"You keep saying your mother is recovering, but recovering fromwhat? I've asked three times now and you give me a different answer each time?—"
"Because it's none of your concern." I turned on her, and something in my expression must have been terrible because she took a physical step backward, her light flickering the way it did when she was frightened. "My mother is my responsibility. The council is my responsibility. This court, these people, the testing, all of it—mine. Not yours. You couldn't even stand before the council to claim your father's seat, Ada. You handed it to me because you were too consumed by grief to function. So perhapstrust me to do the job you asked me to do, and stop second-guessing every decision I make."
The words hung between us like smoke.
I had never spoken to her like that. Not even in our worst arguments—not even in the early days at the Academy, when we'd been tearing each other apart after years of childhood closeness had curdled into something uglier, when she'd looked at me like I was a stranger and I'd let her.
I had just gone through the floor.
Ada's chin trembled. One tear escaped, tracking down her cheek. She wiped it away furiously, her jaw tight, and when she spoke her voice held the particular composure of someone who is holding themselves together through sheer will.
"My father trusted you," she said. "He gave you his seat because he believed you were worthy of it. He believed you would take care of this court—and take care of me." She met my eyes. "Was he wrong?"
The question should have broken me. The part of me still drowning beneath the fog—the real Hakan, small and trapped and screaming—heard her words andshattered, because yes, Gün Ata had trusted him, had looked at a shadow-wielding half-blood from the Border District and seen something worth believing in, and that Hakan had sworn on everything sacred that he would be worthy of it.
But the fog swallowed the shattering before it could reach my face.
"Go to bed, Ada," I said. "I have reports to finish."
She stood there for a long moment. Then she turned, climbed into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and faced the window.
I sat at the desk and pretended to read. The runes pulsed against my neck—warm, approving—and a new line of script began to form, creeping toward the hollow of my throat.
Hours passed. The dying palace light cast faint, erratic patterns across the ceiling—gold and shadow chasing each other like ghosts.
Eventually I moved to the bed. Lay on my back, staring upward, and listened to Ada breathe.
She wasn't sleeping. I could tell from the quality of her stillness, the careful regulation of her breathing, the way she lay with her body held in the particular configuration of someone who is pretending to be unconscious because the alternative—acknowledging the silence, acknowledging what has been broken—is worse than the pretence.
She moved first.
Her hand crossed the distance between us beneath the sheets and found mine. Her fingers were cold—she'd always run cold, even in the warmth of the Light Court, and I used to tease her about it, used to wrap her frozen hands inside mine and breathe on them until she laughed and called me ridiculous and kissed me with a mouth that was always warm even when the rest of her was ice.
Her fingers curled around mine. Tentative. Trembling.
"Hakan." Barely a whisper. "Please. Whatever's happening. I'm here."
She shifted closer. Her arm crossed my chest, her face pressed against my shoulder, and she clung to me the way she had in the first days after her father died—desperate, drowning, reaching for the only solid thing left in a world that had crumbled beneath her.
Her light leaked into my skin where she touched me. Faint. Golden. Warm in a way that should have felt like coming home.
The runeburned.
Not a pulse—a burn, sharp and searing, as if her light was acid and the marks on my neck were recoiling from it. I felt that vast, patient presence flare with displeasure, felt the fog thicken and press down, and with it came a wave of revulsion so acute I had to clench my jaw to keep from gagging.
I took her arm and removed it from my chest. Not gently. I lifted it away with the careful detachment of someone handling something unclean and placed it back on her side of the bed.
"I can't deal with your neediness right now," I said. "I have things to think about that matter more than this."
Then I rolled over. Faced the wall. Put my back to her like a door closing.
The sound she made was small. A breath caught on something sharp. Not a sob—she was too proud for sobbing, had always been too proud—but something fractured and quiet that lived in the space between breathing in and breathing out.
She didn't try again.
She lay there in the darkness on her side of the bed, and I lay on mine, and the silence between us stopped breathing.
And there, in the deepest part of the night, in the smallest room left inside me, the real Hakan opened his mouth and screamed.
