Page 47 of Crown of Ashes and Desire

Fuck, Ada!His response slammed into my mind with the force of a tidal wave, a mixture of shock and rage so potent it momentarily cleared the fog of pain. I’m coming. Just fucking hold on.

His presence lingered in my mind, fierce and determined. I could feel him moving, shadows gathering around him with the intensity of storm clouds. Could feel his fury building with each step, but he should have sensed the danger unless something was deliberately blocking his awareness of the shadows here.

Stay conscious and don’t you dare fucking die, he commanded through our bond.Keep breathing.

With titanic effort, I rolled onto my stomach. The movement sent fresh agony lancing through me, but I breathed through it,sending light through my core. Pain meant I was still alive. Still fighting.

Crawl. Just crawl.

I dug my fingers into the soil, pulling myself forward inch by agonizing inch. Blood trailed behind me, marking my path as breadcrumbs would. Ahead, a small alcove formed by ornamental bushes offered the barest hint of shelter. If I could reach it, hide myself, maybe…

Maybe what? What did I hope to accomplish? I was dying, my blood seeping into the garden of my enemies, my guardian subdued, my powers fading.

And yet I crawled. Because that’s what I had always done. Survived. Endured. Refused to give my enemies the satisfaction of an easy victory.

The pain became a distant thing, observed rather than experienced. Bad sign. I knew enough about battlefield wounds to recognize what that meant. My fingers clawed at roots and soil, dragging my increasingly unresponsive body toward the alcove.

Behind me, Melo’s struggles had gone silent. Panic flared, giving me a moment’s strength. My guardian couldn’t die. Wouldn’t. Not while I lived. Our forces were bound too tightly.

Which meant either they’d subdued her completely…or they’d taken her.

I reached the alcove, dragging myself into its meager shelter. The spreading numbness had reached my shoulders now, and I knew I had minutes at most before unconsciousness claimed me. Blood soaked the front of my dress, black in the dim light, warm against my rapidly cooling skin.

Footsteps approached. Heavy. Purposeful. The leader, coming to finish what he’d started. I turned my face toward the sound, determined to look my killer in the eye.

But the figure who appeared at the entrance to my tiny shelter wasn’t one of the assassins.

The world around Hakan had gone wrong. The air itself seemed to recoil from him, shadows not flowing but writhing around his form as if they were living things in pain. Dark power radiated from every line of his body—pupils elongated to slits, features sharp with inhuman rage. The temperature plummeted until my breath fogged before me. Hakan had arrived. And he was furious.

Sarp was at his side, face grim, his shadows dancing around him more subtly but no less dangerous. Where Hakan was a storm, Sarp was the quiet that followed—methodical, taking in everything with practiced precision.

“Check the perimeter,” Hakan commanded, his voice layered with harmonics that weren’t entirely human. “Find the guardian.”

“Already done,” Sarp replied, his usual sarcasm replaced with cold efficiency. “Two of them fled west, through a shadow-gate. The others won’t be running anywhere again.” His eyes shifted to me, assessing the damage with a glance. “She needs healers. Now.”

I’d seen Hakan angry before. Had watched him demolish rooms in fits of rage, had felt the deadly precision of his power. But this…this was something else entirely. This wasn’t anger. This was wrath in its purest form, elemental and unstoppable.

“Ada.” My name in his mouth was both prayer and curse. His movements were unnaturally fluid as he knelt before me, as though the laws of physics bent around him. “Who did this to you?”

Frost radiated from him in visible waves, his voice distorted by barely contained rage. Shadow and frost crept along the ground where he knelt, plants withering to black husks in his proximity.

I tried to focus on his face through the haze of pain. “Does it…matter?” Blood bubbled past my lips with the words.

The garden seemed to darken further, shadows responding to his fury. Hakan’s expression transformed into something terrible, something ancient and predatory. He leaned closer, bringing himself to my eye level, his burning gaze boring into mine.

“Answer my fucking question.” Each word was carved from ice, deliberate and sharp. “Who. Did. This. To. You.”

I flinched involuntarily, a prey animal’s reaction to a predator. His hands shot out, gripping my shoulders to keep me from moving farther, though his touch was impossibly gentle despite the fury radiating from him.

“You’re…too emotional,” I whispered, the absurdity of lecturing the Shadow Prince while dying in his garden not lost on me.

"Shut up," he snarled, his face a cold mask of indifference that was betrayed by the desperate, frantic dance of his shadows. They whipped around us as living things in agony, responding to the emotions he refused to display.

"Your opinions on my emotional state are irrelevant." His fingers shifted to the tattered fabric of my dress, pushing it aside to examine the wound. The sound he made upon seeing it wasn't human—a guttural snarl that echoed with power.

Frost spread farther, crackling across the ground, up the trunks of surrounding trees. A stone bench shattered, frozen so quickly that it exploded.

"Shadow blade," he muttered, his burning gaze traveling from the wound to my face. His expression remained deliberately cold, but his eyes—gods, his eyes—they burned with something beyond rage, beyond fear. "Tell me now, or I swear I will let you bleed."

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