Hakan didn't even look at me. He traced a lazy finger down the woman's arm. "Why shouldn't I? She's beautiful. Doesn't waddle when she walks. I don't have to pretend the lights are off to touch her."
The woman's smirk widened.
Something hot and bright and furious roared to life inside my chest.
"Get out."
The words came from me like a whip crack, aimed at the woman, and my light flared with them — gold blazing around my fists, sparking across my skin, filling the room with the unmistakable authority of Gün Ata's bloodline. The woman's smirk dissolved into alarm. She scrambled upright, clutching her bodice to her chest.
"I said get out of my bed." I advanced a step, and the air around me shimmered with heat. "Before I burn you where you lie."
"Ada." Hakan's voice cut through the room, cold and sharp. "Don't be dramatic."
"Dramatic?" I rounded on him, and I could feel my light flaring dangerously, throwing sharp-edged shadows across the walls. "You're in our bed with another woman and you're calling medramatic?"
The woman flinched. Good.
Hakan didn't flinch. He swung his legs over the side of the bed with deliberate calm, reaching for the goblet of wine on the bedside table. His trousers were unlaced, his chest bare, and he looked at me the way you'd look at a fly buzzing near your ear — a minor annoyance, barely worth the effort of swatting.
"She's not just anyone. She's the daughter of Lord Karadeniz. And she's been far more entertaining company than you've been in weeks."
"I have been grieving." My voice shook with fury, not tears. Not yet. I would not give him tears. "My father is dead, Hakan. He isdead, and I have been drowning, and every time I reach for you —"
"Yes, I know. You reach and you cling and you cry and you need." He set the goblet down. His eyes were green glass — beautiful and completely empty. "It's exhausting, Ada. Do you know that? You areexhausting."
The words landed like a blade between my ribs. I absorbed the impact and stayed standing.
"That is grief speaking. Not you." I held his gaze, refusing to break. I was Gün Ata's daughter. I did not bend for anyone, least of all a man who owed me the truth. "Look at me, Hakan. Really look at me and tell me this is what you want. Because I know you. Iknowyou, and this —" I gestured at the disheveled bed, the blonde woman gathering her clothes with trembling hands, "— this is not who you are."
Something flickered in his eyes. A shadow of a shadow — there and gone so fast I might have imagined it.
Then the flicker died, and what replaced it was worse than emptiness. It was amusement.
"You don't know me." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his shadows darkening across the floor like spilled ink. "You knew a lovesick boy who was too stupid to see what was standing in front of him. A fool who thought a woman's cunt and a pretty face were the same thing as destiny." His mouth curved into something that was not a smile. "I've woken up, Ada. And the view from here is disappointing."
"Don't you dare reduce what we had to —"
"What we had was a distraction." He spoke over me without raising his voice, which was somehow more devastating than shouting. "A warm bed and a willing body while I figured out who I really was. You were pleasant enough, starlight." He said the word —starlight— the way you'd describe the weather. Casual. Meaningless. A term stripped of every tender moment it had ever held, every whispered confession, every desperate promise made in the dark. "But a man needs more than sweetness. A man with real ambition needs someone who understands power. What it takes to rule."
"I am Gün Ata's heir." My light blazed brighter, and I saw the blonde woman shrink back toward the wall. "I am the most powerful light wielder in this court. Do not speak to me about power."
"You're Gün Ata's naive little girl playing dress-up with divine magic you don't know how to wield." He said it gently. Almost kindly. That was the cruelty of it — the tenderness in his voice while he eviscerated me. As though he were explaining something simple to a child who couldn't quite grasp it. "You were never going to be enough for a man with real ambition. I just didn't have the heart to tell you while your father was still alive. Seemed cruel." A pause. "Though I suppose this is crueltoo." He glanced at the blonde woman, who had managed to pull her bodice back on with shaking hands. "Come here."
She hesitated. Looked at me. Looked at him.
Then she went to him, because people always went to Hakan, and he pulled her onto his lap with one arm around her bare waist and his mouth against her neck — slowly, deliberately, without breaking eye contact with me. An exhibition. A performance designed to destroy another person’s soul.
"You don't mean this." My voice came out steady. I was shaking — my whole body vibrated with the effort of holding myself upright — but my voice was steady and I clung to that. "You told me in the tower — under the stars — you said I was your everything. Your salvation."
"I said a lot of things." He pressed his lips to the blonde woman's shoulder while his eyes stayed locked on mine. "I was inside you at the time. Men will say anything when they're inside a woman. Surely you're old enough to know that."
The room went very quiet.
I felt it happen — felt the exact moment something fundamental inside me shattered. Not bending, not cracking, but breaking apart with a violence that rippled through every cell, every thought, every memory I had ever built around this man. My light — the divine light I'd inherited from my father, the light that should have been pure and eternal and untouchable — guttered inside my chest like a flame in a hurricane. Dimming. Flickering. Dying.
I opened my mouth and what came out was not words.
It was a scream.
