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“You seem to be laboring under some misconceptions concerning that role.” He was still speaking in that calm, viciously casual tone with the jagged edge beneath it, aware—she could tell from that broken thing in his gaze that looked like suffering but couldn’t be—that every word was pummeling her. That every word was cracking her apart, tearing strips from her, and he had no intention of stopping it. That he wanted this, no matter how badly it hurt her. Or him. “You are a pawn.”
“Khaled—”
“My country kept the outside world at bay for so long that we came to be seen as nothing but barbarians. It is my job—my sworn duty—to change that perception and our fortunes along with it, but how? And then you stumbled into my life. The standard-issue American nobody.”
She thought she said his name again, but her throat was too tight, she felt too raw and she understood she didn’t make a sound. And that on some level, she’d been waiting for him to say something like this since he’d poured her tea.
His cruel mouth looked surprisingly vulnerable for a moment, his gray gaze stark and hollow, but then it was gone. Cleo knew she must have imagined it.
“There isn’t a single thing about you that is anything but ordinary, Cleo, and that is precisely why I wanted you. It is the only reason I wanted you. I spun you into a princess from a handful of straw.”
She thought she was numb—but surely it would hurt less if she was? He leaned closer, his gray gaze nearly silver with temper and that dark thing beneath it that made her stomach knot. And Cleo had always been a fighter. She had always stood up for herself, eventually. How many times had she proved that? And yet here, tonight, when it would never matter more, she couldn’t seem to do anything but wait for the next blow.
“And look how beautifully you have served your purpose,” Khaled continued, cruel and remote, like the god she’d imagined him so many times before but this time, he was anything but benevolent. “But I cannot have you getting ideas above your station. You are my wife, yes, but the only thing that means to me is that sooner or later, you will provide me with children.”
“To do what?” she heard herself say in an awful voice, thick with all the things she couldn’t seem to say, couldn’t let herself feel for fear it would destroy her even more than he already had, couldn’t even process while she still sat there before him and was skewered. Over and over again. “Obey more of your commands? So you can have a whole collection of helpless, servile creatures to do your bidding?”
He smiled, and it sliced through her. “If you do not obey me, Cleo, I will simply replace you.”
She didn’t know what it said about her that even now, even after what had transpired between them this night, she couldn’t believe he’d said that. That she could feel still more pain. That she could feel shattered all over again.
“Khaled.” Where did that voice come from? So quiet and broken, but still hers—as if it was pushed out from the very heart of her. She lifted her hands up and held them out in supplication, and she couldn’t even hate herself for it. She understood, somehow, that it was strength, not surrender. “This is getting out of control. I don’t want to challenge you. I only want to be with you. I want a partner, a true marriage—”
“I don’t.”
Stark and flat. Matter-of-fact.
The end, that voice within her stated.
Cleo’s mouth dropped open, and it was only when she shut it with an audible snap and happened to look down that she realized she was clenching her hands so hard she’d broken the skin on her own palms with her fingernails.
“But...”
She didn’t know why she was still talking. As if he hadn’t laid her out flat, and if the expression on his face was anything to go by, deliberately. As if there was anything left to talk about with a man who thought so little of her.
Then again, there was one thing. One truth, however tiny it seemed here. One small point of light that somehow, she wanted to believe was worth the darkness.
She swallowed, and then she said it. “I love you.”
* * *
It went through him like electricity—a long charge, harsh and bright. Khaled stiffened, those three words pounding into him like enemy gunfire, lighting him up.
Filling him with fury and grief.
You have no choice, he reminded himself, and her words proved it. They were exactly what he’d wanted to avoid. They were her future disaster in the making, her own ruin lying there before him, as naked and as vulnerable as she was.
