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“I know what it’s like to be a monster, fair gazelle,” he said tiredly. “And you are not one.”
“Is that what the others said when they saw me?” she asked, a wild strain to her voice.
“No, the others didn’t say that.”
No, but they would have thought it. She would have thought it, if she’d seen someone splitting a man in two in his own bedroom.
“The others are concerned,” he said, emphasizing the word to include himself. “That was not you, Zafira. This has nothing to do with wishing a man dead, because plenty of people do as much.”
His eyes fell to the little bedside table, and her own gaze followed, pulse quickening. On it, beside a tin of wrapped malban, was the Jawarat. The sight of it brought on a wave of guilt, strangely detached and not entirely hers—as if it belonged to the Jawarat. What reason would the book have to feel guilty? She had done what it wanted. It had fulfilled its chaotic desires.
If anything, it should be gleeful.
“It’s been speaking to me since I bound myself to it,” she said finally.
He was silent until she dared to look at him. “I
assumed as much.”
“I thought—I thought I’d gained control of it. I thought we’d reached an understanding.”
An understanding. As if it were a person. Not a master playing her like a puppet.
“But I clearly hadn’t,” she finished lamely.
He nodded slowly. “Altair has finalized a plan, and we’ll be leaving soon. One of us can keep it with us.”
Yes. Keep it. She needed the freedom to regain her sanity, to remember who she was.
“You mean to take it away from me,” she whispered instead. Pressure was building in her chest, fear and loss overpowering. What is happening to me?
He paused at the stillness of her tone, gaze flicking to Lana and back to hers. “No one is going to take it—”
She cut him off with a vehement no.
It was hers. She wouldn’t give her clothes to someone else to wear. She couldn’t have had Lana wear her cloak while she went out on her hunts. She wouldn’t let Yasmine wear the ring Deen had given her. There was a difference. He didn’t understand. None of them did.
“No. And neither do you.”
Ever so slowly, Nasir leaned back, rose to his feet, and left—and it was only then that she realized she had said all of it aloud. Every last senseless ramble.
In the silence, Zafira dropped her face to her hands and muffled a scream.
“You’re awake,” Lana said sleepily as she sat up, clutching the blanket.
Zafira clenched her teeth. She wasn’t ready for yet another confrontation.
“They wouldn’t let me study the caliph,” her sister complained. “Isn’t it fascinating how bodies are filled to the brim with blood, yet our bones are pure and white?”
Oh.
“It wasn’t fair,” Lana continued as she slid off the bed and came to kneel by Zafira’s side. “After what he did to us—”
Laa, laa, laa. Lana wasn’t supposed to be fine with this.
“What, Lana?” Zafira demanded. “What did he do to deserve being murdered?”
“You’re the one who cut him in half,” Lana reminded her with a scrunch of her nose. “I’m helping you justify it. But look at it this way: He was going to die anyway. Now … he’ll be written into history with quite the creative death.”
