But Mazin was the only person I’d ever been with, and it was difficult to keep my emotions at bay. I had to feign intimacy when my body was used to the real thing with him.
“And how would you wish to read me?” He was closer, his chest nearly touching mine. We were partially obscured by a curtain and I felt the rise and fall of his breath.
“I would read you like a novel. From cover to cover, learning everything about you.”
He tilted his head. “Leisurely, only taking me out when you felt like it?”
I snorted. “Is that how you read your novels, Mazin? How uninspiring. No, I mean in a fierce frenzy, by candlelight, devouring you until I finished every page and committed it to memory, and then I’d flip right back to the front and start again from the beginning.”
His eyes flared, glowing bright, those flecks of gold in the rich brown coming to life like embers. He pressed in on me further, so that my back hit the wall. I wore a coy smile on my face, daring him to push this more. I wanted everything, I wanted him here in this moment, thinking he had me.
“Ah.” He bit the edge of his bottom lip, his eyes roaming over my face. “Perhaps I’m just reading the wrong things. Shall I tell you how I would read you?”
I shivered, hugging my chest as if my arms could guard my heart. I’d forgotten exactly what it was like for him to turn those dark eyes on me.
He seemed to take my silence as assent, and he continued. “I’d read you like scripture, a prayer. And all the worship I felt, I’d heap at your feet.” His words were low, like he was actually praying, or reciting an incantation of the djinn, words for whispering magic and power.
I sucked in air through my teeth, the tension between us tight. It made me remember all-too-familiar things, his arms wrapped around me, his lips buried in the crook of my neck, his hands on my thighs.
I looked up into his blazing eyes, taking control of the moment.
“Just my feet?”
He moved so quickly I couldn’t catch the movement—faster than any swordplay we’d had. His mouth slanted across mine hot and urgent, his body sheltering me like a banyan tree in a monsoon.
And I nearly sobbed.
It was everything I remembered. Everything that was real between us. It made me want to cry for the girl I had been, hopelessly in love, reckless and far too trusting.
I kissed him back.
Kissed him even though it set my skin on fire, even though it caused a swirling storm inside me clashing between my head and my heart, my body sighing in relief at being touched by him again but my head recognizing him for what he was—the boy who had given me everything and then burned it all to the ground.
My hands clutched at his dark sherwani, my head spinning. I wasn’t sure if it was to pull him closer or stab him with my dagger.
But I wouldn’t do that. Not yet. Not until I burned him up inside like he burned me. Until there was nothing left of him but this wanting. Until he begged for me like a dying man in the desert, and I the mirage that could have saved him.
And in the end decided to let him starve.
Twenty-nine
“I didn’t want to interrupt you and Mazin eating each other’s faces in the alcove, but we have a problem.”
I scowled at Noor and crossed my arms over my chest.
Mazin and I had jumped apart as soon as Noor’s cough had cut between us. I mumbled an excuse and allowed her to drag me away to my bedroom. I couldn’t even look at Maz, not after I’d nearly lost myself in that kiss with him. I touched my fingers to my lips as if I could taste him all over again.
But as Noor spoke, a single clarifying thought entered my head and refused to let go.
He thinks you are someone else.
The way he kissed me, held me, breathed me in, he wasn’t doing that with me. He was doing it with Sanaya.
If there was anything that should douse my old feelings for him, it was this.
He obviously never had the same feelings for me, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to kiss someone else like that. I certainly wouldn’t.
You want to kill him,I reminded myself.
