“What about the threat that Karim made? This man you were involved with...do I need to find Faisal? Is he the kind to—”
Foreboding inched tight across her skin. “How do you know his name?”
“You are my wife. Knowing everything about you, especially—”
“Especially what?” she said, swallowing the distaste his words brought back.
His expression intractable, his aristocratic features reminiscent of centuries of powerful lineage, he was every inch the arrogant prince in that moment. “Especially anything that could come back and cast a bad light on you and Dahaar, I have to know about it. I have to be prepared.”
The same past that she had shamelessly used to try and get out of this marriage to him now curdled in her stomach. “Are you regretting your decision to not listen to me when I warned you? Wondering if you should sever all ties with me and leave me here in Siyaad?”
“I made my vows. Nothing will make me turn my back on them.”
His words cut through her sharper than if he had said he had regrets. “Of course, your blasted word. Nothing in the world is allowed to interfere with it. How much detail do you want? How I met Faisal? Why I fell for him? How many times he—”
He thrust his face closer, bracing his hands on the wall on either side of her. His breath fanned against her skin. “My lucidity is nothing but the barest veil over my madness as you very well know, Princess.” His words were low, gravelly, and instead of scaring her, they incited the most dangerous tingle in her blood. “Do not provoke me. You don’t want to see what an animal I can become.” He pushed back from the wall, as though he found her nearness suddenly distasteful. “All I need to know is if he is a threat.”
She laughed, bitterness tinged into the sound. “He is not. I’m not the woman he wanted me to be.”
His frown deepened. “You’re pining after a man who cared about the circumstances of your birth? I’m disappointed in you, Princess.”
She shook her head. It was tragic how she was surrounded by men with highest codes of honor and yet they inevitably hurt her. “He didn’t. As luck would have it, Faisal was nothing if not full of honor. When he learned who I was, he thought I should be grateful that my father acknowledged me as his daughter. He thought I should become this paragon of virtue and spend the rest of my life proving to Siyaad and its people that I was worthy of being a princess.
“He thought I should embrace my duty. He wanted to live in Siyaad, wanted to earn a place by my father....the list was endless. When I suggested we leave Siyaad as he had been planning before he met me, he looked at me as though I had committed the greatest sin. He left without saying goodbye.”
The corridor echoed with the bitterness in her words, the silence filling up with her anger.
“Then you’re the one responsible, aren’t you?” he said, a hard edge to his words. “Not your father, or anyone else. You ruined your happiness.”
A dark fear inched its fingers around her heart. “All I wanted was to leave this place,” she said, speaking past the thick lump in her throat. “I would have gone anywhere with him.”
“Maybe he realized your hatred for this life was more than your love for him? That he was just the excuse you needed to finally leave?” Ayaan delivered the words with a quiet ruthlessness, leaving her with nothing to hide under.
“Why are you being deliberately cruel?” she said, tears coating her throat.
His mouth curved, a bitter mockery of a smile. “I am returning a favor. Truth. It is the only real thing between us, isn’t it? You tell me the truth that everyone else around me is too scared to voice for fear of making me mad again, and I do the same.
“If you had truly loved him, Princess, would it have been such a hardship to live with him in Siyaad?”
She shook where she stood, everything inside her balling up into an unbearable knot in her stomach. Ayaan became a blurry form as he turned away.
She had been so angry with Faisal for not taking her away, so heartbroken that he would put her status in Siyaad, and all it entailed, before her.
I won’t be the one who will steal you away from your fate, Zohra. Those had been Faisal’s words.
She grabbed the wall behind her, knees shaking under her.
Can you not view it as anything but a sacrifice?
Her father’s words pricked her. Was she, once again, clinging to her stubborn anger and letting life pass her by? Was she going to spend the rest of her life waiting for someone to save her, as Ayaan had done just now, instead of saving herself?
CHAPTER SEVEN