by Penny Jordan
She heard the door to the salon opening and turned round to see who it was, her heart sinking when she saw Zahra closing the door and standing between her and it.
The last person she felt like being with right now was her husband’s mistress; her husband’s ex-mistress, she corrected herself.
Kadir had after all sworn that that was the truth, and if she expected him to accept her own words as the truth then she could do no less for him.
‘Is it true that you are to have Kadir’s child?’ Zahra demanded without preamble.
Her bluntness took Natalia slightly aback, but more importantly and more hurtfully was the knowledge that the only way Zahra could know about her pregnancy was because Kadir had told her about it himself. So much then for there not being any intimacy between Kadir and Zahra. After all, it was hardly the kind of information one would just throw into a conversation with one’s supposedly ex-mistress, was it?
And when had he told her? Last night after she had finally drifted into an exhausted and unhappy sleep? Had he gone then to his mistress seeking solace with her because of his feelings about their child?
‘Is it?’ Zahra pressed her.
There was an almost fevered look about her, Natalia noticed uneasily, a wildness about her eyes and her manner, her movements uncoordinated and slightly jerky as though she was not fully in control of herself.
‘Whether or not I am to have a child is surely a private matter,’ Natalia answered with quiet dignity.
Zahra ignored her attempt to apply discretion to the situation by telling her passionately, ‘Kadir has no secrets from me. He tells me everything. Everything,’ she repeated fiercely. ‘Do you understand? I know you are to have his child, but of course he doesn’t want it. How could he?’
Natalia felt a wave of sickness surge through her, draining her strength. Until she had heard those last few telling words she had tried to convince herself that Zahra was exaggerating the extent of the intimacy she shared with Kadir, but now with that damning ‘he does not want it’ she was forced to accept the truth. Kadir had called her a liar, but he was the one who was obviously lying. No, she could not bear to go there. She must not let Zahra see how much she had upset her; she must think of her child instead.
‘You say nothing, but I know it is true. Your very silence gives you away,’ she could hear Zahra raging. ‘You think you’ve won, don’t you?’ she told Natalia furiously. ‘You think that just because Kadir has impregnated you he is yours, but he is not and he never will be. You may have conceived but you have yet to give birth. A king needs sons, heirs, live children…and you will never bear those.’
Something was going dreadfully wrong. She could sense it, taste and smell it almost in the air that separated her from Zahra. The other woman’s words now surely had turned away from those of a jealous, vengeful mistress determined to stake her claim in a shared man and had instead become a direct threat to Natalia herself. The first tiny tendrils of fear began to unfurl coldly inside Natalia’s stomach.
Where were her maids and the countess? It was too late now to regret insisting that she preferred to be left alone unless she sent for them. Zahra was standing between her and the main doors into the public corridor. The other doors in the room, which were further away, led towards the rest of the apartment, which was empty.
Surely, though, she was being overly dramatic, something that perhaps all newly pregnant women were inclined to be when it came to the safety of their unborn child, Natalia reasoned, but no sooner had she offered herself the comfort of this thought, Zahra began to rant.
‘Do you really think I will let you take Kadir from me? Do you really think that just because you tell him that you are to have a child that he will choose you above me? If so you are a fool. Because he won’t. I won’t let that happen. Not ever. I am the one he loves and wants. I am the one who is destined to stand by his side. Kadir is mine. Our sons will be his male heirs, and not yours. He can never be yours.’
Suddenly the tone of Zahra’s voice had dropped to a chilling hiss that brought up the hairs at the back of Natalia’s neck in warning.
‘I will kill you first! You and your child. I will slit your throat and then tear the child you carry from your belly before I let you take Kadir from me.’
Zahra was mad. Completely and totally insane, Natalia recognised in a rush of shocked horror. Insane and dangerous, she admitted, icy cold fear gripping her as Zahra’s words sank in. Instinctively Natalia looked towards the door. Quick as lightning Zahra intercepted and correctly interpreted her look.
‘It is no use. You cannot escape.’
She must do something to try to calm her down, Natalia recognised. She must not panic and make an already dangerous situation even worse by playing into Zahra’s hands. Someone would come, they were bound to do so. Desperately she tried to force herself to think past her panic and her instinctive and urgent need to protect her baby, to use logic, calming measures to diffuse the situation.
‘There’s no need for this, Zahra,’ she told her, trying to keep her voice calm and steady. ‘I don’t want to take Kadir from you.’ If she could just skirt round Zahra and get to the inner corridor doors she could escape into the corridor and lock herself in her bedroom until she could summon help.
‘You’re lying. You love him and you want him for yourself. I have seen it in your eyes. You have told him that you are carrying his child in an attempt to keep him, but it will not work, because you will not be carrying it for much longer.’
To Natalia’s horror Zahra suddenly reached within the flowing sleeve of the long gown she was wearing and produced a wickedly sharp-looking curved and pointed dagger.
There was no doubt now that Zahra was totally insane, Natalia recognised numbly. There was no point in her trying to reason with her because wherever Zahra was it was somewhere way beyond listening to any kind of logical reasoning.
‘First it was that mother of his who stopped him from marrying me,’ she panted as she started to move towards Natalia. ‘She did not approve of me. She did not think I was good enough for Kadir. And now because of her and her lies there is you, a European nobody who Kadir has been forced to marry. But he doesn’t want you. He wants me. And I want him. Only you stand between us and our happiness. It is my duty to kill you, because it is my duty to make Kadir happy, and I am the only one who can give him true happiness.’
She had to reach those inner doors, Natalia knew, because if she didn’t Zahra would try to harm her baby and try to kill her. She was the taller of the two of them and the more athletic, but she had no knowledge of how to use a knife or how to defend herself from one and from the slashing stabbing movements Zahra was making as she stalked her. Zahra was well versed in handling the murderous-looking weapon she was holding.
Even if she turned and ran for the doors, they were heavy and not easy to open and Zahra would be on her before she could do so, bringing that dagger down to rip and tear at her flesh.
Oh, what was she to do? Natalia found that she was praying silently for strength and help, begging God or anyone who was nearby to please help her and, more importantly, her baby.
The vines were in their resting period, row upon row of immaculately tended brown stems. As he watched and listened to Giovanni Carini, Natalia’s grandfather, as he lovingly described their virtues and their vices to him it was as though he were talking about his children, Kadir recognised. Each vine was known to him and cherished for its individuality.
‘And these are the new vines that were the gift to us of Rosa Fierezza,’ Giovanni told him proudly. ‘Their strength grafted onto our own vines will produce our best wines yet.’
‘You obviously love them as though they were Nirolian born,’ Kadir teased him gently.
‘Surely it is every man’s duty to cherish that which is a gift of love as much if not more than that which he has created himself?’ Gioivanni told him steadfastly.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, inside his head Kadir could see an image
of his mother as she had been in her last weeks, frail in body but the strength of her spirit shining through as she begged him to be proud of his true paternity.
‘Niroli will benefit from all that you bring to ruling it, Kadir, just as Hadiya would have done had you chosen to take up your inheritance there. Your brother is a good administrator, and a fair and kind man, but you are the one who has the vision and the passion that is needed by a true leader and those are your gifts from your natural father. I beg you, do not turn aside from them or scorn them.’
His mother…How she would have loved Natalia. And the child Natalia was carrying? As clearly as though she had been standing at his side he could hear his mother’s voice telling him softly, ‘Do not deny your child, Kadir; do not turn away this precious gift, out of fear.’
Was that it? Was his refusal to accept that he was the father of the child Natalia was carrying based on fear? He knew perfectly well, despite having denied it to Natalia, that condoms were not always reliable; what man did not? In every other way Natalia had proved to him over and over again her honesty and her strong moral code through the things she said and did. Was it therefore so very unlikely that she would not tell him the truth about this child…? This child…His child. And he wanted to believe her, didn’t he? He wanted her to be truly his wife, his partner, his, totally and completely. Again he felt that sharp stab of fear. The fear of a man deeply in love so lacking in true strength that he feared he was not able to win and hold the love of the woman he loved so deeply, because in the past he had felt unloved?
Kadir had never imagined that he would ever be called upon to look so deeply within himself and question his own motivations. But when a man fell deeply in love, the way he looked at everything changed.
Deeply in love? Him? With Natalia? Well, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that what this was all about? Was he really not man enough to accept her word that this child was his? What if their positions were reversed? What if he was being accused of having fathered a child who was not his, for instance, and she refused to believe him? How would he feel? All at once Kadir knew he needed to see Natalia and talk to her, honestly and openly, to lay before her his own insecurities and his love for her. He had been the first man, the only man she had slept with in many years, she had told him. How did accepting the truth of that admission make him feel? Didn’t it make him ache to wrap his arms around her and tell her just what it did to him to know that her immediate and overwhelming desire for him had led her to break her own rules and show him how she felt? He looked discreetly at his watch. The tour was only half over, it would be several hours yet before he could return to the palace.
A sudden powerful surge of wind bent the vines to the ground, whistling as it ripped through the air around them, followed by the splatter of heavy rain.
‘It is the notorious Niroli storm,’ Giovanni told them. ‘They come out of nowhere from the sea, blessedly infrequently, but when they do come…’ He was looking anxiously at his precious vines and Kadir could see that he was impatient to do what he could to protect them.
‘Your Highness, we should perhaps head back to the palace,’ one of his aides was suggesting, ‘at least until the storm blows over.’ He was having to raise his voice so that Kadir could hear him above the increasing howl of the gale now battering them.
Kadir nodded his head, thinking ruefully that, whilst he wished the vines of Niroli no harm, he couldn’t help but be pleased that the storm was giving him an excuse to be with Natalia.
Natalia! The urgency of his desire to be with her was pounding inside his head and his heart, driving him, and for once in his life he was determined to follow his instincts and his heart and not his head and logic.
The first person Kadir saw as he walked into the palace was the countess.
‘My wife?’ he asked her. ‘Is she…?’
‘She is in your apartments, Your Highness. She asked not to be disturbed, but if you wish me to tell her that you—’
‘No, there is no need, I will go myself,’ Kadir said, thanking her.
‘You cannot escape, you know that, don’t you?’ Zahra told Natalia. ‘Even if you scream and someone hears you, by the time they get here it will be far too late.’
Natalia was struggling to accept what was happening. She knew that inwardly she had likened the previous intensity of Zahra’s manner to that of a potential stalker, and she had, too, felt irritated by Kadir’s typical male inability to see beyond the adoring, soft-as-butter, man-pleasing façade Zahra put up whenever she saw him, but it had never occurred to her that Zahra might physically attack her. The very idea seemed outlandish and like something out of a bad film. But it wasn’t a film and it was happening to her.
‘Zahra, you need to think about this and about what your own future will be if you go ahead,’ Natalia urged her, striving desperately to bring down the tension by talking matter of factly about what was happening. ‘You won’t be able to escape. You will go to prison and how can you be with Kadir then?’
Zahra, though, was refusing to be sidetracked. ‘Kadir will protect me,’ she insisted. ‘He is beyond the law and so I will be, too. Besides, why would anyone mourn you? You are nothing…and once I have given Kadir his first son no one will remember that you ever existed, but first of course I have to destroy the child you are carrying and you with it.’
How could she sound so casual? Surely only some kind of mental disorder could be responsible for such behaviour? And that surely meant that there was no point in trying to reason with Zahra. She had to try to get to those doors, Natalia recognised. There was no other chance of escape from her. With every deadly word Zahra uttered her madness became more clear. There was no point in trying to reason with her.
Natalia tried to judge the distance she would have to run; if she feinted and pretended to make for the far set of doors that might draw Zahra off and allow her to get behind her to the main set.
She took a deep breath and said a small prayer to her guardian angel, if she had one, and to her child for its forgiveness if they didn’t make it.
She must focus on the doors, on getting them open and getting out. Abruptly the main door to the suite opened, causing both women to turn towards them.
‘Kadir…’ Natalia sobbed his name in sick relief as she saw her husband standing there. Whilst he might have encouraged Zahra to come here to be with him, Natalia did not believe for one minute that he could have known of her obviously hidden precarious mental state.
‘What the—?’
Kadir took in the scene with one brief glance around the room. ‘Zahra,’ he began but she didn’t let him continue.
Without taking her eyes off Natalia, she said with mad glee, ‘It is all right, Kadir. Soon she will not come between us any more because I shall have killed her and the brat she carries.’
‘Guards. Guards!’ Kadir called out urgently into the corridor as Zahra made a swift lunge towards Natalia, ripping the sleeve of Natalia’s top with the downward plunge of her dagger as Natalia dodged her and started to run for the now-open doors. Natalia was fast, but Zahra’s madness had obviously given her even greater speed. Natalia could hear the sound of her breathing behind her, she felt the sharp, biting sting of the blade as it sliced into the flesh of her shoulder and then, incredibly, unbelievably and surely impossibly, just as she thought there would be no escape for her after all, Kadir, who must have moved at the speed of light, threw himself protectively in between them to shield her and to take the full force of Zahra’s savage stab towards his heart.
The last thing Natalia heard before she fainted was the soft, low grunt of pain Kadir gave as he fell forwards onto her.
‘Your Highness, the woman Zahra Rafiq was intercepted on her way to the airport. She has refused to undergo a medical examination here in Niroli. We have therefore as you instructed been in contact with the necessary authorities in Hadiya and they have given permission for her to be escorted there to undergo a medical assessment and receive treatment.’
Kadir’s mouth compressed. He knew he would never cease to blame himself for not realising the dark truth Zahra had been concealing behind her mask of apparent sanity. Natalia, saint that she was, might have urged him to think compassionately of her and to understand that her behaviour sprang from an undiagnosed mental condition, but for the moment Kadir was finding that hard to do. The true guilt, of course, was his own for not realising the truth about Zahra himself, and he doubted he would ever forgive himself for that.
Having thanked the minister for his report he turned to the palace aide waiting anxiously to talk with him. ‘King Giorgio is most anxious to see you, Highness,’ he told Kadir. ‘The news of the dreadful attack on you and the Crown Princess could not be kept from him and he is beside himself with anxiety.’
‘Please tell my father that I am well and that I shall be with him as soon as I have spoken with the Crown Princess’s consultant.’
Not even to reassure his father did Kadir intend to leave the hospital until he had spoken with Natalia and told her what he had to say.
He knew that from now until his dying day he would never, ever forget the emotions that that seized him when he had thrust open the doors to the apartment and seen what had been happening. The reality of her own imminent death had already been shadowing Natalia’s eyes, her hands clasped across her body to protect her, his child, and in that moment all he had known, his single and only thought, had been his need to protect them both. Not just Natalia, but the child she carried as well, for he had known instinctively then, when it was almost too late, that the baby could not have been fathered by anyone other than himself. He had felt protective of the baby and he’d been filled with the most tender love for him or her. Who would protect them both if he did not do so, who had more responsibility, more right to stand between them and whatever harm might threaten them? His wife…His child…