Page 33 of Crown of Ashes and Desire

The words tasted like poison, and I hated myself for speaking them. The darkness within me compelled me forward, drowning out the voice that screamed this was wrong, that I was destroying the only person who had ever truly mattered to me.

Her eyes met mine, defiance blazing despite her trembling body. “Go to hell.”

I leaned closer, our faces nearly touching. “Tell me what you’re protecting. Just give me that, and this stops.”

I invaded her mind one final time, tearing through her defenses with brutal efficiency. She screamed—a sound of pure agony that echoed off the stone walls. Her back arched, her body convulsing while I ripped through layers of memory and thought.

Then I encountered it again—that wall of blinding light, protecting whatever she guarded so desperately. I threw all my power against it, determined to break through?—

But the barrier held, and the effort left us both shattered. Ada collapsed, her mind retreating into itself while trauma overwhelmed her conscious defenses.

Horror crashed through me as I watched her crumble. This wasn’t what I’d intended—I’d wanted answers, not this complete mental collapse. The woman who had just struck me with such fierce defiance was gone, replaced by something broken and fragile. My shadows recoiled instinctively, as if even they recognized the wrongness of what I’d done.

Monster.The word she’d called me echoed in my mind, and for the first time, I truly understood what she meant. This was what monsters did—they broke beautiful things simply because they could. They tortured the people they claimed to love until nothing remained but pain and fear.

But almost immediately, the darkness I'd cultivated for five years reasserted itself—the cold calculation that had kept me alive in my father's court, the cruelty that had become second nature. It warred with my recovered memories, creating a constant battle between the man who'd loved Ada and the monster I'd deliberately become to survive.

She didn’t seem aware of me anymore, her eyes unfocused, her body curled protectively while she rocked back and forth. While her surface defenses had been shattered by my assault, I could sense that the ancient barriers protecting her deepest secret had somehow held firm—whatever she was hidingremained locked away behind those golden symbols of power, her core self battered but intact.

“Can’t breathe, can’t escape, he’s everywhere, always watching,” she muttered, her voice childlike and broken—words that spoke to her trauma rather than any connection to shadow magic.

The familiar words—echoes of her breakdown—sent nausea through me. How completely had I destroyed her? What had I driven her to become?

The door burst open, revealing Sarp. I recognized immediately that he’d been searching for me when Ada’s screams had reached him through the corridors—the sound carrying farther than I’d anticipated in the stone passages. His eyes took in the scene, and his expression shifted from concern to fury in heartbeats.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he demanded, shadows lashing out to strike me backward into the wall. “Look at what you’ve done to her.”

The binding's protective magic erupted with unprecedented force—this wasn't the manageable backlash from emotional manipulation or minor pain I'd caused before. This was the bond's most severe punishment, reserved for when one partner's actions threatened the other's very sanity. The ancient magic woven into our connection recognized what I'd done to her in that laboratory as a violation so profound it triggered every defensive mechanism built into the binding, sending agony through me that nearly brought me to my knees.

“She’s mine to break,” I managed, though the words sounded hollow even to me. The shadows whispered that I had to maintain control, couldn’t show weakness, even as part of me wanted to crawl to her and beg forgiveness.

“She’s not a thing,” Sarp spit, and crossed to Ada and kneeling beside her with gentle hands. “Ada, it’s Sarp. You’re safe now.”

Her wild gaze focused slightly on his face. “Sarp? The shadows…they’re in my head…”

“I know,” he said, staring at me with utter disgust. “But they’re going to recede now. Aren’t they, Hakan?”

I could have forced him out, could have reminded him who ruled here. But something in Ada’s broken expression stopped me. I fought against my own emotional turmoil, forcing my shadows to withdraw completely despite their instinctive response to my agitation. I gave her mind space to recover.

Minutes passed when I watched her fight to reassemble the pieces of her shattered consciousness. Her breathing gradually steadied, the wild look in her eyes slowly fading while she forced herself back to awareness through sheer will. I could see the tremendous effort it took, the way she had to rebuild her mental walls brick by brick. But even when awareness returned, something remained fractured—her gaze drifted occasionally, as if she was seeing things that weren't there, and when she focused on me, the hatred in her eyes was accompanied by a haunted quality that spoke to deeper damage.

She tried to stand but swayed dangerously, her hand pressed to her temple as if fighting off a migraine. "I can't—the memories keep shifting. What did you do to me?" The question held genuine confusion, as if she couldn't quite grasp what had happened or separate present reality from the fractured images in her mind.

I wanted to ask about what I’d seen, about what she was still hiding. But the words caught in my throat. What right did I have to demand explanations after what I’d just done?

“Help her back to her room,” I told Sarp, unable to meet his accusing gaze. “Summon additional guards to her door—triple the watch.”

“You’re at war with yourself, Hakan,” Sarp said, his voice cold with disgust. “This obsession with breaking her—it’s going to cost you everything.”

I watched them leave, haunted by what I’d witnessed. She was still hiding something, something significant enough to endure this torture to protect. But whatever it was, it wasn’t what I’d expected.

Back in my chambers, I smashed my fist into the wall until blood ran freely. I had tortured her for nothing, broken her while chasing the wrong answers entirely.

Yet beneath the self-loathing, a terrible truth lurked: part of me had enjoyed her pain, her fear. The part shaped by my father’s teachings, by years of embracing shadow and cruelty.

That part disgusted me more than anything else.

Whatever Ada was hiding, it carried some strange resonance I couldn’t identify—something that felt both familiar and utterly foreign. The implications were staggering, but I couldn’t grasp them.

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