"I love you," she murmured.
The words hit me like a blade between the ribs. "I love you too."
We spent the rest of the day tangled together—talking, laughing, fucking with a desperate intensity that left us both breathless. I memorized every moment. Hoarded every sound, every expression, every whispered confession.
If these were my last days of happiness, I would spend them worshipping her.
* * *
That night, sleep dragged me under.
The dream began in silence.
Not the comfortable silence of rest, but something deeper—a void that pressed against my consciousness like cold water filling my lungs. I couldn't see anything. Couldn't feel anything. Just darkness, endless and absolute, swallowing me whole.
Then the whisper came.
"My son."
The words slithered through the void, wrapping around my mind like shadow-silk. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't even breathe—but I knew that voice. Would know it anywhere, in any realm, across any distance.
Erlik.
"I've been watching you."
The darkness shifted. Not lightening—that wasn't possible here—but becoming somehow more present. More aware. Like the void itself had opened its eyes and found me wanting.
"A seat on the council." The whisper carried something that might have been approval. "Gün Ata's blessing. His trust. His gratitude." A pause, thick with implication. "You've exceeded my expectations."
I tried to speak. To scream. To do anything but float helpless in this ocean of nothing while my father's voice coiled through my skull.
"The Light God grows weaker by the day. His divine flame gutters. And there you are — his trusted advisor, welcomed into his inner circle, given his blessing and his gratitude."
Something brushed against my mind—not a touch, exactly, but an awareness. A presence testing the walls I'd built, probing for weaknesses.
"You're still protecting someone. I can feel it—that desperate devotion, that willingness to burn for another's sake." The whisper dropped lower, and became almost intimate. "I don't need to know who. Not yet. The knowledge will come, in time. It always does."
The void began to compress. Slowly at first, then faster—the darkness pressing in from all sides, crushing, suffocating, reducing my existence to a single point of terrified consciousness.
"Time is running out, Hakan."
I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Could only feel the weight of eternity bearing down on me, the promise of what awaited if I failed.
"Settle your affairs. Say your goodbyes. Make whatever peace you need to make with the life you're leaving behind." The whisper was inside my head now, woven through my thoughts like poison through blood. "And then come home. Come to me. Take your place at my side."
The pressure increased. I felt something crack inside my mind—not breaking, not quite, but bending in ways that shouldn't be possible.
"Or don't." The words carried a smile I couldn't see but could feel, sharp and patient and hungry. "Refuse me. Run. Hide. Protect your precious secrets with whatever walls you can build." A pause. "And I will find them anyway. I will find everyone you've ever loved, everything you've ever wanted, and I will show you exactly what happens to those who disappoint me."
Sevda. The image flooded my mind before I could stop it — that broken thing dragging itself across obsidian, every joint bent wrong, the wet clicking of bones that had been shattered and reassembled incorrectly, the mouth that couldn't close, the eyes that couldn't forget. Sixty years of continuing. Not living. Continuing. And Ada — my Ada, my starlight — crawling across a stone floor with her spine curved the wrong way and her jaw hanging open and her golden eyes emptied of everything except the memory of what she'd been before he broke her.
The void shattered.
I woke gasping, drenched in cold sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape. The sheets were twisted around my legs, soaked through, and my hands were shaking so badly I couldn't make them stop.
Ada stirred beside me, reaching for my hand in the darkness. "Hakan? What's wrong?"
"Nothing." My voice came out rough, barely recognizable. "Just a nightmare."
