He could not. A shroud of shadow thickened his thoughts, stealing something from him. Replacing him. Overpowering the emptiness.
Blinding pain cut into his back. He was shoved to the floor. The tiles were cold. The medallion fell with an irreversible clink and crack, but nothing happened. Aya was right, and now he would pay with his life. A hand gripped his collar and wrenched his head back.
And everything came to a halt at the sound of a whisper.
Nasir stilled. He had imagined it. They had all imagined it. There was no possible reason the sultan would say—
“Ibni,” Ghameq repeated.
Mutt. Scum. Nothing. Everything disappeared at that one whispered invocation: My son.
Ibni. He was a child with a splintered shin. Ibni. Reverently receiving his first sword. Ibni. Visiting Sarasin, as people pondered why the sands had begun to darken.
Then this. On his knees in his room, the stench of blood heavy in his lungs.
“I knew it would be you. The world would bow at my feet, but only you would save me.”
Ghameq’s voice tremored with the weight of years lost. The room resembled a graveyard, the tiles stained red, corpses staring wide-eyed at the lights suspended from the ornate ceiling.
“Release him.”
It was not the same voice that spoke these words. This was curt, harsh as ever. Even the last of the hashashins flinched.
Nasir rose, swaying from the loss of blood, from light-headedness. The hashashin handed him a cloth, which he held against his bleeding arm.
The medallion lay broken between them, cast in the gold of the firelight and the glow of the moon. The medallion that had claimed his father for years and given a tyrant a throne.
Now he was free. Free.
Nasir stepped forward. Near enough to feel the heat radiating from the sultan. He looked exactly as he had a moment ago, gray eyes rimmed dark with exhaustion, displeasure denting twin scores between his brows.
“Ibni,” Ghameq murmured again, and Nasir was powerless as his father drew him close.
Baba, he wanted to say, but the word knotted in his throat. He listened, instead, to the beat of his father’s heart. The reminder that worse could have been lost.
CHAPTER 32
Night laved the last of the light from the sky, relieving the sooq of the relentless heat. Zafira had always thought people annoyed her. The way the Demenhune laughed and smiled despite the ill that surrounded them had always grated on her nerves.
That had nothing to do with the people, she knew now, but herself. Her own inner turmoil.
As she meandered the sooq, listening for whatever voice Bait ul-A
hlaam would use to call her, she studied the people as much as the stalls.
A young safi spread fresh yogurt across a round of flatbread for his smitten human customer, and it was clear the way they felt about each other was mutual. Zafira watched as two safin sisters nicked an extra from an olive cart when the merchant turned to grab change. It was behavior she’d never expected from safin, and it made her smile.
She passed a shop that offered narjeelah alongside tobacco marinated in molasses and sold by the weight. There was another with abayas adorned in embroidery that would have taken weeks, low-cut necklines making her skin burn. A moon ago, she would have barely given the colorful gowns a second glance. Now she wondered how she would look wearing one of them. Any of them.
You’re still poor.
That was not why she looked at them, and she knew it. She hurried along, pushing past safin and human alike, nearly tripping on the tiny sand qit roaming for scraps near the stalls that smelled of tangy sumac and sizzling onions, manakish and roasting mutton.
At the head of another dark alley, she paused. A song whispered from a dimly lit entrance deep within, and her spirits rose.
“Found you,” she whispered back.
The night drew shadows that reminded her too much of the Lion and the heart he had stolen. Of Nasir and his wayward dark. As she neared the doorway, the tune grew louder, a flute both gentle and seductive. Zafira stepped inside, breath held, fingers pressed against her thighs.