"Tonight."
"Bold. The full family introduction. Give Elif my love. And tell your father I still owe him for that card game — but I intend to die before paying."
He walked away, whistling, and I sat with my cold tea and the weight of what he'd almost said.
Because Sarp knew. Maybe not the details — not the shadows, not the torture, not the dark singing satisfaction that had coursed through my blood as Tahir screamed. But he knew the shape of it. Knew me well enough to see the thing I was hiding, even if he was generous enough to let me hide it.
A man is dead.
And the worst part wasn't the death. The worst part was the memory of how it had felt — the shadows answering my rage, the power surging through me like something waking from a long sleep, the moment I'd stood over Tahir's broken body and the dominant sensation hadn't been horror. It had been satisfaction.
What kind of person feels satisfaction watching someone suffer?
The dining hall noise pressed in — laughter, clattering plates, the bright morning sounds of people living uncomplicated lives. I pushed my tray away and stared at my gloved hands.
Tonight. I was taking Ada to meet my parents. Properly. Not the stolen glances when she visited the border market, not the awkward nod across a crowded courtyard. A real introduction. *This is the woman I love. Please don't tell her I'm a monster.*
The thought of it — of sitting across from Elif with Ada beside me, of watching my mother read every secret on my face the way she always did — should have terrified me. It did terrifyme. But underneath the fear was something else, something so unfamiliar it took me a moment to identify it.
Hope.
I didn't deserve hope. Not after Tahir. Not after the courtyard with the cherry blossoms and everything I'd done to push her away. But hope didn't care about deserving. It just grew, stubborn and persistent, like the weeds that pushed through the cracks in the border district streets no matter how many times the priests burned them back.
I pressed my thumb against the scar on my jaw. The one she'd given me. It ached faintly, the way it always did when I thought about her.
And without warning, my mind slipped backwards — not to the courtyard this time, not to the cruelty. Further. All the way back to the beginning.
The Boundary Quarter. Summer. I was fifty-six years old — still a child by our reckoning, still small and knobby-kneed and young enough to believe a fort made of sticks could keep the world out.
The forest behind our apartment building was technically off-limits — a strip of ancient woodland that marked the border between the Light Court's jurisdiction and the unclaimed lands beyond, where the trees grew so thick the eternal light barely reached the forest floor. My mother had forbidden me from going past the third oak. I went past the third oak every day.
It was mine, that forest. The one place in the Light Court where nobody watched me, nobody looked at my patched clothes and my mother's tiny apartment and decided what I was worth. I knew every path, every hollow tree, every stream crossing. I'dbuilt a fort from fallen branches in a clearing where the canopy opened just enough to let a single column of light through, and I spent my afternoons there pretending I was something other than a border rat whose mother flinched at shadows.
I was sitting in that fort, whittling a stick into something that was supposed to be a sword but looked more like a sick snake, when I heard crashing through the undergrowth. Not animal sounds — too clumsy, too loud, accompanied by the particular graceless stumbling of someone who'd never set foot anywhere wilder than a garden.
I had my stick-sword raised before the intruder burst through the bracken.
A girl. My age, maybe a bit younger — small, dark-haired, barefoot. Her dress was white silk, the kind that cost more than my mother earned in a year, and it was destroyed — ripped at the hem, streaked with mud, a long green smear across the front where she'd clearly slid down something she shouldn't have been climbing. There were twigs in her hair. Scratches on her arms. And her face — flushed, wild-eyed, lit with the most ferocious joy I'd ever seen on another person.
I knew that face, though. Everybody knew that face.
Ada. Daughter of Gün Ata, God of Light and Love. Heir to the Palace of Light. The most protected girl in two realms, currently standing in my secret forest with mud on her silk and a look like she'd never been freer.
I should have melted back into the trees. Border rats survived by staying invisible — we learned that young. She was everything the Light Court valued and I wasn't: golden, watched over, worth something. My forest wasn't hers to stumble into.
I didn't move.
She caught her breath, tipped her head back to find the column of light falling through the canopy gap, and — apparently not caring that a strange boy was watching her with a raised stick — spread her arms and turned a slow, ridiculous, perfect circle in the beam of light, as though she was claiming the clearing.
She was being chased. I could hear the distant, increasingly frantic voice of a woman calling a name I didn't catch, the sound of someone trying to follow the same path through the undergrowth with considerably less enthusiasm.
The girl saw me. Saw my fort. Saw the gap between the branches where a small body could squeeze through and disappear.
"Move," she said.
Not please. Not excuse me. Not any of the polished little phrases a girl in a silk dress was supposed to use. Just *move*, with the force of someone who expected everything around her to do as she said.
"No. This is my fort."
