Traded to the Desert Sheikh

“I don’t think I care for your tone of voice,” Elizabeta replied, her tone light. But her blue eyes were hard. “Is that the kind of disrespect you learned here? We can’t get you away from him fast enough.”

“Did we live off a trust my father set up for me when I was a child?” Amaya hadn’t known she meant to fire that at her mother until she did it. And when Elizaveta froze, she wanted to grab the words back—except instead, she continued. “Is that how we survived those years? Because I must have misunderstood. I thought you told me we had to move around so much because we were destitute.”

She saw the truth in her mother’s face, so much like her own. She saw the glitter of it in her mother’s gaze.

“Things were a good deal more complicated than you can possibly understand,” Elizaveta said, her voice chilly in the warm room.

“That’s all right, Mother.” It wasn’t until she spoke that Amaya heard the bitter edge to her words. That she felt it inside her, spiked and painful. “Lucky for you, I’m far more forgiving than you are.”

She started to move away then, her emotions blinding her and her breath much too ragged, but her mother’s hand on her arm stopped her.

“It’s not forgiveness,” Elizaveta said crisply. “It’s weakness. Haven’t I taught you the difference? Your trouble is, you make yourself a doormat for anyone who happens by and wishes to wipe their feet on you. That’s the difference between us.”

Something cracked then, so loud and so huge that Amaya was surprised she didn’t hear screams from the crowd. It took her a stunned moment to understand that the palace hadn’t crashed down around them—that something had instead toppled over inside her. She could feel the aftershocks, shaking through her.

She reached down and tugged her mother’s elegant hand from her arm.

“I choose how I bend, Mother,” she said. She might have shouted it, though she knew she hadn’t—yet she saw the dazed look in Elizaveta’s eyes as if she had. Amaya could only wonder what expression was on her face. She found she couldn’t bring herself to care. “And to whom. I only kneel when I want to kneel, and that doesn’t make me a doormat. I’ve spent my life catering to you because I love you, not because I’m weaker than you. You’ve spent your life prostrate to your feelings for a man who forgot you the moment you left him, if not long before, because you were never as strong as you pretended to be. That’s the difference between you and me. I’m not pretending.”

“You must be crazy if you think a man like Kavian thinks of you as anything but a conquest,” Elizaveta hissed.

“Don’t mention him again,” Amaya said, with a certain finality that she could see made her unflappable mother blink. “Not ever again. He is off-limits to you. As am I.”

“I am your mother!” Elizaveta huffed at her, as if Amaya had punched her.

“And I love you,” Amaya said with a certain fierce serenity that reminded her of Kavian’s desert. “I always will. But if you can’t treat me with respect, you won’t see me again. It’s that simple.”

For the first time in as long as she could recall, her mother looked old. Something like frail. But Amaya only gazed at her, and ignored the pity that made her heart clench tight.

“Amaya.”

“This isn’t a debate,” she said quietly. “It’s a fact.”

She left her mother standing there, looking lost, for the first time in her memory. It took a few steps to remember herself. To smile. To incline her head as regally as possible as she caught the eye of this or that noble personage. Amaya moved through the crowd as she reached the waiting courtyard, open to the night sky above with a series of decorative pools and fountains marking its center.

Kavian stood on the far side of the pools, that stark, harsh face of his intent as he listened to the two Daar Talaasian generals before him. As if he’d sensed her approach, or her eyes on him, his gaze snapped to hers across the night.

And for a moment there was nothing but that. Nothing but them. No crowd, no guests. No wedding in the morning.

His face was as brutally captivating as ever, and she knew it so much better now. She felt him deep inside her, as if he’d wrapped himself around her bones, taken her air. She felt him as if he was standing beside her instead of across a grand courtyard, as if they were alone instead of surrounded by so many people.

She thought she might feel him like this, as if they’d fused together somehow on some kind of molecular level, all the rest of the days of her life. Amaya told herself that what moved in her then, thick and harsh, was not grief. It couldn’t have been.