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“Sultani,” murmured Sanya.
“Wait!” Zafira said, and the girls ran into each other. “What about Lana?”
Lana started for the door. “Okhti, this is a palace. I can get dressed in the hall if the rooms are full. You, on the other hand…”
She attempted a wink but closed both her eyes, then followed the servants into the hall. Zafira laughed shakily when the door closed, her neck burning. She floundered, and finally looked up at him through hooded eyes.
She watched the shift in his throat. If only he knew how much she loved the silvery lilt of his voice. Would he ever stop speaking then?
“I have something for you,” he said.
He handed her a box, long and slender. She took it, discreetly testing its weight. Providing for her family meant gifts were few and far between with her on the receiving end.
“Shukrun,” said Zafira, containing herself. Fighting against the emotions lodging in her throat because he had come. He was here. Truly here. Not to slit her palm. Not because he was required to be.
That yearning, missing, emptiness in her soul vanished, gullible as it was to know what tonight entailed but not to allow herself to care. Not yet. This was her moment. Hers alone.
“Open it,” he insisted, standing close.
She had never thought herself shy until she was the object of his gaze. The box was wood, simple and hinged, and she lifted the latch. The lid fell back with a soft creak, and a pang shot through her.
Tucked into a bed of silk, a blade glinted back at her, sharp and tapering at its curve. Black filigree ran along its blunt edge, matching the line of onyx set into the flat pommel and burnished hilt, the silver dulled and dark with age.
A jambiya. It was lavish, more so than anything she had ever owned.
“It was my first dagger,” he explained. “My father gave it to me when—when he was still himself. I could have commissioned a new one, but I know that you, well, you favor sentiment, don’t you?”
That drew a smile from her. “I do.”
“Don’t say shukrun again,” he said before she could thank him.
“What should I say, then?”
“That you like it,” he said, and worked his jaw, “or that you don’t. Or that you don’t want an old castoff. Then I’ll find you a new one.”
She laughed. “That’s not how gifts work.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, and she wondered if gifts were rare for him, too. It was no small act, parting with the dagger one had received from the loving father who became a monster. It made this more than a jambiya—it was a collection of memories and moments, a culmination of experiences. If there was any dagger worthy of replacing Baba’s, it was this. His.
“I love it,” she said softly, testing it in her palm. It fit as well as Baba’s did, though the blade was lighter, finer. Made for a prince. “It’s beautiful and old and perfect.”
She lifted the hem of her dress and slid the dagger into the sheath, forgetting how well the pants clung to her skin and suddenly aware of his gaze following the movements.
Silence stretched between them, and she wondered if Kifah had told him, or if he had asked. Or if he had noticed her empty sheath and surmised the rest.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and though they were two short words that could be meaningless, she knew they were anything but. Not from him. Not from the boy who rarely spoke at all, making each word that he uttered worth a thousand from anyone else. He lifted his hand and his fingers splayed before he dropped it. “For all that I’ve done. For all that I never said.”
She might have remembered what she said if he hadn’t been so close. If they weren’t both struggling to understand. With a strangled sigh, he slipped his fingers into her hair and she let him draw her closer, closer, until their foreheads touched. Five finger pads to the back of her skull, the smallest at the nape of her neck.
Somehow, this moment felt more intimate than their encounter on Sharr. It was an emotion stretched raw. Her exhales became his broken inhales. Their hearts pounded as one.
“I can’t—”
The word tore from his throat, and then some part of him retreated. She pulled back, finally understanding why. She saw it in the way his brows furrowed and his jaw worked. It wasn’t that he was too proud to speak, he struggled to. He assumed no one cared for what he wanted to say.
“I know what it’s like,” she said softly. She had Yasmine, but her friend had a knack for asserting her opinion more and listening less. She’d had Deen, until he began to love her in a way that was different from the way she loved him. And then there was Lana, whom she had wrongfully believed too young to understand, too new to burden.
Yet from the tightening of his shoulders, she knew she was wrong. She could never understand the extent of what he had endured. She had been given a glimpse when he had met his father on Sharr. When the sultan barely allowed his son a word, when nearly every sentence hurled at him was some form of ridicule.
