She doubted she would need that long. She walked confidently through the dark camp along the same path she had taken the night before. She still wore the uniform of a Janissary. Perhaps that was fitting. She would use everything the Ottomans had given her, right down to their own clothes, to destroy them.
Only outside Mehmed’s tent did she pause. The weight of history, everything they had been and done together, slowed her steps. She felt it, accepted it, let it settle.
Could she do what she had set out to? It was one thing to plan murder and another to follow through. And tonight she would not act out of rage or instinct. This had to be a choice.
She would walk into that tent, and she would stab her first friend, her first lover, her only true equal through the heart.
She did not want to, she found. But she would do it anyway. It was what Wallachia needed, what it demanded, and Wallachia came before Mehmed. It always would. It had to.
Her heartbeat even, her breathing calm, Lada used the cut she had made the night before and entered Mehmed’s tent for the last time.
“Hello, Lada,” her brother said.
Lada scanned the tent quickly, her heartbeat finally picking up.
“He is not here,” Radu said, leaning against Mehmed’s desk. “But I can oversee the signing of the new treaty.” He spoke in Turkish.
Lada’s lip curled in distaste around the language she, too, had spoken for years of her life. “I am not here to sign a treaty.”
Radu smiled. Truly looking at him for the first time, Lada saw in that smile how much her brother had aged since they had been apart. He was taller. Still lean, but with a hollowness to his face that threw his jawline and cheekbones into sharper relief. The too-large eyes were still just as striking. He was beautiful. And he was a stranger. The boy she had known, the boy she had loved and protected, was gone.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Too many things.” Radu sat on one of the cushions, gesturing for Lada to join him.
She remained standing. “I told him he should not have sent you to Constantinople. I cannot believe he put you in harm’s way.”
“You would have done the same.”
“I would not have! You always needed protection, and I protected you.”
Radu tilted his head, a puzzled look on his face. She was reminded again how much he looked like their mother. And, with the weary sadness pulling at his mouth, she saw how life and its cruelty would break him. She had seen a glimpse into his future when she visited their own ruined mother.
“I think,” he said, “you and I remember our childhood much differently. You protected me from Mircea, but only because you liked him even less than you liked me.”
Lada snorted. “That is certainly true. But what about in Edirne?”
“I recall you refusing to do your studies even when I was beaten for your insolence.”
“Are you that stupid?” When Radu looked hurt instead of understanding, Lada sat in a huff across from him. “They used everything they could against us. And they used us against our father. If I had stopped that tutor, if I had let them see they could use you to control me, you never would have been safe again. I let you be beaten to keep you from being used as leverage against me.”
A dozen emotions flitted across Radu’s face, none of which Lada understood. He settled on amused and sad. “We do have very different definitions of protection, then.”
Lada searched her brother’s eyes, trying to find the little boy he had always been to her. Even after his refusals to help her, even after all this time, he had not changed in her mind. But reality presented her with the truth. He was not her delicate, weak baby brother anymore.
“You look upset,” he said, his voice soft.
“I have lost something.” Even though Lada should have known it, she had never let herself believe it. But now the truth was undeniable. She had completely lost her brother to the Ottomans. “Where is Mehmed?”
“Why?”
“He has much to answer for.”
“We all do, I suspect.” Radu drew his legs up, wrapping his arms around them and resting his chin atop his knees. There! A fleeting glimpse, but Lada saw her Radu.
“Tell me what has happened to you. And why are you in Mehmed’s tent? Are you—do you stay here now?” Lada kept her voice as even as she could to avoid betraying anything. But Radu was always better at emotion, better at reading people than she could ever be.
He laughed. She stood, bristling. Radu waved one hand, gesturing for her to sit back down. “No, I do not stay here now. I am in Mehmed’s tent because you came here tonight to kill him, did