"I'm angry," I said.
"You should be."
"I'm angry and I still don't want you to leave."
Something crossed his face — quick, unguarded. He blinked it back. Swallowed once.
"Then I won't."
Outside, a door splintered. Closer. The next building.
The silence between us wasn't forgiveness. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. But it was honest. The first honest thing we'd shared in two hundred years, and it would have to be enough because we were out of time.
"We need to move," Milan said. "Now."
My mother appeared in the back room doorway. Already dressed, hair pulled back, three leather satchels at her feet. She'd heard everything. Of course she had. She looked at me the way she'd been looking at me since last night — like she was memorizing my face.
"This isn't running," I said. More to myself than to either of them. "This is surviving long enough for Ada to reach her father."
"That's exactly what it is." Milan moved to the center of the room. His fingers traced patterns in the air, gray light following his movements. "I have somewhere. Not a safehouse — somewhere between realms. Somewhere they can't follow. I've used it before."
Reality thinned where he worked. The fabric of the world wore through at the seams. A tear opened — darkness beyond it, cold and ancient and deep.
Outside, boots on the stairs. Our stairs. Someone pounding on the door below us. A voice — loud, official: "Open up. Light Court inspection. All residents present themselves immediately."
"Now," Milan said.
I grabbed the satchels. My mother took my arm. Her grip was strong. Steady. The grip of a woman who had done this before — packed in the dark, fled through a door that shouldn't exist, trusted a man to lead her somewhere safer than where she was.
"Always forward," she said quietly. Something she'd said to me as a child, every time we'd left another village in the night. "Never look at what you're leaving."
Milan stepped through first.
We followed.
The cold hit instantly — not winter cold but something deeper, older, settling into bone and refusing to leave. The darkness had weight here, pressing against us from all sides. It smelled of ash and sulfur and something underneath both, something that made the shadows beneath my skin stir with a recognition I didn't want to examine.
Milan stood just ahead of us, his back to the portal, his gray eyes moving across the darkness. I watched him read it the way he read every room — exits, threats, the shape of the danger before it showed itself.
Then his hands came up. Gray light sparking at his fingers. His voice sharp and low.
"Get back through —"
The darkness took him.
Not a wave. Not a force. The dark simply decided he didn't belong here and removed him. One moment he was in front of us, hands raised, already fighting. The next he was gone — thrown back through the portal so fast I barely saw him move — and the tear in reality sealed behind him with a sound that shook my teeth.
The candlelight vanished. The cold deepened. The smell of sulfur thickened until it coated the back of my throat.
My mother's hand found mine in the dark. Her grip had changed. No longer strong and steady. Desperate.
"This isn't the waystation," she whispered. "Hakan, this isn't —"
"I know."
Silence. Except for the screaming. Distant. Endless. The kind that never stopped because the throats making it could never die.
I reached for my shadows. Tried to tear a new opening. But my power felt sluggish here, muted, like trying to hold water in a fist. Whatever controlled this darkness, it wasn't me.
