BLOOD AND LIGHT
Ada
They found Tahir at dawn.
A servant taking the forest path to the northern estates stumbled across him — bound to a tree with rope, his left arm hanging at an angle that made the girl who found him vomit into the undergrowth. No visible wounds. No magical residue. Just a lord's son tied between ancient oaks with a dislocated shoulder and eyes that stared at nothing, because the life behind them had already left.
Dead. Lord Tahir of one of the oldest families in the Light Court, dead in the Borderland Forest on the night of the Moonlight Ball.
The court erupted.
I stood in the great hall as the announcement was made, surrounded by three hundred nobles in yesterday's finery — some still wearing their ball clothes, summoned before they'd had time to change. The High Priest spoke in measured tonesabout shadow infiltration, about the enemy at our borders. Lord Serkan stood behind him with an expression of carved grief that didn't reach his eyes.
"A Shadow Court assassination," Serkan said. "No marks. No wounds. This is how they kill — reaching through the darkness, draining life without leaving evidence."
The court murmured. Security would tighten. Patrols doubled. The purification program expanded.
I barely heard any of it.
I was looking for him.
My eyes swept the hall the way they always did now — automatically, hungrily, searching for the one person I'd told myself I wasn't looking for. I found him against the far column. Black clothes. Gloves. The scar on his jaw catching the morning light. He looked like he hadn't slept in days — gaunt, hollowed, his jaw set so tight I could see the muscle jumping from across the hall.
He felt me looking. He always felt me looking.
His eyes found mine and for one raw, unguarded second the mask dropped. I saw exhaustion. I saw hunger — the kind that had nothing to do with food. I saw two weeks of silence and distance compressed into a single look that saidI know you're there. I know you're watching. Don't come closer.
I took a step toward him.
His gaze hardened. A fractional shake of his head — so slight nobody else would have caught it.Don't.
I stopped. Stood there with my pulse hammering and the space between us filled with three hundred bodies and none of them mattering, none of them real, the entire hall reduced to background noise around the axis of his face.
Sarp's hand found my elbow. "Ada? You've gone pale."
"I'm fine."
I wasn't fine. I was standing in a hall full of mourning nobles and all I could think about was the way Hakan's throat moved when he swallowed. The way his gloved hands gripped his own forearms like he was physically holding himself together. The way he looked at me like I was water and he was dying of thirst and the glass was poisoned.
The days that followed were their own kind of torture.
I saw him everywhere. In the corridors between classes — a flash of black at the far end, his stride long and purposeful, his face turned from me with the exact same angle every single time, as if he'd calculated the minimum amount of not-looking-at-me required to make his point. In the training grounds — I'd pass the scholarship hall and hear the rhythmic crack of wood splitting, and I'd know it was him in there alone at dawn, destroying things because he couldn't destroy whatever was eating him alive.
In the library. Once. I'd turned a corner between the stacks and he was there — three feet away, close enough to touch, and we'd both frozen. His eyes had dropped to my mouth. My fingers had twitched toward him. The air between us turned thick and hot and electric, and for two heartbeats neither of us breathed.
Then someone coughed in the next aisle and he'd walked away without a word.
I'd stood there for five minutes afterward, gripping the shelf, my legs shaking.
Sarp noticed. Of course Sarp noticed.
"You're distracted," he said over dinner, watching me push food around my plate. "You've been distracted all week. Is it Tahir? The security lockdown?"
"Just tired."
"You keep looking toward the east wing."
"I'm not —"