his voice, the way he stays with me while I fall apart, it reminds me that not everyone in my life is built on lies. Some bonds, at least, are real.
But then the fury rises again, hot and bright and looking for a target. And Yasar is here, being kind, being gentle, and suddenly I'm furious at him too. Furious at the bond that ties us together, furious at another choice that was made for me, another chain around my neck.
"Don't," I snarl, jerking away from his touch. "Don't touch me. Don't pretend to care."
