My hands were still in my lap. My nails had cut four perfect crescents into each palm, and blood was pooling in the lines of my skin, warm and red andlight—untainted, unblemished, the divine blood of Gün Ata's line. The blood they would never test, never question, never force to betray itself on a lecture theater floor.
I closed my fingers around the small wounds and walked out of the room on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else.
* * *
I went to my father.
I did not think about it, did not plan it. I simply moved through the palace corridors with the single-minded desperation of a child running home after a nightmare, because that was what Iwas—Gün Ata's daughter, and my father was a god, and surely a god could stop this.
The guards outside The Golden Throne Hallcrossed their spears when I reached the doors.
"My lady." Cem would not meet my eyes. "The Divine Council is in session. His Radiance has requested no interruptions."
"I need to see my father."
"The session may continue for several hours, my lady. I'm sorry."
Behind the doors, I could hear the murmur of men deciding things that would affect thousands of lives while the doors stayed shut and the guards stayed loyal and the system continued to function exactly as it was designed to. I pressed my palm flat against the gilded wood. The gold hummed faintly against my skin.
"Tell him I need to speak with him. Tonight."
"Of course, my lady."
I turned and walked away, and the tears came before I reached the end of the corridor. Hot and furious and utterly useless—the tears of a girl who had just watched a child be tortured and then been told to wait her turn to complain about it.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to force them back.
"The great Light Princess. Crying in corridors." A pause. "How veryhumanof you."
Everything in my body tightened at once.
I knew that voice the way I knew the sound of my own breathing—low, unhurried, carrying the particular brand of lazy arrogance that made my jaw clench and my pulse kick and my magic rise to the surface of my skin without my permission. I hated that voice. Hated the way it curled around words like it owned them. Hated the way it moved through my body like warm liquor, pooling in places I refused to name.
I hated him.
I had been telling myself that for months. Ever since the day he'd pinned me against the library stacks and told me that no one would speak to me that way while he was breathing, and I'd felt the heat of his body through both our clothes and realized with a sick, plunging certainty that the boy I had grown up with had become something else entirely. Something I could not look away from. Something that made me press my thighs together under the covers at night, alone in the dark with his name caught between my teeth, my fingers doing what I would never,neverlet him do?—
I hated him for that most of all.
Hakan was leaning against one of the marble columns, arms folded across his chest, one shoulder pressed to stone. He wore the dark gray of Lord Kaya's apprentices, his sleeves pushed to his elbows, forearms corded with lean muscle. The late-afternoon light caught the line of his jaw, the column of his throat, the shadow in the hollow beneath his ear.
He looked bored. He looked devastating. I wanted to slap the indifference off his face and then do something far worse.
"Go away, Hakan."
"No." He said it the way you'd decline a second cup of tea. Mild. Uninterested. "I heard what happened in Selim's class. The new detection technique." His gaze drifted over my face—the tear tracks, the blotched skin—and one corner of his mouth tugged upward. Not a smile. Something meaner. "Tell me, princess. Did you clap at the end? I'm curious."
"Fuck you."
"There it is." He unfolded his arms and took a step toward me. "The mouth your handmaidens don't know about. I do enjoy that mouth." His eyes dropped to it, slow and deliberate, and stayed there a beat too long. "Among other things."
Heat flooded my face. My neck. Lower. I clenched my teeth against it.
"You don't know what it was like there."
"I know exactly what it was like." All the amusement drained from his face in an instant—one moment lazy and taunting, the next, cold as the stone at my back. "I know they chained a girl to the floor and burned the shadow out of her blood while your classmates took notes. I know she's in the purification wing right now, and she won't come out alive. And I know you sat there with your hands in your lap and your pretty mask on and didnothing."
He said it once. He did not need to say it again. The wordnothinglanded in my chest and stayed there, a stone dropped into still water.
