And Issam reached out and took her by the elbow.
3
Mackenzie stalked back and forth in the holding cell, taking deep, cleansing breaths. They weren’t working. She was furious.
The cell itself didn’t have anything to draw her attention. It was made of concrete and had the basics—a thin, plasticky mattress on a cot bolted to the floor, a metal toilet and sink behind a divider just a few feet high, so that the guards could still look in and see her.
She should be afraid. She should be terrified, crying—she’d been given a death sentence. But she was too angry to feel the fear.
She’d had enough of Middle Eastern men. Everywhere she turned, she was bumping into an alpha male determined to ruin her day. She did not take the imam for anything less than that, despite his mild tone of voice. He was as bad as anyone.
“It’s only a bad day,” she told herself aloud, because what else was there to do? “You’ll get through this.”
She would. She was certain of it. She was a good lawyer, and her mother had been a good lawyer, and they were strong women, both of them. “There’s always another way,” her mother used to tell her, bent over case files she’d brought home from the office. “We search for every avenue.”
Every avenue. Mackenzie would find another avenue that would get her out of this holding cell and out of the death sentence. She clenched her teeth, thinking of the way the imam had turned his back on her. One toppled column shouldn’t be worth ending her life over. Aside from that, intention was nine-tenths of the law in America. It had to be similar here. An imam on the sidewalk outside a mosque couldn’t simply condemn her to death with no recourse.
Could he?
She wished she could go for a run. A few hours earlier, she’d been pounding out the miles on the treadmill in her hotel’s exercise room, mentally preparing for the negotiations with Issam. That had gone off the rails, hadn’t it?
Mackenzie settled for pacing the room a little faster.
If they’d only give her access to the laws. She was sure that it was probably a collection of ancient books interpreted by another group of men, but if they gave her the books, she could find a way out.
She turned back to the door of the holding cell and pounded against it with the side of her fist. “Is anyone there?” she shouted, then knocked harder on the door. “I need help!”
* * *
This was not how this day was supposed to go. Far from it. Issam had stepped out of his shower worrying about all the wrong things. And picking up Inan from the mosque had set off a chain of events that was rapidly leading to disaster.
“Ms. Peters is an American citizen,” said Bahir, his right-hand man, reading off the tablet in his hand. “We had her scheduled for a meeting this afternoon. President Mulazim of Al-Madiza sent her as his representative.”
Issam rubbed a hand over his eyes. “An American citizen. And we’re holding her under a death sentence.”
“An American citizen who has come for diplomatic negotiations.”
Issam paced to the end of his private living room and looked out the window. It showed a view of the city, sprawling before him in the midmorning sun. Somewhere below was the mosque, with its one pillar in shambles on the ground.
The pillar wouldn’t be the only thing to collapse if Issam couldn’t find a way to calm this situation. The Americans wouldn’t take kindly to Al-Dashalid sentencing one of its citizens to death, and that would set off an international PR firestorm, not to mention destroying relations between the two countries. And it wasn’t only America he had to contend with. Al-Madiza had cautiously approached them months ago as the leadership in Caldad had grown bloodthirsty. If Issam didn’t stop Mackenzie’s sentence from being carried out, he could be at war on three fronts.
Then there was his family.
They would be equally appalled at this turn of events, he knew it. And Issam wasn’t married. If he didn’t find a bride soon, they could replace him, and after this, they would. The royal family valued its traditions, yes. But
not at this cost.
He turned back to Bahir, a short man in a tidy suit. “Is there any news from the legal team?”
“They’ve been researching since the moment you returned to the palace.”
“And?”
Bahir frowned. “The imam was correct. It is a law on the books. However, there is no evidence as of yet that a sentence like this has been carried out for hundreds of years.”
“Because the imams granted forgiveness?”
His second-in-command raised one shoulder in a helpless shrug. “Because no one has damaged the mosque.”