"Did she? Or did you just need to say it?"
Their voices faded, leaving me alone with echoes and the ghost of Hakan's smile and a handprint still burning on my palm.
I hated him.
I hated him.
I repeated it like a prayer all the way back to the palace, and if the words tasted like lies, I refused to acknowledge it.
Melo was waiting on my windowsill when I returned. She sat with her tail curled around her paws, russet fur burnished copper in the dying light, turquoise eyes fixed on me with an expression that was half reproach, half concern. She had been bound to my bloodline for generations—protector, guide, and the only creature in this entire palace who had never once lied to me. She’d never spoken a word to me either, not in all the years I’d known her. But she didn’t need to. I’d learned to read her silences the way other people read faces.
I sank onto the bed and told her everything. About Ferit. About Volkan. About the look on Hakan’s face—that cold, calculated satisfaction, as though a man’s destruction were nothing more than an afternoon’s entertainment.
Melo listened, her ears swivelling with each detail. When I finished, she was quiet for a long time. Then her tail flicked once against the stone—sharp, deliberate—and she tilted her head toward me with something ancient flickering in her gaze. A warning. Or perhaps a sadness.
I knew what she meant. Be careful with that one.
“I hate him,” I whispered.
Melo held my gaze. She didn’t blink. She didn’t need to.
That night, I dreamed of golden light and screaming children.
And of green eyes burning with hunger in the dark.
CHAPTER 2
GROWING IN THE SHADOW
Hakan
The Light Academy stood as testament to everything the Light Court believed itself to be.
Its spires pierced the heavens like prayers made stone, each tower sheathed in marble so white it seemed to glow from within. Crystalline windows caught Gün Ata's eternal radiance and scattered it into rainbows that danced across courtyards where the realm's finest young minds gathered to learn the sacred arts. Fountains sang with voices of pure light, their waters blessed by priests each dawn. Gardens bloomed with flowers that never wilted, their petals permanently kissed by divine magic.
It was beautiful. It was holy. It was the heart of enlightenment in a world perpetually threatened by darkness.
It was also where I learned that nobility had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with cruelty dressed in silk.
I made my way through the eastern colonnade as the afternoon bells chimed the hour, my scholar's robes marking me as one of the fortunate few permitted to walk these sacred halls despite lacking the proper lineage. Lord Kaya's apprentice. A scholarship boy plucked from obscurity because my talent with light theory had caught the attention of someone who mattered.
The other students parted around me like water around stone—not from respect, but from the particular disdain reserved for those who had earned their place rather than inherited it. I had grown accustomed to their sidelong glances, their whispered comments, their casual assumption that my presence somehow diminished their own.
The library awaited me—three hours of research into ancient binding rituals for Lord Kaya's latest project. Tedious work, but necessary. Everything I did was necessary. Every hour of study, every perfectly executed assignment, every moment spent proving myself indispensable brought me one step closer to a future that did not depend on the charity of my betters.
One step closer to becoming someone worthy of?—
I severed the thought before it could fully form. That path led nowhere but madness.
The colonnade opened onto a smaller courtyard, one typically deserted at this hour. I had chosen this route specifically for its solitude, its distance from the main thoroughfares where I might encounter?—
Voices.
I halted mid-stride, pressing into the shadow of a pillar before my mind had fully registered the words floating from the garden alcove ahead.
"—saw her at the ceremony yesterday. Weeping over plisk filth like it was her own kin."
Ferit Ercel. I recognized his voice immediately, that blend of aristocratic drawl and wine-soaked contempt.
