She turned from the window. Her eyes were bright. Not with tears — with the particular shine of someone revisiting a version of their life where they were happy and knowing it's gone.
"We had years, Hakan. Good years. He laughed with me. He cooked for me — badly, horribly, because he'd never had to cook a single thing in his entire existence and he burned everything he touched and then got furious at the pan as if the pan had betrayed him. He held me at night and told me things he'd never told anyone. About his son. About the wars. About Kaan's mother, who he'd loved before me and lost. About the emptiness that lived inside him no matter how much power he consumed." She swallowed. "I thought I was saving him. I thought if I loved him hard enough, if I stayed long enough, the man I knew in private would become the man he was in public."
CHAPTER 17
THE DEVIL WITH TWO FACES
Hakan
The silence changed. Darkened.
"When did it go wrong?" I asked.
"Slowly. That's the cruelty of it — it wasn't sudden. It was a tide going out. So gradual that by the time I noticed the water was gone, I was standing on dry sand wondering when the sea had left." She sat back down. Her hands were steady now, folded in her lap, and that steadiness frightened me more than the trembling had. "I found the first one by accident. A woman in the lower chambers. Beautiful. Empty-eyed. She didn't speak. She just existed. Like a doll someone had forgotten to put away."
"One of his —"
"Lovers. Playthings. Women he'd seduced the way he'd seduced me — with charm and attention and the full devastating force of his focus. Women who'd believed they were special. Who'd been told they were the one he'd chosen." Her jaw tightened. "I askedhim about her. He said she was from a long time ago. That it was different with me. That I was different."
"And you believed him."
"The first time. And the second, when I found another. And the third." She laughed — short, harsh. "By the fifth I'd stopped asking and started looking. There were dozens of them, Hakan. Scattered through Kara Cehennem like broken furniture. Some had been there for centuries. Some were barely conscious. Some had been beautiful once — you could see it in the bones of their faces, the way they held themselves even when their minds were gone."
"He kept them."
"He forgot them. That was worse. He didn't keep them out of cruelty — he kept them because he genuinely forgot they existed. They'd served their purpose. He'd consumed whatever it was about them that fascinated him and moved on, and they were left behind in the dark, and no one came for them because no one leaves Kara Cehennem."
She looked at me steadily.
"I started to see it in how he looked at me. The same fascination, the same intensity — but beneath it, a patience that unsettled me. He'd done this before. You could feel it. The courtship. The devotion. The slow withdrawal when the novelty faded.”Her voice went quiet. "I loved him. And I watched him love me back. And I understood, finally, that his love had a shelf life, and when it expired I would end up in those chambers with the rest of them. Empty-eyed. Forgotten."
The shadows in my hands were churning. I pressed them flat against my thighs.
"When I told him I wanted to leave, he hit me." Flat. Matter-of-fact. "It wasn't rage. It was correction. The way you'd discipline an animal that had forgotten its training. And when I fell, he stood over me and explained very calmly that I was free to go whenever I wished. But I would go without my legs. He'd heal them wrong, he said. So I'd crawl for the rest of eternity as a reminder of what happened to women who mistook his patience for weakness."
My vision went dark at the edges.
"I stopped arguing. I smiled when he wanted me to smile. I performed when he wanted entertainment. I survived." She lifted her chin. "And then I discovered I was pregnant."
The room went quiet. I could hear the shadows humming beneath my skin.
"He didn't know?"
"Gods don't think to look for such mortal things. By the time I was certain, I had already begun planning. I couldn't let him have you. I couldn't let him turn you into what he wanted — a weapon, an heir forged in cruelty. Or worse, another thing he'd love fiercely for a while and then forget in a dark corridor."
"How did you get out?"
"A servant who still remembered being human. She showed me a passage through the shadow realms that even Erlik didn't monitor. I ran for three days without stopping. I didn't know if he was behind me. I didn't know if I'd survive." She smiled — thin, fierce. "I survived. You survived. And I have been hiding ever since."
"And Milan?" My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "Where does Milan fit?"
The question broke something in her composure. Her mouth trembled — just once — before she steadied it.
"Milan found us three months after you were born. I was half-starved, living in a border village, barely surviving. He was passing through on one of his wandering trips. He saw a woman alone with a newborn and he stopped." Her voice softened. "He didn't have to. He owed me nothing. But he stopped. And he stayed. And the first time he held you, he looked at you like you were the most extraordinary thing he'd ever seen."
"Did he know? About Erlik?"
"I told him everything. He deserved that much." She met my eyes. "He stayed anyway. He said it didn't matter who your blood father was. That you were a baby who needed protecting and he was a man who could protect you. It was that simple for him. It was always that simple."
