We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya 1)

She only wheezed. He made sense of the word she chanted over and over and over. Deen. Deen. Deen.

“Zafira,” he said gently, unable to savor this moment of whispering her name aloud for the first time.

She stilled and looked at him. Twin scythes of weeping ice.

“It’s not real,” he repeated, the words faltering on his tongue. The spirals of black escaping him were very, very real.

“Who are you to claim what is real and what is not?” the man asked. Nasir dragged his gaze to him. He was cloaked in darkness. His very words dripped with it. Darkness incarnate. “When your own mother holds enough secrets to bring you to your knees?”

Nasir only understood half of what the man said. The other half was obscured by the black bleeding from him.

Some semblance of the Huntress returned when she groaned, “Stop with the riddles, Lion.”

“For you, azizi,” he simpered.

Nasir went very, very still. The man shifted his amber eyes to him.

He’s alive. That was his first thought. He’s been alive all this time. He remembered Benyamin’s claim of a darkness festering in Ghameq, and Nasir understood the familiarity in those eyes.

He had looked into them every time he looked at his father.

No wonder Ghameq knew of Benyamin and Kifah.

“Bring me a knife,” the Lion of the Night murmured. But when he studied Nasir’s unflinching gaze, he smiled, and the shadows stirred in excitement. “Laa, bring me the poker. The Huntress must know I am not lax with my promises.”

CHAPTER 72

As much as she had wished he wouldn’t come, Zafira couldn’t quell a small echo of elation when the prince arrived. She was a little less alone now, a little less lost. Even if he was strung up beside her. Exhaling shadows.

“Will you bring me the Jawarat, azizi?” the Lion asked her in his soft murmur.

She clenched her jaw, and he read her clearly enough.

An ifrit brought him the poker, the steel rod black and unassuming. The Lion gripped it in his palm and set his cool gaze on Nasir.

And Zafira watched as the aloof prince came undone. Fissures in his wide gray eyes, a tremor across his parted lips. The shadows wept from his form, and a sound tore from his mouth.

A cry.

A cry.

She didn’t understand. Not even when the Lion pressed the poker into the fire and drawled a word. “Pathetic.”

Nasir flinched. The crown prince, who washed blood from

his hands like soot from a fire, flinched. His breathing grew labored and he shrank back at the sound of the metal swooping across the dry air.

The scars on his back.

That senseless torture. The ridiculing word.

“Don’t,” Zafira said. She choked on the word, and the Lion canted his head at her. The prince stilled. “Please.”

“Touching,” the Lion purred. “Did you expect me to stop because you were polite?”

She felt the heat of the poker as he drew close, Nasir’s ragged breathing harsh in her ears. Her desperation burned, and she gave in. “I’ll bring you the Jawarat.”

Anything to make the prince stop shaking.