Not of rage — I had no rage left. This was something more ancient and more terrible: the sound of a woman whose soul had been torn in half. The scream filled the bedchamber and shook the candle flames and sent the blonde woman scrambling off Hakan's lap with her hands over her ears, and it went on and on because I couldn't stop it, couldn't close my mouth, couldn't do anything except stand in the doorway of the room where he had once held me like I was sacred and scream until my throat tore and my light flickered so violently the room strobed between gold and darkness.
Something shifted in Hakan's expression. Just for an instant — a fracture in the mask, a flinch he couldn't quite suppress, as though my scream had reached through whatever cold armor he'd constructed and found something still alive beneath it. His hand twitched at his side. His shadows shuddered. Through whatever remained of our connection, I felt it — a crack, something splintering inside him, sharp and sudden and immediately buried.
Then his jaw set. His eyes went flat again.
He waited until the scream choked into ragged silence. Until I stood gasping in the doorway with my hands braced on the frame and my chest heaving and my light barely a flicker beneath my skin. Then he said, bored, patient, as though dismissing a servant:
"Close the door on your way out, starlight."
I ran.
I don't remember the corridors. I don't remember the stairs, the faces of anyone I passed. I remember the sound of my own breathing — animal, wet, broken — and the cold evening airhitting my face when I burst from the Academy doors into the darkening grounds. I remember my feet carrying me without direction, without purpose, driven by nothing except the need to put distance between myself and the image of his mouth on another woman's skin while his eyes held mine.
My father was dead. My love was a lie. Every promise, every kiss, every time he'd said *mine* and *always* and *together* — every time his shadows had curled around me in sleep like they couldn't bear to let me go — every time he'd looked at me with those green eyes and I'd felt the universe narrow to a single, perfect point of light —
Lies. All of it. Every word, every touch, every moment I'd built my life around.
I ran until my lungs burned and my feet bled and the last of the daylight drained from the sky. When my legs finally gave out — when my body simply refused to carry me further and I collapsed against ancient stone with my hands over my face — I didn't know where I was.
Then I looked up.
The Sky Tower.
Ancient stone, half-covered in vines, its windows dark but somehow expectant. The iron door stood slightly open, as it always had — Hakan had never locked it, had said he liked knowing it was always there, always waiting. Our place that existed outside the rest of the world.
Where he'd brought me one perfect night and shown me two realms' worth of stars bleeding into each other. Where he'd told me he'd never been with anyone — that every time it got that far, he couldn't, because they weren't me. Where his hands hadtrembled against my waist and he'd whispered, *If we do this, I'm not going to be able to let you go.*
I climbed the stairs. What was left of them. I don't know why — perhaps because there was nowhere else to go, perhaps because some shattered part of me needed to stand in the place where we'd been real and test whether the ruins still remembered, even if he didn't. The walls had come down. Whole sections of stone were missing, open to the night sky, and the steps crumbled at the edges where the explosion had taken chunks out of them. I climbed carefully, testing each one before I trusted it with my weight.
It felt appropriate, somehow. Picking my way through the wreckage of something that used to hold.
At the threshold I stopped.
I didn't go to Melo. I couldn't. I couldn't bear the way she would look at me — that ancient turquoise gaze that always knew too much, that had watched me love him for years and never once warned me it would end like this. So I did something I had never done before. A small, shameful spell, barely a thought — the kind of thing that felt like a betrayal even as I cast it. I closed myself off from her. Pulled every thread of myself inward and sealed them away.
I just needed to not be found. Not yet. Not until I had nothing left to hide.
The night was dark. I was alone. And the tower waited above me like an open wound.
CHAPTER 36
CRACK
Hakan
The door closed behind her and the silence was immediate. Total. The kind of silence that follows a detonation — not peace but the absence of everything that had been making sound a moment before.
I sat on the edge of the bed. My hands rested on my knees. My breathing was even.
Across the room, the blonde woman — her name was something I should know, something I had known an hour ago when I'd summoned her here with specific instructions and a tone that left no room for refusal — pressed herself against the far wall. Her bodice was half-laced, crooked, her fingers too unsteady to work the stays. She was staring at me.
"I want to leave," she said. Her voice was thin. "Please. I want to leave now."
"Then leave."
She edged along the wall toward the door, giving me the widest berth the room allowed, as though I were something unpredictable and cornered. Her hand found the handle. She paused.
"You didn't tell me she would come."
