I looked at her. She flinched.
"You said she wouldn't find out. You said it would be — you said she was —" Her mouth worked around words she couldn't organize. "The way shescreamed. That wasn't — I've never heard anyone make a sound like that. What did youdoto her?"
The question existed at a distance. I could see it, could parse its syntax and identify it as an interrogative requiring response, but it connected to nothing inside me. She might as well have asked about the weather.
"Close the door behind you," I said.
She fled. The door clicked shut. Her footsteps receded down the corridor — quick, almost running — and then the silence returned, thicker now, pressing against the walls of the bedchamber like water filling a hull.
I sat for a long time.
The candles burned. Shadows moved across the ceiling in their usual patterns — my shadows, dark and restless, curling and uncurling in the corners with an energy that had nothing to do with conscious direction. They'd been agitated since Ada arrived. Since before she arrived. Since I'd arranged the scene with the care of a stage manager — the unlaced bodice, the disheveled sheets, the wine, the woman positioned exactly where Ada would see her first.
Why had I done that?
The question rose and the fog swallowed it before it could fully form. In its place came the familiar blankness — smooth, efficient, correct. I had done it because it was necessary. Because attachment was weakness. Because the runes knew what I needed even when I didn't, and the runes had said:sever it. Sever it now, before the connection grows strong enough to compromise you.
I stood. My bare feet found something on the floor — something soft and damp and still faintly warm. I looked down.
A vine leaf.
It had come to rest against the side of the bed, half-unrolled, its filling spilling out in a pale smear across the stone. Around it, the wreckage of the meal she'd brought: shattered pottery, peach slices browning in the candlelight, flatbread torn where it had struck the ground, a dark stain of yogurt spreading slowly across the tile like something bleeding out.
I picked up the vine leaf.
The fog thinned.
It happened without warning — a sudden clarity, as though a window had been thrown open in a room that had been sealed for weeks. The vine leaf sat in my palm, small and ruined, and my fingers knew the way it had been rolled — tight, precise, the filling tucked in before the final fold so nothing would leak during cooking. My mother's method. The method she'd taught to —
Ada. Ada standing in my mother's kitchen with flour on her chin, laughing, while Elif guided her hands and said, "Tighter,tighter, he'll tease you if they fall apart," and Ada said, "He'll eat them no matter what because he loves me and he's biased," and my mother laughed and said, "Yes, he is."
The memory was so vivid it had texture. Taste. I could smell the kitchen — olive oil and mint and the particular warmth of bread dough rising. I could hear my mother's laugh, which I had not heard in — how long? How long since I'd heard it? How long since I'd stood in a kitchen with people who loved me and felt the simple, devastating weight of belonging somewhere?
Something cracked in my chest. Not the runes — something behind them. Something they'd been built to contain.
Ada.
Her name moved through me and it hurt. Not the dull administrative ache of the fog — this was searing, jagged, the pain of a nerve ending being exposed after months of numbness. I saw her face in the doorway. Not the face I'd looked at twenty minutes ago with practiced indifference — therealface, the one beneath my detachment, the one my eyes had seen even when my mind refused to process it. The shock. The shattering. The moment her light had guttered inside her chest like someone had reached in and closed a fist around a candle flame.
I had done that.
Ihad done that. Not the runes. Not Erlik. Me. My mouth forming the words. My hands on another woman while Ada watched. My voice sayingclose the door on your way out, starlight— and the wordstarlight, my word, the word I'd given her in the Sky Tower the first time I'd laid her down beneath our sky and whispered it against her hair while she trembled in my arms —
My right wrist ignited.
Not the runes — the runes burned from the outside in, a crawling, corrective heat that started at the edges and tightened like a vice. This was different. This came from the pulse point. From beneath the skin, from the place where the crescent sat — dark inside, amethyst at the rim, with a single gold dot at its heart that I had stared at in the tower's half-light while Ada slept on my shoulder and I understood for the first time in my life that I was not only my father's son.
The mark burned the way it had burned the night it appeared — clean and precise, like a blade pressed flat. Not cutting. Recognising. As though the bond itself had felt the crack in the fog and was reaching through it, reaching for her, sayingI know you. I know what you did. I know what you are without the thing your father built on top of you.
I dropped the vine leaf. Both hands were shaking. The room tilted and I braced myself against the bedpost and the sheets still smelled of the blonde woman's perfume — cheap, cloying, nothing like jasmine — and nausea hit me so hard my vision darkened at the edges.
"Ada."
I said it aloud. To the empty room. To the scattered food. To the shadows that recoiled from the sound as though her name were a blade.
"Ada, what have I —"
The runes ignited.
