The Sheikh's Claim (Desert Nights 2)

Haidar’s words cleaved inside his skull. “Go to pieces later, Jalal. We need to say something to this crowd, contain this catastrophe first, then we’re getting you out of here and…”

He pushed Haidar away, unable to bear any more talk and ran out of the hall, a storm of agitation exploding all around him. He heard cries, inquiries, exclamations that pummeled him with their alarm. He pushed through the hindering bodies and presences. If he ran hard enough, he might still find her, save her....

Inexorable forces pulled him back. He turned and found Haidar and Harres holding on to him. Amjad and Shaheen were running toward them.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Haidar hissed.

“I won’t even say I can imagine how you feel,” Harres said. “Because I damn well can’t. But let’s slow down for a moment....”

“Slow down?” Jalal roared. “Lujayn has been kidnapped and you want me to slow down?”

“Kidnapped?” Shaheen frowned, looking among his brothers.

Amjad came to a stop a couple feet away. “So you think the only way she’d stand you up at the ma’zoon is if she’d been kidnapped?”

Jalal rounded on him snarling, shaking off Haidar’s and Harres’s shackles.

Amjad deflected his aggression with unperturbed sarcasm. “She wasn’t kidnapped, so you can stop working on this heart attack.”

Everything inside Jalal stopped, clamped down on only three words. She wasn’t kidnapped.

Relief razed through him. “Are—are you sure?”

His brothers exchanged an uncomfortable look. Then, exhaling heavily, Haidar handed him a note.

There were only three words on it, too. In Lujayn’s handwriting.

I’m sorry. Lujayn.

He stared at the words, as if they’d multiply, as if they’d say more if he looked hard enough. The same three words remained. Explaining nothing.

“Where did you find this?” Jalal rasped.

Haidar exhaled again. “In the room where the ladies had left her, to have a moment to herself as she’d requested, before walking out to the bridal procession. She’d taken off her wedding dress and left through the balcony.”

Jalal shook his head, discounting every word, every evidence. “That’s impossible. She wouldn’t leave. Not of her own accord. A note doesn’t prove she wasn’t kidnapped. She could have been forced to write it, to—to…” Moisture that felt like acid forced its way out of his eyes, slithered down his cheeks. “Ya Ullah…Lujayn…ya Ullah…”

Harres hugged him roughly around the shoulders. “She hasn’t been kidnapped, Jalal, so stop going crazy, at least about this.”

“Guards tried to stop her,” Haidar said. “But she insisted they’d be punished if they detained her. They were so flustered by her intensity they let her go. By the time they informed Fadi and he checked the airport, she’d boarded a flight. He ordered them to stop takeoff and disembark her, but she invoked her American citizenship and they took off.”

Jalal stared at Haidar, finding no more places to hide.

She was really gone.

But it couldn’t be because she wanted to. She loved him. More than loved him. He was half of her soul as much as she was his. And the other half was Adam. She wouldn’t leave either of them. She’d die without them. Just like they would without her.

Seemed he’d said that out loud, because Amjad was answering him. “She knows without marrying her, you won’t be able to stop her family from taking Adam back to her. So she only left you.”

He rounded on Amjad. “Would you believe Maram would ever leave you?”

Amjad’s gaze lengthened at his vehemence. Then he shrugged. “Then Lujayn left but didn’t really leave. That leaves one possibility.”

Everyone turned to Amjad, all at a loss.

Amjad raised ridiculing eyebrows. “You really can’t figure it out? What is this, a collective, selective blindness?”

Harres punched Amjad in the arm. “One more useless word, and king or not, the next punch puts you flat on your back.”

Amjad rubbed his arm, gave Harres then Shaheen a pitying glance. “Those two—” he flicked a hand at Haidar and Jalal “—I can understand, having been genetically tampered with. But what’s your excuse?” Shaheen joined Harres in a threatening step, and Amjad’s palms on both their chests held them off as he shook his head derisively, let out a disgusted huff. “Sondoss, what else?”

Jalal’s heart gave one sickeningly painful twist at hearing his mother’s name. Then it all fell into place.

It was his mother. She was the one who’d made Lujayn leave.

“We warned you she wasn’t through messing in your lives.” Amjad scowled at him and Haidar. “But you went all filial on us and exiled her in that tropical resort instead of letting me devise a dungeon worthy of her dragon-ness. Now you pay the price.”

“If you believe a dungeon would have ended her danger,” Shaheen scoffed, “then you don’t realize what Sondoss is.”

Harres nodded. “Jalal and Haidar made the right decision, if for the wrong reasons. An imprisoned Sondoss would have been far more dangerous than an exiled one. The worst she’s evidently done so far was sabotage a wedding. But had she been in prison, she would have plotted the end of the world to get out.”

Amjad smirked. “Good boys. You’re not as gullible as I sometimes fear. I’ll keep you as my heir and spare.” He quirked an eyebrow at all of them. “But it took us years to accidentally stumble on her diabolical plot. Want to bet that in due course, we’ll discover she’s put far worse in motion than spoiling a wedding? Maybe even that world’s end scenario?” He panned his gaze to Jalal. “Though from looking at you, she might have ended yours.”

Shaheen glared at Amjad. “There might still be another explanation to all this.”

Haidar shook his head, looking as shaken as Jalal felt. “No. Mother makes a perfect one.”

Harres nodded. “Agreed. One thing I can’t figure out, though. How did she get Lujayn to leave?”

Jalal turned, walked away. His brothers let him go this time.

He didn’t know how. But he would find out.

He would put an end to his mother’s damage once and for all.

* * *

Ten sanity-wrecking hours later, Jalal walked into the seafront house he and Haidar had provided for their mother in Aruba.