"I bet I could have her begging within five minutes. You know how these sheltered ones are. Starving for it."
The lordlings laughed. Sarp's face changed — I saw the exact moment he understood this wasn't a game. He tried to intervene. Too late. Because nobody knows how to stop a man determined to destroy himself.
And then I kissed her.
Three seconds. Her mouth soft and warm and open against mine, her fingers gripping the front of my shirt like she'd been waiting her whole life for permission to touch me. She kissed me back without thinking — no guard, no calculation, just the raw, desperate honesty of a girl who'd finally got what she wanted. I felt her smile against my mouth. Felt her heart hammering through the thin fabric between us. Felt every wall she'd built come down at once because she trusted me, still trusted me, even now.
I memorized all of it. The taste of her. The sound she made. The way her body softened against mine like coming home.
I memorized it because I knew I would never have it again.
I pulled back. Looked into her eyes.
And laughed.
"Three seconds. Three seconds before she was moaning into my mouth like a tavern whore."
She ran. Cherry blossoms scattered behind her. The lordlings howled. Sarp stood very still, looking at me like he'd just watched something die.
After the courtyard emptied, he found me in the training hall. I was destroying practice dummies with my bare fists — not magic, just knuckles, because I needed my hands to hurt, needed the physical pain to match the rest of it.
"What the fuck was that?"
"A mercy."
"A mercy." He stared at me. "You just publicly humiliated the only person in this court who gives a damn about you, and you're calling it a mercy?"
"She deserves better than me, Sarp. She's Gün Ata's daughter. And I'm —" I gestured at myself, at the blood on my knuckles, at the cramped quarters I shared with my mother in someone else's household. "What am I going to offer her? What kind of future does a scholarship student with no name give a princess?"
"Maybe a future where someone actually loves her instead of using her for politics?"
"Love isn't enough. Not in this world."
He sat down on the floor of the wrecked training hall. Put his head in his hands.
"You're a fucking idiot," he said.
"I know."
"She's going to be destroyed."
"She'll recover. She'll marry some lordling who can give her the life she deserves."
"And you?"
I didn't answer. Because the answer was that I was already destroyed. Had been from the moment I opened my mouth and watched the light die in her eyes. The boy who'd loved Ada since he was old enough to understand what love meant had died in that courtyard along with her trust.
Whatever was left was something else. Something that could function without a heart, because it had just torn its own out and stamped on it in front of a cheering crowd.
The memory released me. 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.
Before I turned on her, we'd been three children in the borderlands. Running through the forests near the Boundary Quarter where my mother kept her tiny apartment, climbing trees and daring each other to cross the shadow line where the light faded and the air turned cold. Ada with jasmine in her wild hair. Sarp with that laugh that hadn't learned to cut yet. And me, watching her even then, before I knew what the watching meant.
The plan had always been the same. Push her away. Keep her at a distance. Make her hate me so completely she'd never get close enough to discover what I was becoming — the dreams of darkness, the singed blankets, the ache in my hands that didn't feel like anything the Academy had taught me. Whatever was wrong with me, whatever was stirring beneath the surface like something waking from a long sleep, Ada couldn't be near it.
The plan was working. She hated me. She should hate me.
So why did my hands shake when Sarp said her name?
