Her heartbeat was almost as loud as her breathing, and she closed her eyes to hold her breath and focus on—
There was a noise behind her. She smashed a hand over Mehmed’s mouth, muffling his own heavy breathing. Turning so her back was pressed against him, she squinted out into the night.
A shadowy figure crept toward them. He wore no Janissary cap. A predatory angle to his body eliminated his being a servant. Servants walked with submissive, downturned lines. This man prowled with hands held at the ready. An errant ray of light flashed like a beacon off something metal in one of those hands.
Lada slipped both daggers free of their sheaths. The hunter was directly in front of them, leaning forward in an attempt to see into the deeper darkness beneath the tree.
Lada leaped out, one arm blocking the hand that held a weapon, her other dagger finding its goal with a wet whisper of success. The hunter was still for one eternal moment, then, with an agonized scream escaping his lips into the night, he crumpled to the ground. Lada stood over him as his life pulsed frantically from his neck. Two twitches, and then nothing, where once a man had been.
It was only when Lada realized she could see well enough to notice the deep red of her target’s blood that she looked up. An enterprising tortoise had finally made its way to the depths of the garden. She was illuminated—dagger winking playfully, hand covered in blood, Mehmed standing behind her.
“Lada?” he asked. His eyes were fixed on the body.
But the rest of the garden party, including Murad himself, stared in horror right at her.
“ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU feel well?” Salih leaned forward intently. His eyes, which turned down at either corner and made him appear perpetually mournful, wrinkled in concern. He was eighteen, only a couple of years older than Radu, kind and anxious and always eager to be in Radu’s company.
Radu nodded, unable to shake off his daze.
Mehmed’s lips.
Mehmed’s hands.
Mehmed’s heart.
Tangled up in Lada, not in him. Lada, who could not love someone else if her life depended on it
. Lada, who had taken all their father’s attention, who had preferred Bogdan over her own brother. Lada, who had abandoned Radu to beatings and lonesomeness his whole life. Lada, who was cold and vicious and loyal only to herself.
Lada, who was not even beautiful.
“Am I not handsome?” Radu blurted out, the words spilling like tears from his mouth.
Salih’s eyebrows raised, making his expression almost comical with its mix of sorrow and surprise. “You—you are.”
“Am I not deserving of love?”
The surprise in Salih’s face shifted to something raw and terrified. “You are.”
Radu dropped his head. What did he know of love? This was not a love that he had heard of, this was not a love sung about by poets, celebrated in stories. This was something…else, something he had no words for. And who could he speak to? Who could tell him how to love another man?
Or how to stop?
Trembling, Salih’s stubby fingers alighted on his shoulder. “Radu, I—”
A servant knocked on the doorframe, interrupting them. Radu looked up, wearily, to see the thin, greasy boy he had paid yesterday. Yesterday, when he still cared about intrigue. When he still viewed himself as Mehmed’s protector.
Yesterday, before the world ended.
“Salih, there is someone to see you.” The servant bowed, waiting.
Salih’s face creased in consternation. “I am sorry, I—”
“Go,” Radu said, eyes on the floor. Their plates of food, his barely touched, sat cold and abandoned. “I will wait for you in your father’s study. He has a book on the Prophet, peace be upon him, that I wanted to look at.”
“I will hurry.”
As soon as Salih had left the room, Radu dragged himself down the hall, steps as heavy and leaden as the beating of his heart. He did not feel daring or clever. His efforts here would be for naught, just as his love for Mehmed. Just as his life.