"Elif." He reached her in three strides, pulling her into an embrace that she returned with fierce strength. "Thank the gods. The portal closed and I couldn't follow and I've been searching every shadow path I know —"
"You worry too much." My mother pulled back, cupping his face in her hands, studying him with that penetrating gaze that had always seen through every lie I'd ever told.
Then Milan's eyes dropped to her hand.
He caught it before she could move — gently, carefully, two hundred years of tending other people's injuries in the way his fingers closed around her wrist. He turned her hand over in his and went very still.
"Elif."
"It's nothing. I fell somewhere in the mortal realms."
"These are broken." His voice was quiet. Not accusatory. Just stating it, the way you state a fact that has implications youhaven't finished working through yet. He looked up at her face, then at me. Something didn't add up, and he knew it.
I held his gaze and gave him nothing.
He looked back at my mother.
"The mortal realms," he repeated, his voice carefully neutral.
"The portal went sideways," she said. "We ended up somewhere completely —"
"I know, I know." He was already guiding her toward the building, his hand supporting her elbow, his eyes still doing that quiet, private calculation. "We'll get this splinted properly. I have what I need upstairs." He shot one more glance back at me over her shoulder — not angry, not demanding. Just watching. Filing. Storing it away for a conversation that would happen later, away from her. "Come. You look like you haven't eaten in days."
My mother's apartment was exactly as we'd left it, though dust had accumulated on the surfaces in our absence. Milan sat her down at the table with a firmness she didn't bother arguing with and began working on her hand — splinting the broken fingers with the quiet calmness of long practice, wrapping them with strips of cloth from the kit he kept in his coat. My mother watched him do it with an expression that was half gratitude and half something she couldn't quite name, softened by whatever Erlik had taken from her.
I stood in the doorway and watched Milan bind my mother's fingers — fingers broken in a room she would never remember, under a cage she could no longer picture — and I kept my face completely still.
"The carrots still need washing," my mother said to me, nodding toward the basin.
"I know."
"Then stop standing there looking brooding and wash them."
Milan caught my eye over her head. Something passed between us — not understanding, not yet, but the acknowledgement that understanding was coming and that we would get to it without her present.
I went to the basin and washed the carrots.
"Milan says the warrant's been dropped," I said, keeping my voice even. "Ada went to her father while we were gone. Whatever she told him, it worked. We're not being hunted anymore."
My mother was quiet for a moment. Then: "And Ada? You and she —"
"Still together. Still approved. Gün Ata gave his blessing weeks ago, you know that."
My mother's knife paused mid-chop. "Did he."
"Before we left. Ada was going to speak with him, but apparently he'd already?—"
"Gün Ata doesn't give blessings without expecting something in return." Her voice was flat, dangerous. "That man has been playing games with courts and kingdoms since before I was born. What does he want from you?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then find out." She resumed chopping with controlled violence. "And be careful. The Light Court's smiles hide sharper teeth than the Shadow Court's snarls. At least in Kara Cehennem, they're honest about wanting to destroy you."
The words landed heavily. She didn't remember Kara Cehennem — didn't remember the cage, didn't remember the thorns, didn't remember what it had cost her to keep standing — but some part of her still knew. Some part of her always knew.
"I will be," I said.
She studied me for a long moment, that penetrating gaze seeing more than I wanted it to. Then she nodded, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
