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“This isn’t revenge, Khaled.” She laughed, and the sound made Khaled edgy. Like ground glass beneath his feet, in his gut. “That suggests you’d care one way or the other that I’ve left you. We both know you don’t.”
Every muscle in his body was tense. Too tense. He gripped his mobile so hard he thought he’d break it, and still, he couldn’t say the things he knew he should. The things that collided in the back of his throat, made him ache.
The things he couldn’t let himself say out loud, because he knew better. Because she deserved better, loath as he was to admit what that meant: that he should never have taken up with her in the first place. That if she wanted to leave him, no matter what rioted in him in opposition to that thought, he should let her go.
His eyes fell shut, and he hated himself. He hated Jhurat. He hated this mess he’d made with his own hands, his own greed for a woman he never should have met in the first place.
But he didn’t say a word.
Cleo was quiet for a moment, waiting, he knew, for him to contradict her. He heard a small sound when he didn’t, like her breath let out in a small, sad sigh, and he detested himself even further.
“I’m nothing but ordinary, Khaled.” His own words were like a spear straight through him. Gutting him, and the worst part was, she said it so mildly. Almost happily, he’d have thought, were it not for that sharp edge beneath. “You should have no trouble slotting a new one in. No one will notice a difference. Least of all you.”
Fury poured through him, black and focused, and that was better. That was familiar.
“If you want to fight with me, Cleo, at least do me the courtesy of doing it in person.”
“I tried.”
He didn’t shout, but it was a close call. “Once.”
“It left a lasting impression.”
Khaled realized he was making a fist, and he dragged his hand through his hair instead. But all he could see was Cleo, who wasn’t in front of him. Who wasn’t in Vienna at all, as far as he knew. Who had somehow lulled him—him—into a false sense of security and then crept out under his nose.
As if he was so uncivilized, so barbaric, that she felt she couldn’t tell him she was leaving to his face. He didn’t know what moved inside him then, a desperate howling through the emptiness, but he hated it.
“I don’t accept this,” he warned her, that fury shifting low, into darkness. Into intent.
“You don’t have a choice, Khaled. It’s not pleasant to discover that, is it?”
“I don’t think you’ve thought this through.” He found it difficult to control that bitterness in his voice. Or that dark thing inside him, inexorable as a rising tide. “The paparazzi will hound you. You won’t find a moment’s peace.”
“Better the paparazzi than you.” She laughed, but it was an ugly sound. “But we both know you won’t follow me.”
“Are you so certain of me, then?” he asked.
Khaled didn’t know what that was that beat in him, demanding and primitive. He had never known himself less than he did in this moment. He felt precarious and wild, balanced on a cliff above a very deep abyss, and he didn’t want to let her go. Not like this.
Not ever, that possessive part of him whispered.
“I’m certain you don’t care enough about me to bother,” she said, and there was that note in her voice then that gave him pause. That sounded far too much like a weathered sort of grief, and he knew that sound. He knew how that felt, how it scraped inside. “This is your pride talking, Khaled.”
“And what if you’re carrying my child?”
She laughed softly, and it scraped in him, digging in deeper than it should have until it became gouges. Leaving ugly marks in its wake.
“I’m not pregnant. I might have been a fool where you’re concerned, right from the very beginning, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Cleo—”
“Goodbye, Khaled,” she said, and there was a huskiness in her voice then that he wanted to mean something.
But even if it did, she ended the call.
And when Nasser—the only person Khaled could trust with this situation, with the truth about his wife’s unexpected disappearance from his side in the middle of their European tour—traced her mobile number, he tracked Cleo all the way to a hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa. Of all places.
“Is there any sign of her?” Khaled asked, his own voice flat. He’d resigned himself to this, but he needed to know where she was. She was his wife no matter where she lived, and she would need his protection.
