"Yes," I said. The word tasted like ash. "It was."
Erlik stood. He moved to the center of the room and the shadows gathered at his hands the way water gathers in a low place—without effort, without drama, simply because that was what it did. A tear opened in the air. Clean and surgical, nothing like Milan's portals with their visible cost and strain. This opened the way a door opens when someone has always owned the key.
Through it: pale afternoon light. The smell of the city.
He didn't look back.
"Don't make me come to you," he said pleasantly. "I find travel irritating. And apparently that's hereditary."
Then he was gone—not dramatically, not with any final gesture, just absorbed back into the dark of his own realm as though he had never quite been separate from it.
I looked down at my mother. Her broken fingers were cradled against her chest, the swelling angry and dark, and she was frowning at them with the vague bewilderment of someone who doesn't remember acquiring an injury.
"Can you stand?"
She tested her legs. "Yes."
I helped her up. She leaned into me slightly, still finding herself, examining her hand with confused concentration. "I must have fallen somewhere in the mortal realms," she murmured. "I don't—the portal was so disorienting?—"
"Yes," I said. "We'll have someone look at it when we get back."
She nodded, distracted, and looked at the portal ahead of us with the expression of a woman ready to be somewhere else.
"Come on," I said. "Let's go home."
We stepped through together.
The cold emptied from my lungs in one long exhale. Warm air, city noise, the smell of the market three streets over. My mother straightened beside me and blinked in the afternoon light, the confusion already settling into something she could account for—a strange few days, a misfired portal, the ordinary disorientation of being returned to familiar ground.
I did not look back.
I walked with her hand in mine and the deal I had made settled into my bones the way something heavy settles when you finally stop fighting to hold it up—completely, and without drama, and in a way that was never coming back out.
Somewhere ahead of us, Ada was still looking for me.
I walked toward her.
And I thought about what came next, and what it was going to cost, and I kept walking anyway.
CHAPTER 23
RETURN TO LIGHT
Hakan
I took her to the only place I could think of — a room above a tanner's workshop in the western quarter that Milan had shown me months ago.If things ever go wrong, he'd said,and you can't go home, come here.Low-ceilinged, windowless, smelling of chemicals and cured leather. Not the kind of place anyone would think to look for a god's son and his mother.
Three days. According to the position of the sun, we'd only been gone three days. It had felt like weeks.
My mother sat in the single chair with her broken fingers cradled against her chest, staring at the far wall with the careful blankness of someone who had decided which memories to keep and which to bury. The lie Erlik had planted inside her mind had settled like silt — smooth and seamless, replacing the horror of Kara Cehennem with a comfortable fiction. She believed we'd been hiding in the mortal realms. Believed a misfired portal had taken us somewhere disorienting. Believed she'd broken her fingers in a fall she couldn't quite remember.
She kept glancing at her hand with a faint, bewildered frown, the way you might frown at an injury acquired in a dream.
I hadn't corrected her. There was nothing to correct her with that wouldn't destroy her.
Milan found us within the hour.
He came through the door with his dark hair disheveled, clothes rumpled like he hadn't slept in three days — which, I realized, he probably hadn't. The moment he saw us, relief cracked across his face — raw and genuine in a way that made something twist in my chest.
