by Tara Pammi
He frowned. “I was twenty-one when I was captured, not sixteen. I was never the one that women flocked to, like Azeez had been, but I have vague memories. The first time, it was...”
She slapped her palm over his mouth, loath to hear all the details. Desire bloomed at the sensitive skin of her palm, spreading through her entire body. “I don’t want to know,” she whispered, past a dry throat.
He pulled her hand off his mouth. “I didn’t realize what else my madness had robbed from me until you showed up, Princess.” He slowly peeled his fingers off her skin. And Zohra realized with a thudding heart how much he didn’t want to, what it cost him to let go of her.
A shiver shook her from within. For the first time a tendril of fear uncurled itself. A fear of the tightly leashed desire in him, and worst of all, her own reaction to that all encompassing hunger.
Tugging her hand back, she stepped away from him. And his unblinking gaze took in everything.
He moved toward the door, coming to a stop and turned back. The right corner of his mouth tilted up into a lopsided smile that wound itself around her. “I recommend a bath to get rid of that burned smell, Princess. Probably a rose-scented one.” He looked gorgeous, the ever-present shadows of pain and grief temporarily gone. The tension in the room broke even as her body still remembered the imprint of his fingers on her. “As for all the rituals you have to suffer through, I appreciate you humoring my mother. The last few months...have not been easy on her.”
Zohra had to grip the bed behind her to steady her legs. “I must admit, it’s worth smelling like burned carrots to see you smile, Prince Ayaan. I see why the queen mentions it so much.”
“Does she?”
There was such naked hope, such a hunger for more, in his gaze that Zohra couldn’t draw breath for a second. It was a glimpse into the boy he must have been, the one his mother couldn’t stop talking about. “Why do you sound so surprised? You are all she talks about.”
He gave a tight nod, and leaned against the closed door, the levity gone from his face.
Hundreds of questions pummeled through her head. “Did she not know you were alive?”
The look he shot her was scorching.
She pushed off the bed.
The quiet swirled and snarled around them. His jaw tightened; his hands turned into white-knuckled fists. The silence went on for so long that she wondered if he would answer. It felt as if she was standing on the shifting, sinking floor of a desert. The more she tried to hold herself at a distance, the more Prince Ayaan and Dahaar wove into the fabric of her very life.
“Only my old bodyguard, who found me, and my father knew that I was alive. Khaleef roamed the desert for months without giving up. Even after the rescue efforts had been called off. I think he wanted to find our bodies for my parents.”
The image those words conjured twisted her gut. “Did he?”
“No, but he did find me.” He met her gaze then and Zohra heard the thread of anger in his. “Is this just puerile curiosity, Princess, or is there a point to this conversation?”
Her breath hovered in her throat, an intense tightness in her chest. She could give the easy answer—lie and face his scorn at what he termed curiosity. But she couldn’t be a coward while facing the truth of her own feelings or fear.
Maybe if she heard what had happened to him from his own mouth, if she knew what tormented him, she could stop speculating. Maybe she would fear him and this...rampant, unwise curiosity about him would die away. Still, it was the hardest truth she had ever given voice to. “I think, as your wife, irrespective of our...true relationship, I have a right to know what I’m dealing with,” she replied, not holding her punches back. “That sounds like I’m hinting something like the rest of the world is, but I would rather know the truth.”
A flash of something lit up his eyes. She released the breath she was holding. “Hint, Princess? I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”
He smiled, a genuine curve of his mouth, a banked firework in his eyes. It cut grooves in his hollowed-out cheeks and sent a pang through her gut. “I—”
“It’s the first sensible thing you have said since you stormed into my suite.” He turned away from her. “Khaleef found me in the desert, a couple of months after the attack. According to him, I...” She saw him swallow with great effort. “I was incoherent and violent when he approached me. He didn’t let me out of his sight until he could personally alert my father. My father took one look at me and sent me off to a castle in the heart of the Alps, where I was conveniently and blissfully mad for five years.”
His words were so matter-of-fact, even when they held so much pain, that Zohra couldn’t even speak for a few minutes. “Mad?”
He stared at her, as if suddenly realizing that she was there. “Mentally ill, violent, incoherent.”
“Do you...remember what happened after you were captured?”
This time, there was no hiding the pain even in his stark face. “Most of it has come back to me.”
“In your nightmares?”
He nodded, a flash of surprise in his gaze.
“So your mother had no idea that you were alive all these years or what...you have been through?”
He shook his head.
What had happened to him in the desert? What horrors did his mind revisit in those terrible nightmares?
Zohra hugged the strange fear that gripped her gut. She didn’t want to know, not because the truth of what had been done to him would scare her. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But she was terrified of her own reaction, of crossing over a threshold and stepping into a path from which there was no return. Instead, she asked him something that had been bothering her, something that needed to be said even if it meant incurring his wrath.
“You said you were doing this—” she moved her hands to encompass them “—for your parents. But what’s the point if your behavior is hurting your mother?”
He looked genuinely shocked, his frown deepening. Pure anger flattened his mouth and he took a step toward her. “You are lecturing me about duty toward one’s parents? You’ve got a nerve.”
Zohra refused to back down, even though his words hit her hard. “I’ve spent the better part of two weeks humoring your mother, seeing everything she hides from you and your father. Do you know that she hasn’t spoken to him since you....returned? She feels so...”
Every time she looked at Queen Fatima, at the repressed pain in her eyes, Zohra’s own pain, her mother’s desolation after her father had left, it all rose to the surface. Lies, even told with the best intentions, caused pain much more terrible than truth itself. “I have seen the tears she hides from you and your father.”
His skin lost pallor as though she had delivered him a physical blow.
“And yet you...avoid her. You barely exchange two words with her. She is standing on the outside, looking at you, wondering what she has done that you won’t even—”
“How can she think she has done anything wrong?”
“Then why won’t you speak with her, why won’t you even meet her gaze?”
“Because I’m not my brother.”
It was a low growl that made the hairs on her neck stand up. His lean frame trembled as though he struggled to contain his emotions within. “I can’t bear to look at her because when she sees me, she’s looking for Azeez. She’s remembering him, searching for something of him in me.”
Zohra swallowed at the anguish in his words. “She thought all three of you were dead. She made peace with it until...suddenly five years later, she’s told you’re alive and...”
“Half-mad and haunted?”
“Your father had no right to lie to her.”
His gaze flashed at her daring. “My father was protecting her. For all intents and purposes, I was dead.”
; “He lied because it would not serve Dahaar’s interests. This is what I hate about this life...about...” She had to stop to breathe through the tightness in her chest, to swallow the rage sputtering through her. This was not about her. “Resenting her for remembering your brother only makes you human. It doesn’t mean she—”
“You think I resent her for remembering her firstborn? My brother was the golden prince, the perfect heir. Passionate about Dahaar, smart, courageous, a man who was everything the future king needed to be.
“I’m not him. He should have been the one that survived. That’s what my parents think when they see me, that’s what the cabinet, the high council think when they see me.”
It was what he thought, why he was so isolated from everything and everyone, Zohra realized, shaking. How could anyone live with so much self-loathing, with so much pain tied into their very existence?
“Who gets to decide who should survive—”
He clasped her cheek, his hand gentle in contrast to his face, a stony mask. “You think I should be grateful that I’m alive? A broken man, a coward afraid of the dark? If it had been Azeez who had survived, he wouldn’t have lost his mind for five years and hid in some Swiss castle, leaving my father to deal with the catastrophe. He wouldn’t have regained his lucidity only to be haunted by memories.”
The bitterness in his words leeched every ounce of heat from the room. The hairs on her neck stood up, her gut gripped by the tight fist of pain.
His pain. She could feel it seep into her, enveloping her.
“My brother would have taken up the mantle of Dahaar instead of still hiding behind our father. He would have chosen a woman like you for his queen instead of being forced into it by duty.” His gaze swept over her mouth with a hunger that shocked her. “He would have been man enough to make you his wife in every way instead of hiding under a sham.
“Do you understand why I can’t bear to look at her, Princess, why I can’t bear to be near you? Because I’m not fit to be a son, or a husband, much less a prince.”
Pushing away from her, he left the suite, leaving the echoes of his anger and pain swirling around her.
With her knees buckling under the weight of his confession, Zohra slid to the seat behind her. He was like a tornado, and as much as she wished to stay out of his path, she had a feeling he would suck her into him.
His laughter and pain carved places inside her. The truth of his desire that she hadn’t been able to see until now thrummed through her. How could she have when she had been mourning Faisal’s loss, when she was nothing but a figurehead in Prince Ayaan’s life?
She needed to escape from him, from everything he unraveled within her by his mere presence.
CHAPTER SIX
ZOHRA TOOK A sip of the sherbet and forced herself to savor the cool slide of the liquid.
It was hard with a dozen pairs of eyes trained on her from every corner of the vast hall, each speculating why she was attending the first gathering in Siyaad after her wedding alone. If it had been up to her, she would have canceled it. But of course, the traditional Al-Akhtum gathering was even more important this year as her family needed to meet the crown prince of Dahaar and understand that he was now an integral part of Siyaad’s politics.
Only she had left Dahaara without waiting to know if Prince Ayaan could fit it into his busy schedule or not.
There was something about being near him, even for a limited time, that unsettled her. Something that had burrowed beneath her skin and refused to dislodge. And it wasn’t just the explosive desire that he had let her see.
By sheer force of will, she forced a smile as another of her father’s cousins took in her attire from top to toe and made his displeasure the known. Although she wore a designer pantsuit with a long-sleeved jacket that covered up every inch of skin, it was still not the traditional caftan that Siyaadi women wore.
She’d heard the whispers behind her father’s back, seen the sneers beneath the smiles, felt their snubs for eleven years. But her wedding the future king of Dahaar and the absence of her father today meant the claws that were usually sheathed were now out.
She could just imagine the whispers if Ayaan let her go in a few years. Whether her father was alive or not, whether Wasim was crowned the prince or not, her life would not change.
Would she resent Wasim and Saira as the years went on because her love for them held her back? Shuttling between Siyaad and Dahaar, a daughter but not a true one, a wife but not a true one. Nothing in her life held any significance, not to her, not to anyone else.
She was so tired of having no one to laugh with, no one she could even call a friend, of living each day with no sense of purpose or hope for a fleck of future happiness.
The depth of her loneliness choked her.
Zohra stiffened as the son of her father’s cousin, Karim, came to a stop beside her. He was the most vicious of them all, hungry for the power of the throne, unhappy that her father had formed an alliance with Dahaar.
He blocked her against the table and leaned in a little too close.
“My sympathies, Zohra.” The false sympathy in Karim’s words coupled with that ever-present seediness made the hairs on her neck stand to attention. She knew what he thought of her. Easy. Whether it was the accident of her birth or the fact that she didn’t simper and bow like a traditional Siyaadi woman didn’t matter.
“I knew this would happen,” Karim said, standing scandalously close. “I warned Uncle Salim that no one could be expected to accept you as his wife, even the Mad Prince.”
Her stomach churned just hearing Ayaan spoken of like that. “You’re not fit to utter his name.”
Shaking his head, he smiled. “Tell me, Zohra. Why did he parcel you back to Siyaad after only three weeks of marriage? Has he already figured out you are...unfit to be even a madman’s wife?” He made a tsk-tsk sound that scraped her nerves. A deathly silence fell around her. Could everyone hear the filthy words that fell from his mouth? “Is this because he discovered you are the result of your mother’s affair with a married man or because he has discovered your own...adventures into love?”
The not-so-veiled threat in his gaze curled into dread she couldn’t shake. That her past could sully Prince Ayaan’s family’s name sent feral fear pulsing through her. Not when he had been nothing but honorable toward her, offered her nothing but respect. Ayaan had challenged her, pushed her buttons, surprised her with his sense of humor, but not once had he treated her with anything but honor. The realization stupefied her even as Karim leaned in closer.
“All I ask is that we be mutually beneficial to each other.” Bile scratched her throat. “And remember, Zohra, I am always here when you need comfort, comfort that the Mad Prince should be—”
Long fingers that looked extremely familiar curled around Karim’s shoulder, cutting off his words. Zohra turned so hard that she had to grab the table behind her to keep her balance.
Ayaan stood next to her, cold fury stamped over his features. He bent his head toward Karim, but his gaze collided with her own, unasked questions in its golden depths. “Stand within a mile radius of my wife again and you will regret it. Deeply.”
He hadn’t spoken loudly yet his voice carried around the room. The color fled from Karim’s face, leaving pasty whiteness beneath the dark skin. “Prince Ayaan, allow me to welcome—”
“Run as fast as you can, Karim.”
The older man cast one last look at her and left the hall. Prickly silence shrouded the hall. Zohra breathed hard, her gut twisting and untwisting.
When had she become everything she detested? A useless princess waiting for her prince to do the saving?
She had known there was a chance Ayaan would be here. But she had been so caught up in her own misery to answer Karim back.
And now she was beholden a little more
to the man she wanted to maintain distance from.
Standing so close that she could smell the scent of his skin beneath his faint cologne, Ayaan clasped her wrist gently. Their gazes met and held, the ever-present currents of desire arching into life. She could see the puckered scar over his eyebrow, hear the slightly altered tempo of his breathing.
His gaze missed nothing, the banked need in it reaching out to her. “Are you okay, Princess?”
This isn’t about you, Zohra reminded herself sternly. If she had learned one thing in three weeks of marriage, it was that Ayaan bin Riyaaz Al-Sharif would have come to any woman’s aid in the same situation. Honor was in his blood.
“I am fine,” she finally managed to mumble. “And please, will you stop calling me that?”
He bent closer to her, the whole room watching them with bated breath. His brows pulled together, his gaze held a question.
“If you are waiting for me to thank you for coming to my aid so heroically,” she said jerkily, hating that the crushing loneliness she had felt mere minutes ago disappeared in his presence, “you will be waiting for a while.”
Leaning against the table by her side, he folded his hands. “Would you like to leave?”
She blinked. He was smiling. It was a wacky, coconspirators kind of smile that barely curved his mouth. And yet it was there. The beauty of it was enough to scramble her already frazzled wits. “I...You are here to bestow all these people with the gloriousness of your exalted presence.” She looked around the hall. “Leaving now would hardly accomplish that goal.”
He turned away from her and she took the chance to study him greedily.
He wore black jeans and a white, long-sleeved tunic with a Nehru collar, handspun with the utmost care by the craftswomen in a small village near Dahaara specifically for their prince. The sleeves were folded to just below his elbows, a gold-plated watch adorning his wrist.
The collar was open at the neck, giving her a view of a strip of golden bronze skin. Feeling a flush creep up her neck, she turned away.