The air was sharp and cold, carrying the scent of night-blooming jasmine from somewhere far below. The sky was thick with stars — the kind of sky that only existed this far from the court center, where the light magic didn't bleed upward and wash everything pale.
I leaned against the low stone wall, letting the cold bite through the thin silk of my dress, and felt him watching me from across the rooftop.
He'd been quiet since dinner. Not his usual quiet — the thoughtful kind, where I could almost see the gears turning behind his green eyes. This was something tighter. Something coiled. The bond mark conversation had never really ended — just gone underground, the way things did with Hakan, burrowing beneath the surface where it could fester.
"Levent's nephew was looking at you tonight," he said.
I almost laughed. "Aslan? He was being polite."
"He was looking at your mouth." I heard him move — boots on stone, deliberate, unhurried. "He was imagining what it would feel like to kiss you. I could see it in his pathetic fucking face."
"Hakan —"
"Don't." The word was a growl against my throat, because he was behind me now, his chest pressed to my back, his hands on my hips, fingers curling into the silk hard enough to wrinkle it. "Don't tell me I'm being unreasonable. Don't tell me he's harmless. I don't care."
He spun me around. My back hit the cold stone, and the shock of it against my heated skin made me gasp. Before I could draw another breath, his hands were around my wrists, dragging them up, pinning them above my head in one brutal grip. The stone pressed into my spine — cold, unyielding — and his body caged me from the front, all hard muscle and barely leashed violence.
His green eyes burned into mine. Not soft. Not loving. Something far more dangerous — desire so dark it bloomed behind his irises like ink dropped in water, spreading, consuming. His jaw was clenched tight enough that a muscle jumped beneath the skin, and his chest heaved against mine with every breath.
"You have no idea," he said, his voice dropping to something guttural, barely human, "what it does to me. Watching someone else look at you. Watching them think they could have even a fraction of what's mine."
"I'm not a possession, Hakan."
His laugh was dark and humourless. "No. You're worse. You're the only thing in this world that could bring me to my knees,and every man in that room can sense it." He pressed closer, his hips grinding against mine, and I felt him — hard, straining, furious with want. "They see you and they think,maybe. Maybe she'll smile at me. Maybe she'll let me close. Maybe one day she'll spread those pretty thighs for someone who isn't him."
The crudeness of it should have made me angry. Instead, heat flooded my core so fast it made me dizzy.
"And I have to sit there," he continued, his mouth hovering over mine, sharing my air, "and pretend I'm civilised. Pretend I wouldn't gut every last one of them for the crime of breathing the same air as you."
"You're insane," I whispered, but my voice came out breathless, wrecked.
"For you?" His teeth scraped my jaw, dragging down to the sensitive skin below my ear. "Absolutely. Completely. Irreversibly fucking insane."
His free hand slid up my thigh, rough and proprietary, bunching silk as it went, fingers digging into the soft flesh hard enough to bruise. I should have pushed him away. Should have reminded him that I wasn't something to be claimed, that I had my own power, my own name, my own light that could reduce him to cinders.
Instead, I arched into him.
"Look at me." A command, not a request. When my eyes met his, what I saw there made my breath catch — raw, feral devotion. Not gentle. Not kind. The kind of love that would sooner watch the world burn than lose what was his. "I need you to hear this, Ada. I need you to remember it."
"Then say it."
He released my wrists only to seize my jaw, tilting my face up, holding me still so I couldn't look away. His thumb pressed against my lower lip, dragging it down, and his eyes tracked the movement with a hunger that made my thighs clench.
"You aremine." Each word was bitten off, deliberate, carved into the air between us like a blood oath. "Every part of you. Every breath, every sound, every inch of skin that's ever going to be touched — it belongs to me. And if another man ever puts his hands on you — if another man evendreamsof knowing what you taste like, what you sound like when you come, what you look like underneath me —" His voice dropped to a snarl, his grip on my jaw tightening until it bordered on pain. "I will rip his still-beating heart from his chest and I will make you watch it pump its last. Do you understand me? I will tear it out with my bare hands and hold it in front of your face so you never —never— forget what happens when someone touches what's mine."
The words hit me like a shockwave. Savage. Obscene. So far beyond anything a sane woman should find arousing that it terrified me — not because of what he said, but because of the dark, twisted part of me thatwantedit. That heard the violence in his promise and felt it like a caress between my legs.
"You're sick," I breathed.
"I'm yours." He kissed me then — brutal, consuming, all teeth and tongue and the copper-sweet taste of the wine he'd been drinking. His hand slid from my jaw to my throat, not squeezing, just resting there — feeling my pulse hammer against his palm like a caged thing. "And you're mine. Say it."
"I've always been yours." The words spilled out before I could stop them, raw and honest in a way I hadn't intended. "Since the first time you looked at me. You know that."
Something cracked behind his eyes. He lifted me onto the stone ledge, pinning me there with his hips, and my legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, drawing him against the aching heat between my thighs.
"Again," he rasped against my mouth. "Say it again."
"I'm yours, Hakan. Only ever yours."
