“You look nice, Zafira,” she drawled playfully when he didn’t say anything more. She flourished two fingers from her brow with a confidence that stole his breath. “Shukrun, my prince.”
She wasn’t nice, she was a vision.
The girls had brushed moonlight onto her skin, leaving that splotch of darkness to taunt him. Her hair was a mane of gleaming tresses framing her face, blue eyes dazzling in a fringe of kohl.
“Do you wish for me to scribe poetry in your name, fair gazelle?” His voice was rough.
“Pretty words are nice sometimes.”
He brushed a hand down the shimmer of her sleeve, touched the inside of her wrist. “Did the stars fall from the sk
y to adorn you in their luster? No—liquid silver. You are the well that forged every blade in the world.”
She laughed, and his heart leaped at the sound.
“On second thought,” she breathed, closing the distance between them, making him all too aware of her bed stretching out behind her, a tease and a wish, before she brought her mouth to his. “You should do more and talk less.”
A sound escaped him. His ears burned at her intrepid advance, so unlike the blushing girl from Sharr. It was one thing to want to kiss her, and quite another for her to grip the collar of his thobe and pull him to her, the softness of her mouth capturing his. His hands fitted to her waist, the warmth of her skin pulsing through the thin cloth.
“Nasir.”
The pleading in her whisper drove him mad. He wrenched her closer, barely stopping a groan at the feel of her against him. Her lips parted with his, and he smiled at the tentative press of her tongue. He tasted citrus, and the roaring in his blood rushed lower, lower.
Perhaps more than her mouth and her soft sighs, he craved the touch of her palm on his chest, the splay of her fingers on his heart. Claiming him. He pulled away to study her. Her eyes were glassy, her lips bruised and far too lovely for a killer like him. Yet he allowed himself the credit—he had done this. He was the reason the cloistered Huntress was falling apart. He was the reason her lungs worked for breath.
He wanted to lose his fingers in the obsidian of her hair again. To knot his hands into the fabric of her dress to stop the tremble in them, to lead her back, back, back, but it would be cruel to ruin her perfection. He lightened his touch.
“I missed you,” she whispered against his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered at the same time.
She drew back the barest bit, and that half-lidded gaze nearly undid him. “What for now?”
He swayed forward. “For ruining your dress.”
“What’s the use of a pretty dress if I can’t do what I want in it?”
What was the use of a crown if he could not do as he wished?
Her hands slid up his thobe and threaded in his hair, igniting him anew before she pulled away with a smothered sob.
“How long can a stolen moment last?” The words were half to herself. That was the reason for her boldness. For her abandon.
It hurt him.
A single chord of perception stood in her blue gaze before she spoke in a breathless rush. “Will you speak these words to your bride? Kiss her so?”
“My bride. My queen. My fair gazelle,” he said in the barest shred of a whisper. “Cannot all three be one and the same?”
Color brushed her cheeks, and he knew it then. The world could bring a thousand women to him and not one could stand as equal to her. He followed the bob in her throat, noted the sadness in her eyes. He had finally found it in himself to voice what he wanted, but what did it matter if she didn’t want the same?
“And the girl in your room?” she asked, thinking he had spoken lightly. “Am I to share you with her when I am your queen?”
“Kulsum. I truly do not know why she had come to my room the night you saw her. She was my mother’s servant, and she lost her tongue because of me. I—I loved her,” he said, because it was true, because he would never lie to Zafira, “until I learned she was a spy who had been using me and that I’d killed her lover years ago.”
His father had tortured him.
His mother had lied about her very existence.