This is how it has to be, he told himself, the way he always did, though it felt emptier than usual tonight. Or he did. This is safer for her by far.
Khaled had never felt so hollow in his life.
“You’re scowling,” Cleo said now, entirely without inflection, because he had told her she was nothing and she’d taken him at his word. This was entirely his doing.
He should have rejoiced at his success. Instead, he felt nothing but grim. As though he’d blacked out his own sun.
“I find my patience for these events grows thinner all the time,” he said, prodded by something he didn’t understand to confide in her. The further he pushed her away, the further she disappeared behind that smooth mask of hers, the more he wanted her close. He couldn’t recall the last time they’d slept apart, and he’d been considering moving her permanently into his suite in the palace. Because he was a despicable man. The truth of that pressed into him, cold and inescapable. “I find it less and less unreasonable that my father locked himself away in Jhurat and closed off all the borders. It would be easier.”
Cleo was silent for a moment. She’d become even more slender in the past few months, and his hand spanned her waist in a way he didn’t entirely like. But still she moved with that beautiful elegance of hers, her dancing as exquisite as she was, and it wasn’t the first time Khaled wished—deeply and wildly—that he was a different man.
Or even that he’d found a better way to keep her at arm’s length.
“You are not your father,” she said, her tone measured, her golden gaze meeting his only briefly before sliding away in that deferential manner she’d adopted that made him clench his teeth. “You want more for Jhurat than he did.”
“That doesn’t mean I’ll get it. And I could do more harm than good.”
Because that was what he did, wasn’t it?
“At least you will have tried,” she said after a moment, and he wondered if they were thinking of the same night. The same vicious words he couldn’t take back. That he knew he shouldn’t want to take back. “That has to be better than hiding out and pretending nothing is happening, doesn’t it?”
Their gazes tangled then, and Khaled very nearly missed a step.
He didn’t know what surged in him then, making him feel broken open and singed black straight through to his core. He didn’t know why he could only look down at her, as shaken as he was cursed, and wonder who this smooth, perfect creature was, who spoke so softly and knew him so well and was lost to him forever.
When, of course, he knew. She was what he’d made her with his very own hands. She was what he’d demanded she’d become. She’d opened herself up wide and he’d smashed her flat.
The truth was, he hadn’t truly believed she’d obey him. No matter what he’d said. She never had before.
Cleo held his gaze as if she knew exactly what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and he didn’t know what might happen if she—
But she was too perfect. Too remote.
She only smiled at him again, and he hated it.
In bed she was still the Cleo he remembered. She was still his. The cooler and more distant she became while she was in public, the wilder and more raw she was in private. Anything but smooth. Anything but polished. He held on to that with more desperation than he cared to examine.
She hadn’t claimed to love him again. He’d broken her of that.
“When we return to Jhurat I want you to see the palace physician,” he told her abruptly, and she stiffened in his arms so briefly he almost thought he imagined it.
“Am I ill?”
It was an echo of the old Cleo, that soft yet faintly sharp question, and it went through him like a shot—but when she tilted her head back to look at him, he saw nothing but that blandness he’d come to despise.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Though it would explain a great deal. Do you feel ill?”
“Not in the way you mean.” She was insolent and it thrilled him—but then she blinked, that mask of perfection obscuring the Cleo he wanted to see. “Though I believe I ate far too much of that Sacher torte.”
She had done nothing but pick at the intensely chocolate cake, a Viennese specialty, that had been presented to them earlier. She had marveled over its richness to their hostess but consumed very little of it.
Not that Khaled had taken to monitoring her every movement like an obsessed fool.
“You’re still not pregnant.” It came out flat. Like an accusation.