Lada made her face stone, her heart a mountain. A mountain that would never be pierced to let cold, clear water flow. “Nothing holds me here.”
Mehmed closed his eyes, rearranging his features from rage and hurt to supplication. He had so much control now, so much skill in using emotion as a tool. How they had all grown. “You have saved my life three times. I would be dead without you. I need you.”
“Give up Constantinople.”
“What?”
Lada lifted her shoulders impassively. “Your mindless determination to take Constantinople is what threatens your life. You have no claim to the city, no right to it, no reason to fixate on it. Give it up, and your enemies will stop trying to kill you.”
“You know I cannot!” He clasped his hands behind his back, pacing the length of the room. “It calls to me, taunts me. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said it would be ours, and I must—I must—be the sultan to see his words fulfilled. As my people were made for greater things than traveling deserts on horses, so am I made for bigger things than maintaining a stagnant, dismissed empire. We will be the jewel of the world, the envy of all Europe, the new Rome. I will be the one to make it that way. I have to show the world what my people are. This is my calling. I cannot turn my back on it.”
Lada nodded, lids half closed, heavy with the weight of the future. “We understand each other completely. I cannot give up Wallachia. I cannot turn my back on my home for what scraps may fall to me from another master’s table. I did not choose to come here, Mehmed. I was held against my will.”
“But now I am asking you! Choose to stay! Choose me.”
“And be left behind when you go crusading? You would not take me to Albania, you will not take me to Constantinople. I will hate you for it, and the poison between us will grow until I turn into one of your invisible wives, as captive as your father ever made me. If you try to keep me, I will hate you, and you will lose me forever. You already know you cannot rule me. I proved that the last time you were on the throne.”
Anguish and anger warred on Mehmed’s face as he stopped in front of Lada and grasped her shoulders. “What would you have me do?”
And, in that moment, Lada saw her future. Her past was filled with snatching what threads she could from the men around her. Her father. Ilyas Bey. Mehmed. But before her was a knife. She would cut them all.
She did not have to accept only what was offered to her.
She would take what should be hers.
What had always been hers lit on her face like the sun on the mountain peak so many summers ago. “I want Wallachia.”
“What?”
“Make me vaivode.”
Mehmed frowned. “But that is the title for a prince.”
“Make me prince, then. You know I am capable. Send me with my Janissary troops, give me the backing of the empire.”
Mehmed raised a hand dismissively, but he sounded unsure. “They will never accept you.”
“I will make them.” She waited for another dismissal, but none came, so she pressed her advantage. “Send me as prince, as a gesture of peace. No one will see it as a show of strength or aggression. They will see that you want stability, not conquest. I will deliver treaties to Hunyadi, to everyone who has opposed you. I will spread news of peaceful Mehmed who wants only what he already has and nothing more. And you will be free to focus on Constantinople.”
Mehmed’s voice was soft, tortured. He did not turn to face her. “But I will lose you.”
Though she had always known returning home would mean leaving Mehmed, until that moment she had never considered the reality of it. It was not fleeing, or being forced away. It was choosing to lose him. It felt impossible. Radu finally met her gaze, and she silently implored him, holding out a hand. She could not, would not lose both of them.
He shook his head.
Huma’s words from all those years ago slipped beneath her armor, piercing her heart. What must be sacrificed to secure a future where no one can touch you? Lada knew now exactly how much she had to lose, because she was about to cut out her heart and leave it.
The two men—the only two people—who had been constants in her life would be left behind. Radu and Mehmed had both given her something she could not give herself, had seen her in a way no one else had and no one else ever would. They looked at her, ugly Lada, vicious Lada, and saw something precious. And she looked at them and saw Radu, her brother, her blood, her responsibility, and Mehmed, her equal, the only man great enough to be worthy of her love.
One future—bleak and unknowable, filled with violence and pain and struggle—unfurled before her. Another, with her brother and the man who knew her and still loved her, shone like a beacon.