"Hm." He looked at my mother. Said simply: "Down."
Something happened that I didn't see him do. My mother's knees buckled—violently, involuntarily—and she wrenched herself back upright with a sound that came out of somewhere below language, raw and stripped of everything, and the thorn-collar?—
She recovered. She held. She stood.
Her broken fingers had hit the side of her thigh when her knees went and the sound she made told me exactly how much that cost her. She stood.
"Nothing to agree to," I said. The words came out steady. I made them steady. "You want leverage over me, you've wasted yourtime. My mother ran from you for two hundred years. You think a cage changes?—"
"I think," he said pleasantly, "that you've been awake for less than three minutes and you're already making speeches. It's very endearing. Kaan did that too." He began walking again. "The problem with speeches is they require a conviction that you actually have options. You don't. You've established that. Your shadows can't reach me, you can't reach me, you spent all night looking for an exit and I suspect you've concluded there isn't one." He glanced at me sideways, almost amused. "So the speeches are really just a way of telling yourself you're still fighting. Which I respect. But they don't change the room."
"Then what does."
"Agreement." He said it simply. "That's all. We're not enemies, Hakan—that's not what this is. I don't want to damage you. You're too valuable and frankly too interesting." He stopped walking, turned to face me fully. "But you need to understand something about the way things work here, in this realm, in this family. So." He spread his hands. "We're going to continue your education. And you're going to tell me when you've learned what I need you to learn."
He crossed to my mother.
"Don't." The word came out before I could stop it—not a threat this time. Something rawer than a threat. "Don't touch her again."
He looked at me over his shoulder with an expression that was almost kind.
"I told you," he said. "I'm not teaching her. I'm teaching you."
He put two fingers against my mother's broken hand.
She made a sound that lasted less than a second before she killed it — bit down on it, swallowed it, forced her face back into stillness through sheer will while her whole body shook with the effort. It was the most controlled thing I had ever seen a person do and it destroyed me more completely than any scream would have.
I was hitting the barrier. I know I was because my hands were bleeding—the skin split across the knuckles, the impacts going numb past a certain point—and I know it wasn't doing anything because it never did anything and he had told me it never would, but I kept doing it anyway because the alternative was standing still and I could not stand still.
"Stop. Stop it.Stop.I'll—whatever you want—all of it—juststop?—"
He stepped back from her. Just stepped back, hands loose at his sides, and watched me with those bottomless eyes.
"Tell me that again," he said. "Slower."
I stopped hitting the barrier.
My hands were shaking. I looked at them and made them stop and looked back at him.
"Whatever you want," I said. "All of it. Your terms. I won't fight them."
He studied my face for a long moment.
Then he said: "Not yet."
I stared at him.
"You mean it right now," he said. "I believe that, genuinely. But right now you're reacting to pain that isn't yours, and reactions don't hold. I need something that holds." He began walking again, slower this time. "So. One more thing. And then we'll be finished."
He stopped circling.
He looked at me.
"Imagine," he said quietly, "someone you love more than this."
The sentence hit like a hand closing around my throat.
"Someone whose face you've been very carefully not thinking about since you arrived here. Someone you've been keeping very deliberately blank every time my attention moves in a certain direction." His voice remained conversational. Almost gentle. "I don't need the name. I'm not asking for it. I'm asking you to do one simple thing."
