"What was I supposed to do?" My voice cracked. I hated that too. "Stand up in front of forty-three students and challenge an instructor? Get myself expelled? Get myself?—"
"Yes." He closed the distance between us, and I backed up instinctively, my shoulder blades hitting the corridor wall. He didn't stop. He planted his palm on the stone beside my head and leaned in, and the air between us compressed into something thick and charged and almost impossible to breathe. "That is exactly what you were supposed to do. Because you are the only person in this court with enough power to make them listen and enough name to survive the consequences. And instead—" His gaze dropped to my clenched fists, then back to my face. "You made fists in your lap and bled quietly, like a good girl."
Like a good girl.The words did something filthy to me. I felt them in the base of my spine, in the pit of my stomach, in the sudden slick heat between my thighs that I absolutely could not be feeling right now, not here, not with tears still wet on my face and a girl dying two floors below us. But Hakan's body was a wall of heat, and his arm was caging me in, and his mouth wasright there—close enough that I could see the faint scar on his lower lip from a training yard brawl, close enough that if I tilted my chin up our mouths would touch.
"Back up," I said.
He didn't.
"I saidback up, Hakan."
"You have to make me." His voice had dropped to that register—the low, rough one that scraped against something raw inside me. "You just watched a girl burn and did nothing. Prove to me you're capable of doingsomething."
My light crackled at my fingertips. He noticed. His eyes went to my hands, then back to my face, and his pupils were blown wide, the green almost swallowed by black.
"Go on, princess." Barely a whisper now. His breath ghosted across my mouth. "I know you want to. I can feel your magic rising. I can feel—" He inhaled, sharp, through his nose, and something in his expression fractured. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to see the hunger he kept locked behind the cruelty—vast, desperate, barely contained—the hunger of months of starving with a feast finally spread before him and no permission to touch. His breathing had changed. Harder. Faster. His chest was rising and falling in a rhythm that matched mine.
He closed his eyes. When he spoke, his words sounded as he had a knife imploded in his chest.
"You smell like light and jasmine. You have always smelled like that." A breath. Unsteady. "Like something sacred. Like something that was never meant for me. And I have spent half my life learning how to stand next to you and act like it means nothing."
He opened his eyes.
"It has never meant nothing."
I stopped breathing.
He caught himself. I watched it happen—watched the vulnerability slam shut, watched the walls go up, watched his expression rearrange itself into something cruel and careless and utterly untouchable. He smiled, and it was a vicious thing, all teeth and sharp edges.
"But what would Gün Ata's golden daughter want with a nobody from the borders?" He reached out. His fingers found the strand of hair that had escaped my braid, and he wound it slowly around his index finger, tugging—gently, then not gently, tipping my head back until my throat was exposed and his eyes were on the pulse hammering beneath my jaw. “A nobody who doesn't even have the right bloodline to breathe the same air as you." He released the strand. Dragged his fingertips along my jaw on the withdrawal—a slow, deliberate graze that left fire in its wake. "Although I wonder…" His hand dropped. His expression was all predator. "If you think about bloodlines when you're alone at night. In your chambers. With the candles out."
My heart stopped.
He couldn't know. There was no way he could know.
But the look in his eyes said he did. Or suspected. Or had imagined the same thing I imagined, in his own small quarters in Lord Kaya's household, and the thought of Hakan lying awake in the dark thinking about me the way I thought about him?—
I could feel the heat blazing across my cheeks, my throat, my chest. I could feel other things too — the ache between my legs, the tightness in my nipples, the way my body was leaning toward him even as my mind screamed at me to pull away. Every inch of me was traitor. Every nerve ending was defecting to the enemy, and the enemy was standing six inches away smelling like sandalwood and something darker, something male and warm and his, and looking at me like he wanted to ruin me.
"You're disgusting," I whispered.
He didn't smile. Didn't deflect. Something flickered across his face — there and gone — and when he spoke his voice had lost all its edges.
"I know."
His hand hung at his side, fingers curled tight into his palm, knuckles bloodless with the effort of it. He wasn't looking at my face anymore. He was looking at my throat, at the pulse he'd just exposed, and his jaw was locked like a man doing sober arithmetic on something he very much wanted to do.
"Go," I said. "Right now. Before I do something neither of us can walk away from."
"Like what?" He tilted his head. His eyes were burning. "Hit me? Burn me? I'm curious what Gün Ata's daughter does when she's pushed past her precious limits."
My light erupted.
Not a slap. Something more primal—a flare of raw magic that burst from my palm and grazed his jaw, leaving a line of searing gold across his skin. The smell of singed flesh bloomed between us, brief and acrid.
Hakan's head snapped to the side. When he turned back, there was a welt rising along the line of his jaw—angry red, already blistering. He touched it with two fingers.
And laughed.