"You'll get away." He caught my hand before I could leave, pulled me back for one last kiss. "You always do."
I slipped through the door and into the corridor, smoothing my hair and composing my expression into something that didn'tscreamI just came on a man's fingers in the music room.The servants' passage was empty, the late afternoon light casting long amber shadows across the stone.
Movement at the window caught my eye. I turned, and there she was—Melo, sitting on the ledge outside the corridor window, watching me with turquoise eyes that held too much intelligence for an animal. Today her eyes held something new. Not the usual watchfulness. Not warning, exactly.
Sadness.
As if she knew something I didn't. As if she could see further down the road we were walking and wanted to tell me to turn back but knew I wouldn't listen.
"What is it?" I murmured, pausing to meet her gaze. "What do you see that I can't?"
The fox stared back, unblinking. Then she turned and disappeared over the ledge, a flash of russet against gray stone, gone before I could call after her.
A chill passed through me despite the warm afternoon. I shook it off and continued toward my chambers, but the sadness in those turquoise eyes stayed with me like a bruise.
* * *
The execution was held in Justice Square the following afternoon.
I told myself I wouldn't watch. Told myself I would close my curtains and read a book and pretend the drums echoing across the city were something else entirely, that I didn't recognize the tension that filled the air around the palace. But when the timecame, I found myself standing at my window like everyone else, staring down at the distant square where a crowd had gathered to watch a man die.
The prisoner was a shadow runner—a merchant caught smuggling goods across the border. Spices, silks, luxury items the Light Court had banned to weaken shadow trade. Nothing dangerous. Nothing worth dying for.
But smuggling was treason, and treason meant purification.
"They say he has children," my handmaiden Sera had reported that morning, practically glowing with anticipation. "Three of them. They'll be registered after, of course. Watched for signs of taint."
"And his wife?"
"Shadow Court. She won't be allowed to collect the body." Sera smiled. "Just as well, really. Who would want to touch something so corrupted?"
I'd said nothing. Just watched her bustle around my chambers, laying out gowns for me to choose from, completely oblivious to the horror of her own words. This felt natural and normal to her. But I'd been seeing it for months now—the cracks in the golden surface. The plisk servants walking with their eyes down. The cleansing ceremonies I once thought were mercy. The way my father watched everything with calculation rather than kindness. Ferit's casual cruelty, spoken aloud in gardens where anyone might hear, because no one in the Light Court would think to challenge it.
I kept questioning the Light Court methods. Kept seeing the rot beneath the shine.
Now, standing at my window, I watched the crowd swell. Hundreds of Light Court citizens, dressed in their finest whites and golds, jostling for better views like this was a festival rather than a murder. Vendors moved through the masses selling honeyed nuts and spiced wine. Children sat on their parents' shoulders. Everyone was smiling.
The drums changed rhythm—faster now, building toward the main event.
This is what centuries of lies look like, I thought.Not monsters. Not villains who know what they are. Just people who genuinely cannot see it.
I couldn't see the prisoner from here. Couldn't see the golden circle they would have forced him to kneel in, the chains that would hold him still, the crystal lens that would focus Gün Ata's divine light into a weapon. But I could imagine it. Had seen it done before, in the Palace of Light, to children whose only crime was being born with the wrong blood.
The drums reached their crescendo.
And then the screaming started.
Even from this distance, I could hear it—a man's voice, ragged with agony, begging for mercy that would never come. The crowd cheered. Actually cheered, like they were watching a tournament rather than a torture.
I gripped the windowsill until my knuckles went white. I wished I could be somewhere away, with Hakan, not even aware of what my holy father was doing. We were supposed to be good, the Shadow Court was the evil one with the Lord of Darkness.
"Barbaric, isn't it?"
I turned to find Sera standing behind me, her face arranged in an expression of delicate distaste. "The Shadow Court, I mean. They say they do even worse to their prisoners. At least we offer purification—a chance to burn away the poisonous shadows in their blood and die cleansed. The shadow lords just torture for sport."
"Is that what we tell ourselves?"
Sera blinked. "My lady?"
