The little girl was staring at me. She could see me through the gap in the shutters — I realized it too late. Seven years old, dark hair in a messy braid, her father's flour still on hernightdress. She looked at me the way children look at adults when something terrible is happening and they're waiting for someone to fix it.
I didn't fix it.
I stood at the window with shadows coiling around my fists and I watched them drag her father down the street and I did nothing. Because Ada was at the palace. Because if I killed Light Court guards in broad daylight, everything she was trying to build would collapse. Because the smart thing, the strategic thing, the thing that served the larger plan, was to let a good man be dragged to a purification cell while his daughter watched.
The patrol moved on. Door by door. Methodical.
Working their way toward us.
I counted the buildings between them and our door. Eight. Maybe ten minutes.
The back door opened.
I spun, shadows flaring. Milan stepped through with his hands raised.
"It's me."
He closed the door quietly behind him. His dark hair was loose, dust from the streets still on his coat, gray eyes sharp beneath the silver threading at his temples. He looked like he'd been moving all night — coat creased, stubble darker than usual, that crooked smile nowhere in evidence. The easy warmth he carried like a second skin was gone. What remained was the man underneath it — focused, alert, already calculating.
His eyes found mine. Reading me the way he'd always read me — quickly, completely, missing nothing.
"How is she?"
"Sleeping."
"Good." He moved to the window, peered through the shutters, stepped back. His jaw tightened at whatever he saw. "Serkan's moved faster than I expected. That's the third patrol I've passed this morning. He's not just hunting shadow-wielders. He's purging anyone with even a trace of dark affinity. The prisons are already full. They've started using the temple basements."
"I know. I watched them take Tarik."
"The baker?" Something moved across Milan's face. He'd eaten the man's bread too. Had joked with him about the state of his sourdough. "His daughter —"
"Saw everything."
Milan was quiet for a moment. Then he straightened, and the grief was filed away behind whatever compartment he kept things in when there wasn't time to feel them.
"How long before they reach this building?" I asked.
"Minutes."
The word sat between us. And beneath it, the other thing. The thing we hadn't said to each other yet. The thing that had been pressing against my teeth since I'd walked through my mother's door last night with black blood on my hands and the truth in my chest.
"You let me call you father for two hundred years."
Milan didn't flinch. Didn't look away. He stood in the middle of the room with his coat still on and his hands at his sides and let me say it.
"You stood there while I said the word and you knew it wasn't true and you never once corrected me."
"No," he said. "I didn't."
"Why?"
"Because you needed a father. And I needed you." He said it simply. No performance, no charm, no easy deflection. Just bare truth. He'd made his choice two hundred years ago. He'd make it again. "Your mother told you it was my idea. She told you right. I asked her to let me have the name. Not because I deserved it — because you deserved to grow up without being afraid of your own blood."
"And when I got older? When the magic didn't match and we both knew it?"
"Then I was a coward." His jaw tightened. "I told myself there would be a right time. There never was. Every year you loved me as a father was another year I couldn't bear to lose."
I stared at him. This man who had taught me to hold a sword. Who had cooked badly and laughed about it. Who had gripped the back of my neck and called me son with an ease that never wavered. Who had carried a lie for two centuries not because it was easy but because putting it down meant losing the only thing he'd ever wanted.
