"Hit me." He was on his feet — too fast — and in my space, backing me toward the wall. "Burn me. Brand me again. That's what you do, isn't it? When I get too close, when I push too hard — you light up and you make me bleed." His face was inches from mine. Blood running down his arm, dripping onto the floor between us. "So do it. Prove I can still feel something that isn't shadow.”
"I'm not going to hurt you —"
He grabbed my hand. Pressed my palm flat against his bare chest, right over his heart. The contact was immediate — my light surging to meet the darkness pouring off his skin, the collision that happened every time we touched, gold and black, a war that felt like drowning.
"Do it," he whispered.
My light flared where my skin met his — not in defense, not in warning. It reached for him. Poured into the place where his heart hammered against my fingers as if it was trying to find something buried underneath all that shadow. And for a second I felt it. Him. The real him, trapped under the black, screaming without making a sound.
I hit him.
His head turned. Stayed turned. I watched his chest heave. Watched the red bloom across his cheekbone. Watched his tongue press against the inside of his cheek where my palm had connected.
Then he looked back at me.
His eyes were black. Not green-going-dark. Black.
"Hit me like that again," he said, his voice low enough to scrape bone, "and I'll have you against this wall with your nightgown around your waist before you can take your next breath."
The words went through me like voltage. My hand was still raised. Still stinging. And the heat that flooded my body had nothing to do with light magic and everything to do with the way his mouth shaped the wordnightgown— like he'd been thinking about what was underneath it. Like he'd been thinking about nothing else for weeks.
I hit him again.
Harder. The same cheek. His blood smeared across my palm from where I'd touched his chest — dark and warm, and the sensation of his blood on my skin sent something savage through me that I didn't recognize and didn't want to name.
He moved before the sound finished echoing.
His hand caught my wrist. His body drove mine into the wall — stone cold against my back, him burning against my front. His mouth found my throat and his teeth sank in, not gently, not carefully, and the sound that tore out of me wasn't something a princess should be capable of making.
"I warned you," he said against my skin.
I grabbed his bleeding arm. He hissed — pain, shock — but I didn't let go. I looked at the wound. At the blood that wasn't red, that was the proof of everything the Light Court would execute him for.
I pressed my thumb into the cut.
His whole body jerked. A sound came out of him — guttural and wrecked — and it went straight through my stomach and settledbetween my legs. His blood welled around my thumb, warm and dark, and I dragged my finger through it slowly, tracing the wound from wrist to elbow.
"Ada." My name scraped raw. "What are you doing?"
"Touching you." I brought my bloodied hand up between us. His blood on my fingers — black-red, shimmering faintly with shadow. "Does it disgust you? That I'm not afraid of it?"
He stared at my stained fingers. The mask was crumbling. Layer after layer stripped away until what was left was just him — starving and terrified and wanting so badly it was eating him from the inside.
He caught my hand. Brought my bloodied fingers to his mouth. His lips parted against my stained skin, his tongue tracing the line of his own blood across my fingertips. Hot. Slow. His eyes locked on mine the entire time, watching my face as he tasted his own darkness off my skin.
My legs nearly gave out and the blood drummed in my ears. A whimper escaped me — thin, desperate — and I watched something ignite behind his eyes. The hunger shifted from anguished to predatory.
His bleeding hand slid down my body. Over the fabric of my nightgown, leaving a trail of dark smears across white cotton. My ribs. My hip. My thigh. He gathered the fabric in his fist and pulled it upward. Cold air hit my bare legs and I gasped against his mouth.
"Two weeks." His forehead against mine, breath ragged. "Two fucking weeks watching you smile at him. Watching him touch you. Watching you let him kiss you while I —" His hand found the inside of my thigh. Blood-warm fingers against bareskin, sliding upward and in that moment I stopped breathing, waiting, his fingers were barely inches away–burning. "While I destroyed training halls and cut myself open to see if my blood was still human. While I can’t close my eyes without seeing your face."
Hakan slid his fingers over my clit, slick with his own blood, dark and warm, and I cried out so loudly his other hand clamped over my mouth. He was panting heavily, staring at me as he parted me and slid one inside me.
"Quiet, starlight." His mouth was at my ear, his voice wrecked and vicious at once. "Unless you want every guard in the Academy to find the Light God's daughter in a forbidden tower with a shadow-blood's hand between her legs."
I bit his palm. He groaned — broken, guttural — and his fingers moved.
There was nothing gentle about it, nothing like courtship. This was possession. His bloodied fingers first circled my clit, with excessive slowness, before he eased them inside me. I bit harder into his hand, trying to suppress my moans as the savage heat laced through my core. Hakan was working me with a control that bordered on cruel, finding every nerve and exploiting it, and the wrongness of it — his shadow blood slick between my thighs, his darkness inside my body, corruption and divinity fused at the most intimate point — made everything sharper. Hotter. More.
