"You removed your gloves because you'd spilled wine on them. That's not seduction, that's laundry."
"She didn't know that. The effect was devastating." He took a piece of cheese from my tray. "My reputation is in ruins. Three years of careful cultivation — the mystique, the danger, the air of romantic unpredictability — reduced to harmless. I might as well become a priest."
"You'd make a terrible priest."
"I'd make a spectacular priest. The entire congregation would be in love with me within a week." He dunked the bread in my tea without asking. "The problem is, word's got around that I took the Light God's daughter to the Moonlight Ball and she chosethe brooding scholarship student instead. It's been reframed as a rejection. As if I — Sarp Akay — was found wanting."
There it was. The thing we hadn't talked about.
Three weeks of Ada and me together, and Sarp had said nothing. Not a word of resentment. He'd joked in the courtyard — *take care of her, you brooding bastard* — and carried on as if the kiss at the ball had never happened. As if he'd known before their lips had even parted that she wasn't his.
"Sarp."
"Don't." He pointed the remaining bread at me. "Whatever earnest, guilt-soaked speech you're composing behind those brooding eyes, I don't want it."
"I should have said something weeks ago."
"You should have done many things weeks ago. Years ago. You are, historically, quite bad at doing things when they should be done." He chewed. "But if you're about to apologize for being with Ada, save it. That would actually insult me."
"I'm not apologising for being with her."
"Good. Because I kissed her at the ball and she smiled at me the way you smile at a cousin who's given you a thoughtful birthday gift. I knew then." Something real moved beneath the performance, just for a moment. "A woman doesn't leave a perfectly charming man standing at a fountain to chase someone she hates into the dark. Whatever's between you two — it was there before I entered the picture and it'll be there long after I've moved on to terrorising other women with my devastating good looks."
"You're not —"
"If you say a better man than me, I will throw this tea in your face." The lopsided grin. The one that cost him more than he'd ever let on. "I'm not a better man. I'm a different man. One who knows when the game's over and has the good taste to exit gracefully. Besides, I'm treating Lady Mira's assessment as a personal challenge. New horizons. Fresh victims."
He was deflecting. Always deflecting — burying whatever hurt beneath layers of charm and performance, the way he'd done since I'd first known him.
"For what it's worth," I said, "I don't deserve her either."
"Obviously. But she's chosen you anyway, which means either she's catastrophically bad at judging character or she sees something the rest of us are too sensible to look for." He leaned back. "Either way, I'm choosing to be magnanimous about it. Write sonnets about my selflessness. Commission a statue."
He paused to steal the last of my bread, and his tone shifted — still casual, still Sarp, but the way he brought it up told me it had been on his mind.
"Strange business about Tahir, though."
My hands didn't move. My expression didn't change. I'd had weeks to practice that.
"What about him?"
"Dead in the Borderland Forest. Tied to a tree. Dislocated shoulder. No visible wounds." Sarp shook his head. "The court's calling it a Shadow Court assassination. Serkan's already using it to push for increased patrols and expanded purification." He glanced at me. "Were you still at the ball when they found him? I lost track of you that night."
"I left early. Went for a walk."
"A walk." He nodded absently, tearing the bread. "Terrible night for it. Cold. Dark." A beat. "Lot of forest between the Academy and the border."
"Since when do you care about politics, Sarp?"
"I don't. I care about the fact that a man I once shared a bench with in Advanced Light Theory is dead, and nobody seems particularly interested in finding out who actually did it." He brushed the crumbs from his fingers. "But you're right. Not my business. I'm sure it was exactly what Serkan says it was — shadow assassins, very convenient, nothing to question."
He let it hang there. That was Sarp's way — he'd lay the shape of the truth at your feet and wait for you to trip over it in your own time.
I said nothing.
I didn't need to. The guilt said it for me, silently, in the pit of my stomach where I'd been carrying it since the night I'd walked out of that forest with clean hands and the taste of power in my blood. I'd left him alive. Checked the ropes. Told myself someone would find him at dawn. But nobody had found him in time, and a young lord was dead because I hadn't been able to control what I was becoming.
"Anyway." Sarp stood, the heaviness vanishing beneath his usual easy charm like it had never been there. "I have a reputation to rebuild and a Lady Mira to re-terrify. Are you taking Ada to meet your mother today?"
