"They applied when I left."
"You are making this evening considerably less enjoyable than I'd planned, Elif."
"What did you do to Milan?" I demanded.
"Returned him." Erlik glanced toward where the portal had been, utterly unbothered. "He doesn't belong here. Neither do you, technically — but you're a special case." He tilted his head. "He'll be on his feet already. Loyal creature. He'll spend the next several hours trying to find a way back in."
His smile sharpened.
"He won't manage it."
And underneath it all, woven through the silence like threads of pain — the screaming. Distant, endless. The kind that never stopped because the throats making it could never die.
Erlik caught me listening and smiled. "Atmospheric, isn't it? The Screaming Galleries. Souls who displeased me over the centuries." He cocked his head. "Though I admit the soprano section has been a bit pitchy lately. I really should address that."
Then I heard something else.
Closer than the screaming. A wet, rhythmic sound — like something dragging itself across stone. I turned toward it before I could stop myself.
She emerged from the shadows between two pillars, moving in a way that made my stomach turn before my mind could fully process what I was seeing. A woman. Or she had been. She wore the shredded remains of what might once have been fine clothes, silk now black with old blood and years of filth. She moved on her hands and knees, but wrong — every joint bent at an angle it wasn't made for, elbows pointing skyward, knees twistedoutward, her spine curved in a direction that should have been impossible. Each movement produced a soft, wet clicking sound, like knuckles cracking underwater.
She stopped when she reached the edge of the light. Just stopped, and crouched there, trembling.
My mother's hand found my arm. Her fingers dug in hard enough to bruise.
"Who is that?" she whispered. Then, quieter: "What did you do to her?"
Erlik's gaze passed over the woman and kept going.
"That's Sevda. She was one of my favorites, once. Extraordinarily beautiful, very devoted — or so I thought." He clicked his tongue. "Turned out she was passing information to a rival. I broke all her bones. Every single one. And then I put them back together." A small, regretful smile. "Incorrectly. And then I prevented her from healing. She can't die, you see. That's the elegant part. She just — continues. About sixty years now."
He paused.
"Sevda, darling, you're making our guests uncomfortable."
She turned her head toward his voice, and I caught a glimpse of her face through the curtain of hair — eyes that had seen too much and forgotten how to close properly, a mouth stretched permanently open by a jaw that no longer sat right. She made no sound. Just watched him with the absolute stillness of something that had burned through every possible response to its situation and arrived, finally, at nothing.
I thought of my mother. Two hundred years of running from the man who made this. I thought of Milan — who had steppedbetween us and this monster without hesitation and been ripped away like paper. Milan, who wasn't my father but had chosen to be.
Sevda dragged herself back into the dark. The clicking faded. The screaming continued its distant, endless chorus.
My mother stepped out from behind me. She stood straight. She always stood straight. It was the only thing she had left to control.
"He wants nothing to do with you. He never will."
Erlik's attention shifted to her, and something darker moved behind those black eyes. "Elif. Still so fierce. The sheer arrogance of a mortal woman thinking she could outrun a god."
"I managed for two hundred years."
"You stole my son," he said, and for the first time the amusement was entirely gone, replaced by something colder. "Hid him for two centuries. Suppressed his true nature until he was too ashamed of his own power to use it."
"I saved him from becoming you."
"You crippled him." The words came out flat, stripped of theater. "He should have manifested at puberty. Should have been trained in shadow magic from childhood. Instead you raised him in terror, taught him to hate what he is. And now he's a grown man with the power of a god and the control of a toddler. Do you have any idea how dangerous that makes him?"
"I'm not weak," I said.
"No." He looked at me, and for one moment the performance dropped entirely and there was just a god looking at his sonwith something I didn't have a name for. "No, you're not. Which is precisely why I'm interested." He stepped back, shadows swirling around him. "I could force this. Strip your mind, bend your will, reshape you into whatever I need. I've done it before."