"The entrance exams missed a lot of things." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Serkan. Start talking."
He talked. Haltingly at first, the words coming in jagged pieces while he flinched away from every movement of my hands. I didn't know what I was doing — that was the truth I kept having to steady myself against. I was following instinct and whatever the shadows showed me when I paid attention to them, a thread around the wrist tightening when the words stopped, a brush against the throat when he started to go vague and evasive. They seemed to know things. Where to press. How hard. It frightened me in a way I couldn't afford to look at directly.
Steady. Focus. Listen.
Serkan's faction was larger than I'd suspected. Six council members, a dozen minor lords, two Academy professors who administered shadow-blood testing. They'd been building for years — since Gün Ata first showed signs of weakening. The purification expansion wasn't just zealotry; it was infrastructure. Every new registry, every half-blood catalog was another brick in a system designed to be ready when the old god fell.
And Ada was the centerpiece. Not as a ruler — they'd never allow that. As a vessel. A wife. A divine bloodline to be bred with the right family.
"Those were Serkan's words," Tahir gasped. "Not mine. I respect the princess —"
"You called her pathetic."
"I was —"
I moved my wrist. I didn't think about it, didn't plan it — the shadow surged and I didn't stop it in time and Tahir's arm wrenched upward, the joint going wrong with a sound that echoed through the trees.
His scream sent birds erupting from the canopy.
And something in me responded to that sound. Not the horror I should have felt. Something lower. Older. A pulse of dark satisfaction that ran through my blood like heat, that made the shadows swell and thicken and push outward, and I stumbled back a step from the sheer force of it —
No.
I yanked my hands in, pressed them flat against my thighs. The shadows pulled back with a resistance that felt physical, like trying to hold something against a current, and I stood there shaking for a full four seconds while Tahir sobbed into the dirt.
"Lord Cevdet," he gasped. "The old one. He's the real architect. Please — please, I've told you everything —"
I believed him. That was the rational assessment. I believed him and I needed to walk away right now, before I did something I hadn't planned and couldn't take back, before the thing under my skin made another decision I hadn't consciously reached.
I was my father's son. I didn't know what that meant yet. I was beginning to suspect it meant something terrible.
STOP.
The word came from somewhere deep — Elif's son, surfacing at last, clawing through the darkness with everything he had.
Stop. A man is kneeling in front of you, broken and weeping, and you are enjoying it. This is not who you are. This is not who she would want you to be.
I wrenched the shadows back.
The effort was physical — like tearing something from my own chest. The darkness resisted. It didn't want to retreat. It wanted Tahir's fear, his pain, wanted to press deeper and take more. And the terrifying thing was how much of me agreed with it.
But Elif's son held. Barely. By his fingernails. Shaking and sick and horrified by the satisfaction still echoing through his blood.
Tahir had stopped screaming. His head hung forward, chin on his chest, breathing shallow and ragged. The pain had done what pain always did eventually — taken him somewhere the mind goes when the body can't cope anymore. His eyes were open but unfocused, seeing nothing.
Unconscious. Or close enough.
I stood over him and breathed. In. Out. Counted the breaths the way my mother had taught me when I was small and the nightmares came —breathe, my love, just breathe, the dark can't hurt you if you breathe.
She'd been wrong about that. The dark could hurt. The dark could do terrible, precise, exhilarating things, and the worst part wasn't the doing.
It was that I hadn't known. I still didn't know — what I was, where this came from, whether it had always been in me waiting or whether Ada's hands on my face in that garden two weeks ago had cracked something open that couldn't be closed again. Theshadows had shown up and I had used them and I had no idea what that made me.
I pulled on my gloves. Checked the rope — secure, tight, but not tight enough to kill. He'd be found in the morning. Some servant taking the forest path, some early rider. They'd find a lord's son bound between trees with a dislocated shoulder and no memory of who did it, and they'd blame the Shadow Court because that was what the Light Court did. Everything dark, everything violent, everything that shattered the golden illusion — it was always the Shadow Court.
I walked away.
CHAPTER 7
