The door swung open.
She shoved her tingling hand beneath her thigh. Nasir pressed a hand to his lips and stared at his fingers.
“Why am I never invited to such things?” a boisterous voice asked, and Zafira’s disappointment at the interruption was replaced with a different kind of elation.
Altair swept inside, carrying a bundle wrapped in an ivory cloth. He was clean now, scrubbed free of the terrible bloody tears that had streaked his face. A neat patch of deep crimson threaded with gold covered his eye, matching the turban carefully styled around his head. Only he could procure something so extravagant so quickly.
She thought of him turning away, standing at the Lion’s side. How well he’d looked then, only a day before he had lost his eye. What had changed within so short a time?
“Why is it you can never knock?” Nasir asked, clearing a rasp from his throat.
Altair peered at him. “Why? Were you busy? You don’t look like you were busy.”
The insinuation rang clear in his voice, and the feathering in Nasir’s turned neck made her pulse quicken. Touch me, that vein whispered.
She swallowed thickly as Altair crouched and frowned at her empty cup. “Nice of you to join us in the world of the living, Huntress.”
“I could say the same of you,” she replied. Questions rose to her tongue. Why did you leave us? What happened?
His eye was bright as it swept her face, his smile warm, and Zafira wondered if he had gotten that dimple from his mother or father. “I knew you’d miss me.”
And she had, so very much. She’d thought it odd, at first, that she could miss them when she had finally reunited with Yasmine, but it seemed that delicate, mortal hearts were strange and vast.
Riddled with guilt, too. Within the very walls of this palace, Yasmine nurtured hatred for her brother’s killer, yet here Zafira was, filled to the brim with relief that he was safe.
Skies, Yasmine. Altair.
How was it that they had lived leagues apart for decades and now, when anger and pain and vengeance burned in the sister of her heart’s veins, the object of that vehemence was only a hall away? As if she didn’t have enough to do, now Zafira needed to ensure the two of them did not meet. That their paths remained uncrossed.
She could imagine Yasmine in all her tiny glory scrambling atop him with murder and rage while Altair went slack-jawed at her beauty. He would apologize, she knew, but it wouldn’t be enough. No amount of apologizing could bring back Deen and mend the hole in Yasmine’s heart.
Only time could do that.
“I’m sorry about Aya,” Zafira said softly. Altair’s face fell, his eye ghosted by weariness. He and Benyamin had been close; it only made sense that Aya had been his friend, too.
If Zafira had been willing to live the rest of her life with Aya’s blood on her hands, would any of this have happened?
Kifah stepped inside and slammed the door closed, looking among them. “Oi, is there a reason we’re all loitering in something we probably don’t need to be loitering in?”
All three of them looked up. Kifah repeated her question with a silent lift of her brows. Her head was freshly shaved, scalp bright.
“We’re a zumra. We hunted the flame together, found the light in the darkness, but we were far from done, laa? Now we unleash it. We free the stars, shatter the darkness holding us captive, and return the world to the splendor it once was.”
Zafira breathed deep, as if she could somehow ingest the hope of her words. Had Kifah decided not to leave with her calipha?
“With a side of revenge, of course.”
Altair dipped his head. “Spoken like a true qa’id.”
Kifah cast him a sidelong glance. “Did you just put me in a position above yours? You do know a qa’id commands a general, yes?”
Altair grinned, and Kifah groaned before he even opened his mouth.
“I have no qualms about putting women above me.”
Him and his strange double-edged sayings that she wished she could ask Yasmine about.
He turned to Zafira with a stern look and held out the bundle in his hands. “I thought you might want this back.”