We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

And his lover’s every kiss had been a double-edged sword.

Now isn’t the time for your pathetic realizations. It was too late—he was already spiraling down the abyss. She saw it. She saw the chaos on his face, heard it in the thrum of his heart because she was still so close. It was only when she pressed her brow to his that he remembered to breathe.

“You are right not to accept me. Not to want this,” he said.

She shook her head against his. “It isn’t your fault that—”

He cut her off with a broken laugh. “What are the odds, Zafira? Every bit of affection in my life has been fabricated. When does it stop being the fault of others and start being the fault of mine?”

She didn’t speak. Only gripped his shoulder with a sure hand, listening as no one ever had before.

“I only look human,” he said quietly. A curl of shadow escaped his mouth. It happened when his emotions ran rampant, when he struggled to rein in his thoughts. “I’m a monster. A beast. And the ones who run are the ones who’ve gotten close enough to see that there’s no room inside for anything else.”

“Even a beast is capable of love. Of being loved,” she countered. “The Lion made your father cruel. Necessity made your mother lie. Pain fueled Kulsum’s manipulation. No matter what Altair has become now, he loved you before. Kifah loves you. I—”

He stilled. He didn’t dare draw breath.

A knock sounded at the door, insistent.

“I should—” She stopped, breathless, and pulled away.

“Yes,” he said dumbly, and then she was gone, leaving the scent of oud and roses on his clothes, silver starlight everywhere he looked, and the ghost of words that never were.

CHAPTER 48

Altair bit his tongue until it was bleeding as profusely as his eye. He refused to make a sound, refused to cry out, even as every vessel in his body begged to. In pain. In loss. Ninety years he had retained himself, only for this.

This.

Aya stood in the doorway, dirt smeared across her pink abaya. She was bloody from head to toe—no, that was his vision. Blood dripped from his chin, spattered onto the floor as if he were a basin with an irreparable leak.

She ran to him and he shrank away. He hated her in that moment. Her pity, her pain. She had no right to any of it.

“What happened?” she cried.

“Why do you care?” Altair felt as hollow as his voice.

He tasted his blood on his tongue. Two paces away, the si’lah heart was witness to it all, thrumming faintly.

“Fix him, my sweet,” the Lion commanded quietly. “He must see that he chose wrongly.”

She reached into the tray and slit her palm after a moment’s hesitance, and through his pinprick of perception, he wondered if he was supposed to be grateful to her for abandoning her fear of dum sihr when she cupped her hand beneath his chin and stirred his blood with her own. When she pressed her fingers to his eye socket. When he saw, with a dry heave, what was left of his eye being torn away from his numbed skin.

“Give me water,” she said to an ifrit afterward. “To clean him.”

“Don’t,” Altair snarled. “Step away from me.”

She lowered her hand reluctantly, hurt flashing across her features, and Altair laughed. A sad croak of a sound he didn’t recognize as his own. The Lion murmured something he missed, and she went back to him, washing her hands in the basin in the corner.

The room smelled of blood and the must of oil. It smelled of apprehension and change. Of loss. With one eye, Altair watched the Lion recline across his bedroll as Aya sat beside him, crossing her legs. Her gaze flitted to Altair with the barest unease. With sorrow, always sorrow. Ever since her son’s death.

He seized it as whatever held him stiff against the wall subsided and the ifrit grabbed him once more.

“Aya, look at me,” he implored, despite the hatred in his veins. “Look at what he’s done. What would Benyamin say?”

She smiled at him. “The dead cannot speak, sadiqi.”

The Lion looked pleased. Aya picked up the first of her tools and pulled back the folds of the Lion’s robes.