Traded to the Desert Sheikh

She really did roll her eyes then. “Lectures, then. Is that a better term?”

“You are meeting with your aides and advisers to better understand and shape your role as queen of this great land.” The way he arched those dark brows at her dared her to contradict him. “Just as you are practicing your Arabic so you may converse with the subjects under your rule whenever appropriate.”

He meant when fully vetted by my men. When it came to any issue that could be construed as pertaining to her physical safety, Amaya had found that Kavian was utterly inflexible. Unlike the rest of the time, when he was only almost utterly inflexible. Which should not have amused her, surely. Where was her panic?

What happens when you cannot bend? her mother had demanded, and what did it matter what Elizaveta’s motivations for asking had been? When instead you break?

“The point is that the role of ‘princess,’ whatever that means, was never one I learned to play,” she said instead, because she couldn’t sort out was happening inside her. Because she was afraid this was what broken looked like, this absurd idea that she could be safe with a man this elemental, this raw and powerful. “I was never treated as a princess of anything anywhere we went after my mother and I left Bakri.”

Quite the opposite, she thought then as the memories she usually kept locked away rushed back at her, thick and fast. There had been a long stretch of years when Elizaveta would fly into one of her cold furies at the very sound of the word princess and punish Amaya for it whether or not she’d been the one to say it out loud.

She took a sip of the thick coffee and tried to swallow the unpleasant past down with the dark Arabian brew. “If anything, my mother downplayed it as much as possible.”

That shrug of his was still a cool, harsh weapon, and then he turned his attention back to the papers before him, which only made it worse. “Because you outrank her.”

The shrug was a weapon and the words a blow.

For a moment, Amaya simply reeled. She placed her mug back down on the glass table very, very carefully. She blinked.

“My mother doesn’t care about rank,” she said, and she couldn’t have said why her voice sounded like that, as if there were rough and terrible things simmering there beneath the surface. “She walked away from Bakri of her own volition. If she cared about rank she would have stayed in the place where she was queen, not taken off into the big, bad world where she had no means of support.”

“No means of support?” Kavian shook his head when she frowned at him in confusion. “She had a walking, talking bank account at her disposal. She had you.”

That sensation of reeling, of actual spinning, only worsened. “What are you talking about?”

“You,” he said very distinctly, his gaze a fierce shot of intense gray in the bright room, “are the daughter of a king. Your mother did not live by her wits or her charm or even her looks, Amaya. She lived off the trust your father set up in your name, for your support.”

Amaya couldn’t speak. Or move. She felt as if he’d hammered a giant nail straight into her and pinned her to her chair.

She thought of all the times Elizaveta had lectured her about her expectations, her terrible entitlement. She remembered the many, many times her mother had embarrassed her in front of others by claiming that Amaya was “her father’s daughter,” in a manner meant to suggest Amaya always selfishly wanted far more than her share, that she was greedy and ill-bred, that she was entirely, deliberately heedless of reality. She’d excused these things, one after the next, because she’d understood where her mother was coming from, what Amaya’s father had done. She’d assumed these things came from her mother’s panic at having to find ways to support them all on her own.

“I treat you like an adult because you would otherwise grow up coddled and spoiled like every other member of the Bakri line,” Elizaveta had said when Amaya was perhaps eleven. “The truth is that we have nothing. We are dependent on the kindness of friends.”

She’d meant her many lovers, the men who she’d never stayed with for too long, because they had always required such careful handling to put up with a woman with a sulky daughter in tow. Or so Elizaveta had always claimed.

“I don’t expect you to be as grateful as you should—that’s your father’s influence in you, I’m sure—but you must comprehend what there is to lose if you don’t do as I say.” Elizaveta had glared at Amaya as if she’d expected her daughter to argue, when Amaya had long since learned the folly of that kind of thing. Even then, even as a child, she’d known it was better to bend to those who could not. “We’ll lose everything. The roof above your head and the clothes on your back. Is that what you want?”