The shadows churned around me, restless, wanting. The pleasure of the killing still hummed through my nerves like the afterglow of something obscene. I wanted more. The honest part of me — the part that was going to keep me awake for weeks after this — wanted more.
Behind me, Ada's breathing. Ragged. Uneven. The sound cut through everything.
I turned.
She had pulled herself up against the stone, holding her dress closed with one fist. Blood ran from her split lip and from a gash along her hairline where her head had hit the ground. The bruise on her cheekbone had spread, her left eye swelling. Her arms were scored with cuts from where she'd fought them. And on the skin of her stomach and chest — red marks. Finger-shaped. Already darkening.
The pleasure in my blood curdled into something else entirely.
My knees gave out. The shoulder wound opened fresh and hot and I went down hard. The world grayed at the edges.
"He's losing too much blood." Melo was beside Ada, pressed against her leg. "Bind the shoulder. Tight."
Ada crossed to me. Her hands shook but her grip was steady when she tore a strip from what remained of her dress and pressed it against the wound. I hissed through my teeth.
"Hold still."
She bound it tight, her face close to mine, her breath hitching every few seconds in a way she was trying to hide. The bruise on her cheekbone was inches from my face. The handprints on her skin visible above the torn fabric.
I reached for her face. She flinched — a tiny, involuntary thing — and then held still while my fingers hovered over the bruise without touching it.
Something shifted beneath my skin. Not the violent, consuming shadow of the fight — something quieter. The darkness in my fingertips warmed. Changed. It moved through the binding Ada had tied and I felt the wound in my shoulder close — not heal, not fully, but knit enough that the bleeding stopped and the bone-deep ache dulled to something bearable. The cracked ribs settled. The swelling in my hand went down.
Ada stared at my shoulder. "How —"
I didn't answer. I pressed my palm gently against her bruised cheek and let the warmth move through me into her. I didn't understand what I was doing. But the shadow seemed to. It found the split in her lip and sealed it. Found the gash on her hairline and closed it to a thin line. The bruise beneath my hand faded from purple to yellow to nothing.
I couldn't reach the handprints on her body. Couldn't bring myself to touch those marks. But the shadows moved on their own — thin tendrils, gentle as breath, sliding across her skin where those fingers had been, and where they passed, the redness faded. Erased. As if his touch had never happened.
Ada watched the shadows move across her skin. She didn't flinch this time.
"Hakan," she whispered. "Your eyes."
I didn't ask. I knew. I'd seen them in the pool of blood. Green going black.
Melo had been watching in silence. Now she stepped forward.
"Whatever bloodline this comes from, it isn't anything the Light Court has seen in a very long time. And your mother knows more than she's told you."
Silence.
"The rifts," Melo continued, quieter now. "Someone will have felt them tear open. The shadow magic. By morning the entire court will have a version of what happened here, and it won't be the truth." She looked at Ada. "Your father needs to hear this from you. Not from Serkan. Not from the priests. From you."
"And if I go to him," Ada said slowly, “What about Hakan?"
"No one. He goes to his mother alone." Melo held Ada's gaze. "She owes him answers she's been hiding for two hundred years. She won't give them with an audience."
Ada looked at me. I could see her fighting it — every instinct telling her to stay, to refuse, to plant herself beside me and face whatever came next as a pair.
"She's right," I said.
Ada's eyes snapped to mine. "Hakan —"
"Go to him." I covered her hands with mine, held them there one moment longer. Her knuckles were split from the fight, dried blood dark in the creases. I wanted to press my mouth to every wound and instead I just held on. "You go to your father. You tell him what happened, what those men tried to do. You control what he hears. If he learns it from you first, if he sees your face and knows you're safe and you chose to come to him yourself —"
"What if he doesn't listen?" Her voice had gone raw. "What if he decides you're not worth hearing out?"
"Then at least we'll know." I turned her hands over in mine, pressed my lips to her palms — one, then the other. "And you'll find me, and we'll face it together. But we have to try this first. We have to give him the chance to be the man you believe he is."
