I'll fix this, I thought, not sure what I meant by it or whether I meant the illness or Hakan or Serkan or all of it at once. I don't know how yet but I'll fix it. Sleep, Baba. I'm here.
Behind me, the palace was waking. Servants moving through corridors. The distant chime of morning bells. And somewhere in the city below, guards were already moving through the Border District, door by door, dragging people from their homes for the crime of having the wrong blood.
My father was dying.
Hakan was Erlik's son.
Serkan was seizing power.
And I was standing in a hallway with my hand on a door, carrying a truth that could save everything or destroy it, waiting for a god to wake up.
The mark on my sternum pulsed once. Warm. Steady. A reminder that I was not alone, even when I was standing by myself.
I lowered my hand. Straightened my spine. And waited for dawn to finish breaking.
CHAPTER 19
RUNNING
Hakan
I stood at the window and watched Ada go early in the morning — the set of her shoulders, the way she didn't look back, the same spine-straight walk she'd used leaving the clearing. Different reasons now. Same courage. Melo padded beside her, a flash of russet fur against the gray street, and then the morning swallowed them both.
My mother was sleeping in the back room. The packed bags she'd had ready when I walked in last night sat by the door, still full. Nobody had unpacked them. Nobody had said what that meant.
I lasted as long as it took the sun to clear the rooftops before the walls started closing in.
I paced. Checked the window. Paced again. The shadows curled and uncurled at my fingertips, restless, feeding off whatever was churning inside me. They'd been doing that since the clearing — moving without being called, responding to emotions I hadn'tfinished feeling yet. Every time I looked at my hands I expected to see blood.
There wasn't any. I'd scrubbed them raw in my mother's basin last night, the water going black, and scrubbed them again when the first rinse didn't feel like enough. My knuckles were cracked from it. The shadows had tried to heal them. I hadn't let them.
I checked the window again.
The border district was waking up the way it always did — shutters opening, the smell of bread from the bakery three doors down, a woman hanging laundry on a line strung between buildings. Normal. Ordinary. The kind of morning I'd grown up inside, the kind my mother had built around me like a wall to keep the truth out.
That was when I saw the patrol.
Six guards in Light Court armor came down the street in formation. Not walking — marching. Hands on sword hilts. Eyes scanning every doorway, every window, every face that turned toward the sound of their boots on the cobblestones.
They stopped at the bakery.
The lead guard didn't knock. He kicked the door in — one hit, the wood splintering inward, the sound carrying up the street like a gunshot. A woman screamed inside. A child's wail rose and cut short.
They dragged the baker out by his collar. Tarik — I knew him. Everyone in the border district knew him. A small man, quiet, the kind who slipped extra rolls into your bag when he thought you looked thin. Flour still dusted his apron. His wrists were already bound with golden cord that glowed faintly — lightmagic, designed to burn anyone with shadow affinity. His face was bloodied, one eye swelling shut where someone had hit him before they even got him outside.
"Please." His voice cracked, carrying through the morning air. "I'm not — I've never used shadow magic in my life. I make bread. Please —"
One of the guards backhanded him. Casual. Bored. The way you'd swat something that was making an annoying sound. Tarik's head snapped sideways and he went to his knees on the cobblestones.
"You tested positive for shadow affinity," the guard said. "That's enough."
"The test is wrong! I have a family — my daughter is only seven —"
"Should have thought about that before you let darkness into your blood. Move."
They hauled him up and dragged him past our building. Close enough that I could see the tears cutting tracks through the blood on his face. Close enough that the golden cord left burn marks on his wrists where it touched bare skin.
Behind them, Tarik's wife stood in the broken doorway. She held their daughter against her chest with one arm. The other hand gripped the doorframe so hard her knuckles were white. Her mouth was open. No sound came out. She'd swallowed the scream because screaming would make them come back.
