"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say something wise and infuriating, and I'm telling you now — don't."
Milan picked up his practice sword, returned it to the rack. Moved toward the door.
"I'll only say this," he said quietly. "I've watched Ada since I arrived this morning. The way she carries herself. The way she looked at the purification square from her window like it was breaking her apart." A pause. "She doesn't look at Sarp the way she looks at you."
"She looks at me like she wants to set me on fire. She literally did set me on fire."
"Yes," Milan said. "That's what I mean."
He paused at the door. "Your mother worries. Come home tonight. I'll cook." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Badly, as usual. But I'll cook."
He left.
I stood alone in the training hall with dawn turning the dust to gold and my hands wrapped in bloody cloth and the word jasmine sitting in my chest like a stone I couldn't swallow.
Four practice dummies. A dead girl named Elif. A best friend who'd just declared war on my self-control with a smile and an apple.
Ada was nothing to me. A childhood friend who'd outlived her usefulness, who I'd outgrown the way you outgrew toys and fairy tales. I'd been making that clear for years. Sarp had helped me make it clear.
The memory came the way it always did — unbidden, unstoppable, dragging me under like a current I'd never learned to swim against.
The Academy courtyard. Spring. Cherry blossoms drifting like pink snow.
I'd been avoiding Ada for months. Leaving rooms when she entered. Finding excuses not to walk the same corridors. She'd noticed — of course she'd noticed — but I let her think I was busy, or bored, or cruel. Anything was easier than the truth. I was a nobody.
A scholarship student with no family name, no fortune, no lineage. The son of a woman who lived in a two-room apartment in the border district and flinched at her own shadow. I'd clawed my way into the Academy on talent alone,and every day I walked those golden halls surrounded by lordlings who'd inherited what I had to fight for, the distance between what I was and what Ada deserved grew wider.
She was Gün Ata's daughter. The heir to the Palace of Light. Destined for a political marriage to some pure-blooded lord who could offer her armies and alliances and a future that matched the golden world she'd been born into.
Not a border rat who owned two shirts and whose mother removed every mirror from their home for reasons she wouldn't explain.
I'd tried to let her go quietly. Tried to drift, to stop appearing at the places I knew she'd be, to look through her instead of at her. But Ada didn't let people drift. She pursued. She cornered. She showed up with those golden eyes full of hurt and confusion and demanded to know what she'd done wrong.
Every time she got close, the wanting got worse. Not just her body — the wanting of a life I had no right to. A future where I woke up beside her. Where I was enough. Where the gap between a princess and a nobody didn't matter.
I knew it would never close. Knew that the longer I let her hope, the harder the fall.
So I decided to make her hate me. One devastating blow. Not slowly, not gently — surgery. Brutal, stupid surgery performed by a boy too thick to know there were kinder ways to cut.
I gathered the lordlings by the fountain. Told Sarp I was going to have some fun with the princess — harmless teasing, I let him think. He didn't know the full plan. Not until it was too late.
And then she walked across the courtyard. Cherry blossoms in her dark hair. Golden eyes bright with the hope I was about to destroy.
"Hakan. Can we talk? I just wanted to ask you something."
My name in her mouth. Breathless. Trusting.
I almost stopped. Almost told her the truth — that I was pulling away because I loved her, because loving her was a cruelty I couldn't inflict on either of us, because the world didn't let boys like me have girls like her.
But if I told her that, she'd argue. She'd say she didn't care about names or titles. She'd look at me with those eyes and I'd believe her, and we'd spend months pretending the world would bend for us before it broke us instead.
Better a clean cut.
"Did you think I was interested in you?" The words tasted like poison. Every syllable was a knife I was driving into myself. "Did you think because I was nice to the Light God's daughter, I wanted to fuck her?"
The way her face crumpled. The light dimming in her eyes — actually dimming, as if I'd reached inside and snuffed something out.
