We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

Help, she begged the Jawarat, but when the Lion of the Night closed his fingers around it, slowly morphing into Nasir once more, it did nothing. It was quiet.

Laa, it was exuberant. She felt it buzzing in her own veins, chilling her to the bone. Because she had rejected its chaos and violence. She had rejected it.

She lifted her eyes to the Lion’s, unwilling to let him see her horror.

“I won’t fall for your lies again,” she vowed with halfhearted pride.

The Lion only smiled.

“You will fall, azizi. Mark my words, for it will be my greatest one yet.”

His eyes swept the room, searching for what she blearily realized were the hearts, before he disappeared with what he had coveted, leaving her paralyzed by the emotions he had stirred with a smile and a kiss.

CHAPTER 20

“It’s what?”

Seif’s pale eyes were livid, his rage sending the last of Zafira’s tenacity crumbling. The small room narrowed with each pound of her pulse, shelves along the walls flipping to prison bars, trapping her.

“How could such a thing occur? How did he enter the house?” Aya looked stricken, her yellow abaya appearing colorless in the dim light.

Lana was rooted at Aya’s side, and Zafira felt the distance between them as brutally as an ax.

“Answer the question, Huntress,” Seif seethed.

“How would I know?” she snarled. “I was in my room. It could have been you who let him in for all I know.”

“Watch your tongue,” he hissed, and she felt like a child. “The dum sihr protecting the house might have run out, but you handed him the hilya tied up with a silver bow.” He rounded on Aya. “I knew we should not have trusted her to keep it safe. A mortal. A child. This is precisely what we feared.”

Aya paled, and the fight drained from Zafira as quickly as it had come. Nasir was not here. Which was for the best, as she would not have been able to look at him, not without seeing him in her room, his scar in the light, his hand at her thigh. The Lion’s hand.

“I didn’t know it was him,” she whispered.

“How—”

“Bleeding Guljul, for immortal safin, you’re all so dense,” Kifah snapped. “He’s half ifrit. Did you not think he could possibly shift like full-blooded ifrit can?”

“Whose countenance did he resemble?” Aya asked.

It was becoming increasingly harder to breathe. To think past the press of him, the amber in his false gray eyes.

Zafira’s exhale broke.

“Why does that matter?” Lana asked, coming to Zafira’s side and holding her hand. It was a blanket over her pulse, an instant quiet. “We can try to get it back without standing around talking. No. Okhti, what if he destroys it? You—”

Zafira shook her head. “He won’t. If there is anything sacred to him, it’s knowledge.” Of that, she was certain, and if she had learned anything about the elusive Jawarat, it was that its knowledge was endless. “But he’s going to take the throne.”

She didn’t speak of how he had vowed to make her his queen and how she had trembled from more than disgust and anger.

Shame held her tongue, stopped her from telling them he promised something far worse than anything any of them could imagine. Laa, it wasn’t shame but fear. How would they regard her if they knew she had not only given him the Jawarat but conversed with him? Kissed him?

It was the exact reason she couldn’t speak of the Jawarat’s malevolence. Of its vision and its whispers. To them, she was the girl who was pure of heart. Perfect in her desires.

Fear. Shame. They were needles stitching thread between her lips.

“As is expected.” Seif dismissed her words with irritation. “It was what he wanted a century ago. Did you assume he had changed? That his wants would end with the Jawarat and a single heart? Laa.”

“Then we should go to the palace. Where the throne is,” Lana said, and no one commented on her use of the word “we.” As if she were a part of this. As if she had found a limb on the tree of the zumra and perched upon it, joining them in her own way.