“You can’t really care about that,” she’d said one afternoon, a bit crossly.
He’d come upon her in one of the gardens, bursting with bright pink-and-purple blossoms beneath the blue fall sky, and told her flatly that he didn’t like her hair up in a ponytail. That he preferred the braid she wore over one shoulder sometimes or it loose and flowing around her as she moved.
He’d reached over and pulled the elastic from her hair himself, then tucked it into one of his pockets, as if he couldn’t bear to so much as look upon the offending ponytail a moment longer than necessary. “Can I not?”
“You have a country to run, Kavian.” She’d scowled at him, and had wondered as she did where the courage to defy him so openly came from. When he still made her quake deep within. When it took everything she had. “What I’m doing with my hair should be the least of your concerns. Literally, the very least.”
“I find nothing about you insignificant, azizty.” That hint of a smile on that hard mouth of his, and it spilled through her like the desert sun above them, hot and bright, and made her think she’d do anything to see it again. Stand up to him, run, submit—whatever it took. The rush of that realization had stunned her. “None of it is beneath my notice. You are my queen.”
And then he’d taken her in his arms, right there in the gardens, and kissed her until she’d decided that she had no particular allegiance to wearing her hair in a ponytail after all.
But it occurred to her—as she sat with the group of advisers who were tutoring her each day on a selection of subjects Kavian felt it was important his queen know, like proper palace protocol and the intricate social hierarchies of Daar Talaas—that she always gave in. Or he caught her and then she gave in. That it wasn’t only Kavian—that her life was a series of similar surrenders that had led her straight here.
Because it had always seemed easier to bend than cause a commotion.
“You don’t have the right to make that decision for me,” she’d told her own father some years back. She’d wanted to take a few years off from her studies; he’d wanted her to get her degree—and he’d wanted her to stay in one place so that he’d be able to more closely monitor her, she’d suspected. She’d been very brave indeed on a mobile phone from Paris, far away from him. Polite, yet firm.
“I beg your pardon,” the old sheikh had replied, and his voice had boomed down the phone line as if he’d been delivering a new edict he’d expected would become law within the hour. “I am your father and your king, Amaya. More than this, I pay your bills. Who has the right if I do not?”
And she’d acquiesced. She’d told herself that she’d simply made the practical choice. That she’d done what she had to do in the space that she’d been given. That she’d always done so as a purely rational survival tactic.
Or perhaps it’s that you are a weakling, she’d snapped at herself back then, more than once, and again now as the dry and surpassingly dull vizier in front of her launched into a lecture on the importance of learning the appropriate address for visiting ambassadors. Or you’d stand up for yourself.
But the only person she’d openly defied in all her life was Kavian when she’d run from their betrothal—and she couldn’t understand how everything had gotten so twisted since then, that she could still want to defy him with every atom in her body, fear him as much as hunger for him with every breath and yet melt at his slightest touch.
And worse, feel all that as if it was no contradiction at all.
Kavian was like all the other men in her life. Worse. They expected instant obedience not only from her, but from the whole world—and usually got it, like her late father. Her older brother, Rihad, the new king of Bakri, had been crafted from the very same mold. Even her lost brother, Omar—who’d died in a car accident while Amaya was on the run but had long been the black sheep of the Al Bakri family because he’d refused to dutifully marry on command like the rest of them—had very much lived his life on his terms, no one else’s.
It was only Amaya who bent. Or was it only Amaya who had to bend? It seemed the longer she spent in Kavian’s intense, commanding, addictive presence, the less she knew the answer to that question.
“You are not made of rubber,” Elizaveta had told her not long after her father’s funeral, which Elizaveta had expected Amaya to boycott. She’d been furious that Amaya had defied her and gone to pay her respects anyway. “What happens when you cannot bend? When instead you break?”