Then a voice. Echoing out of the black. Smooth. Amused. Ancient. The voice of something that had never once been afraid of the dark.
"Your friend is fine, if that's what you're worried about. Bruised, perhaps. Winded. But alive."
A pause. The darkness shifted. Thickened. Took shape.
"For now."
My mother made a sound beside me. Not a gasp. Not a whimper. A name, bitten off before it could finish forming.
The darkness laughed. And it sounded, god help me, exactly like mine.
CHAPTER 20
THE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD
Hakan
"Your friend is fine, if that's what you're worried about. Bruised, perhaps. Winded. But alive." A pause. "For now."
The darkness shifted. Coalesced. Took form.
The man who emerged was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of presence that made the air itself seem to lean toward him. He was frightening. That was the honest word. Built like something designed for damage — not lean, not graceful, just big in a way that made the space around him feel smaller. His hair was dark and silver-threaded, falling past his jaw. His face was wrong — not ugly, worse than ugly. A crooked nose, badly set. A scar cutting through his upper lip. Jaw like a battering ram. Cheekbones that belonged on a statue and eyes that belonged on nothing human — black, all the way down, the kind of dark you could fall into and never find the bottom of.
He was smiling.
And I understood, with a sick lurch, where my own smile came from. The particular curve of the mouth, the way one corner pulled higher than the other. I'd seen that smile in mirrors my whole life and never known its origin.
"Welcome to Kara Cehennem," he said, spreading his arms like a host greeting guests at a party. "I'd apologize for the abrupt relocation, but honestly? I'm not particularly sorry."
My mother made a sound — not quite a gasp, not quite a whimper. A name, whispered like a curse.
Erlik's smile widened. He turned to her, and something happened to his face that I wasn't prepared for. The performance didn't drop — it shifted. Softened at the edges. His eyes moved over her the way you'd look at a painting you'd thought was lost.
"You still tuck your hair behind your left ear when you're frightened," he said. Almost to himself. "You always did that. Even when you were trying to look brave. I used to watch you do it and think — she doesn't know she's telling me everything."
My mother exhaled. A long, controlled breath. When she spoke, her voice was flat.
“I've erased you from my memory Erlik," she said through her gritted teeth. "Whatever you think you remember about me, I don't carry it anymore. It's gone."
Erlik's mouth twitched with amusement.
"Liar," he said. Warmly. Almost fondly. "You always were a terrible liar, Elif. Best pickpocket I ever met, worst liar. Remember that time you tried to convince me you hadn'tfinished the rose lokum? You had powdered sugar on your lip. I could see it from across the room."
"I don't —"
"You wiped it off with your sleeve and looked me dead in the eye and said 'what lokum?' and I nearly choked laughing. You remember. Don't insult us both."
The warmth in his voice was real. That was the horror of it. It wasn't performance. He was genuinely enjoying the memory, genuinely pleased to be standing in front of the woman who'd eaten his last rose lokum two centuries ago. Mother was beautiful, and even now after two hundred years she was radiating with light magic. It was obvious how she caught attention of a God.
My mother said nothing. Her jaw was set. But her eyes — her eyes were bright and there was longing in them.
"Do you know what I did after you left?" The warmth was gone from his face now. He didn't wait for an answer. "I tore my own realm apart looking for you. Personally. On my hands and knees in passages I hadn't crawled through in centuries. My court thought I'd gone mad — they weren't wrong. Three servants tried to calm me down. They're still in the Galleries. I broke them because I needed to break something and they were closest." He shrugged. "Not my finest moment. But then, I wasn't at my best. You'd stolen my son and my dignity in the same night, and I've always handled loss badly.”
"You didn't lose me," my mother said. "You never had me. You had a girl too young to know the difference between love and captivity, and when she finally learned it, you couldn't stand it."
Erlik went still. For a fraction of a second something naked crossed his face — not rage, not cruelty. Injury. The wound of hearing the truest thing about yourself from the one person whose opinion still reaches you.
Then it was gone. Buried beneath ten thousand years of practice at not being touched by anything.
