*My little light.*
Then gone. The veil sealed. And I broke apart in an entirely different way — not from grief but from grace. From the knowledge that love survived death. That my father had heard me across the divide.
Hakan held me while I shook. His breathing was unsteady too.
"Did you feel?—"
"Your father." His voice was wrecked. "Through the bond."
We stayed like that for a long time, neither of us speaking, the darkness around us soft and still. Eventually he lay back and drew me with him, and I tucked my face into his neck, and he pulled the covers over us both, and somewhere in the space between grief and exhaustion I felt something in me finally, mercifully unknot.
"You gave me back his voice," I whispered.
"It was always yours. I was just holding it for you."
I fell asleep like that, in his arms, for the first time in four days.
* * *
I woke in the deep of the night to darkness and the sound of his breathing.
I lay still and listened to it for a moment — steady, even — and felt the particular quality of quiet that only exists in the small hours, when the world narrows to the warmth of a shared bed. The grief was still there. Would always be there. But it had shifted while I slept, settled from something crushing into something I could hold.
I turned toward him.
His eyes were already open. Watching me in the dark the way he sometimes did — as though he'd been waiting, and was too honest to pretend otherwise.
I reached out and touched his jaw. He turned his face into my hand, that involuntary thing he always tried to hide and never managed to.
"Hakan."
"I know," he said quietly. And then he reached for me.
He kissed me slowly at first, one hand cradling my jaw, thumb tracing my cheekbone, and I felt the deliberate patience of it — the way he was reading me, calibrating — before I pulled back and looked at him in the dark.
"Don't be careful with me," I said. "I don't want careful."
Something shifted in his eyes. The patience didn't dissolve so much as transform — still controlled, but differently now. His thumb moved from my cheekbone to my lower lip, pressing lightly, watching his own hand do it.
"You want me to take care of you," he said. "That's different from careful." He tilted my chin up. "I know the difference, Ada. I always know."
He kissed me again and this time there was nothing tentative about it — deep and unhurried, thorough in a way that made my toes curl, his hand sliding into my hair to angle me exactly where he wanted me. By the time he pulled back I was breathless and the slight curve of his mouth said he knew it.
He undressed me slowly. Every time he uncovered skin he paused — not to tease but to look, genuinely look, with that dark focused attention that had always made me feel like the only solid thing in a room. When he finally had me bare beneath him he sat back slightly, taking his time, and I resisted the urge to reach for the sheets.
"Don't," he said immediately, catching my wrist. His eyes moved over me without apology. "You're so beautiful it makes me angry sometimes. Did you know that? That I can't look at you without it feeling like something is being done to me." He pressed my wrist back to the mattress, leaned down, and kissed the curve of my breast slowly. "Don't ever hide from me."
His mouth closed over my nipple and I gasped — his tongue circling, slow and deliberate, teeth grazing just enough to make my back arch off the bed — before he moved to the other and did it again with the same maddening patience. His hand slid down my stomach, not rushing, mapping, like he had all night and intended to use it.
When his fingers finally found me, slipping through the slick heat of me, he made a low sound against my breast that vibrated through my skin.
"Ada." He lifted his head to look at me, fingers moving in slow, devastating circles. "You're soaked." Not a question. Not a tease. Just a man stating a fact and making no effort to hide how deeply it pleased him. "Is this all for me?"
"You know it is," I breathed.
"I know." He pressed his lips to my sternum, moving lower. "I just like hearing you admit it."
His mouth replaced his hand and I stopped being able to think in full sentences. He worked me with focused, unhurried attention — reading every sound I made, every shift of my hips, adjusting with infuriating precision — and when I tried to move against his mouth his palms pressed down on my hips with a firmness that was not unkind but was absolutely immovable.
