"Ada." His voice was gentle. Knowing. The same voice he'd used the night of the ball, when they'd pulled apart from the kiss and looked at each other and both understood — without needing to say it — that whatever they were, it wasn't this. He'd laughed first. She'd laughed second. And that had been the end of it — no awkwardness, no grief, just the quiet relief of two people who liked each other enough not to pretend. "If you need to talk to him, talk to him. I'm not standing in your way. I never was."
I couldn't explain that talking wasn't what I needed. That what I needed was so far beyond talking it didn't have a name — that every night I lay in my chambers with my body aching and my magic reaching for something dark that wasn't there, and the wanting was so acute it felt like illness.
A week after the ball, I couldn't sleep.
The palace was locked down — guards at every entrance, light-magic wards humming in the corridors. I lay staring at the ceiling, and all I could see when I closed my eyes was his face at the assembly. The hunger he'd let me see for two seconds before shutting it away.
I got up. Pulled a cloak over my nightgown. Took the servant passage behind my wardrobe.
I didn't decide to find him. My feet decided. Through the eastern wing, past the locked classrooms, up the narrow staircase to the abandoned tower where students weren't allowed.
The door was ajar. Faint light from inside — not lantern light. Something colder.
I pushed it open.
He was on the floor.
Shirtless, his back against the stone wall, legs stretched in front of him. A knife lay beside his right hand. His left forearm was laid open from wrist to elbow — not deep, not desperate. Precise. The cut of someone conducting an experiment.
His blood was wrong.
It pooled on the stone floor, and it wasn't fully red. The edges were dark — black, threaded with something that moved beneath the surface like living ink. He was staring at it the way a man stares at a death sentence written in his own handwriting.
"Hakan."
His head snapped up. For one unguarded second — terror, exhaustion, the raw desperation of someone watching himself become something monstrous. Then the mask. The cold.
"Get out."
"Your arm —"
"I said get out, Ada." He reached for his shirt, smearing blood across the fabric. "You shouldn't be here."
"You cut yourself open." I was already moving toward him. "Let me see —"
"Don't touch me." He pressed back against the wall. "I mean it."
"No."
"Ada —"
"I said no." I knelt in front of him. Close enough to see the cut — the blood that moved against gravity, crawling toward the shadow pooling on the floor like it wanted to join it. "How long has your blood been like this?"
"Does it matter?" His laugh was hollow. "My blood is turning black. My magic is — I can't control it anymore." He stopped. Jaw working. "Go back to Sarp. Go back to the light."
"Stop telling me where to go."
"You don't understand what I'm becoming."
"Then show me."
Something cracked behind his eyes. He held up his bleeding arm. The darkness in his blood writhed on his skin, alive, reacting to his emotions. “My blood is turning black. My magic is wrong, Ada. It doesn't match Milan's. It doesn't match anything I've been taught. My mother checks my hands while I sleep — she thinks I don't know but I do — and whatever she's looking for, she's terrified she'll find it. Every day the darkness gets louder and I don't know what I am."
I stared at him, thinking how to respond, how to comfort him.
"Hit me," he said, his tone commanding.
I blinked and then shook my head.
