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That had not been what eleven-year-old Amaya had wanted. The very idea had given her nightmares. And Elizaveta had never been a perfect parent, certainly. Life with her had always been complicated, but Amaya had been sympathetic because she’d understood that her mother hadn’t said those things to be cruel. Amaya’s father had broken something inside her, and sometimes it came out as poison. Amaya had learned not to take it personally... Or anyway, she’d tried her best not to take it personally.
“You are mistaken,” Amaya said to Kavian now when she could speak without that rough-edged thing inside her taking over and revealing too much. “I don’t know where you heard such a thing.”
“Had she married any of the men she found, she would have had to return you to your father and worse, to her way of thinking, give up her access to your money.” Another shrug, which made her want to throw her plate at him. A flicker in that gray gaze made her think he knew it, too. “This is not an attack, Amaya. This is simply a fact. I did not hear this through some grapevine or other—I’ve seen the paperwork.”
Amaya shook her head, so hard it almost hurt, and noticed her heart had started to kick at her, almost as if she was panicked.
“My mother was a self-made woman. She had nothing when she left Ukraine. She talked her way from minor dance halls into the fashion houses of Milan. She had nothing but her wit, her charm and her looks. That was how she entered her marriage to my father, and that was how she left it. If anything, I was a complication.”
It was only when she was finished speaking that Amaya realized her voice had risen, as if every sentence were a plate thrown, a blow landed on his wholly impervious form.
“She also had ambition,” Kavian said softly. He was so much more dangerous the quieter he got, she knew. She sucked in a breath against it. “Never forget that. She left Bakri because she was losing the sheikh’s favor. Better to leave and tell a sad tale across the years to a thousand receptive audiences. Better by far to hold the king’s daughter as ransom than to remain in Bakri as a neglected, forgotten wife. The sheikh would have banished her to one of the outlying residences, far away from the palace where she would wither away into irrelevance, and she knew it. That, azizty, did not suit your mother’s ambitions at all.”
Amaya stared at him, willing herself not to react in the way she suspected he wanted her to do. Her lips felt bloodless. Her stomach twisted—hard. “You don’t know anything about my mother. She was not ambitious. She was in love.”
She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t have uttered those words. Not to him, not here. Not out loud—and she didn’t dare ask herself why that was. But Amaya couldn’t take them back, no matter how much she wished she could. She couldn’t make that taut, near-painful silence between them disappear, or do anything about that sudden arrested look on Kavian’s austere face. She straightened in her seat instead, and forced herself to meet that edgy gray gaze of his straight on as if she felt nothing at all.
“My father was a convincing man when it suited him.” She heard that catch in her throat and she knew Kavian did, too, but she pushed on. “He convinced a woman who had been born with nothing and raised to expect little else that he adored her. That he worshipped her. That he would remake his world in her honor.”
She didn’t point out how familiar that sounded. Just as she didn’t give that searing blast of temper in Kavian’s dark gaze a chance to form into harsh words on his lips.
“He lied. Maybe he meant it when he said it—what do I know? But my mother believed him. That was why she thought there was something she could do to regain his favor, to win back his attention once it drifted. Anything to make him love her again. But what my father truly loved was collecting, Kavian. He was always looking for his next acquisition. He didn’t lose much sleep over the things he’d already collected and shunted aside.”
He didn’t speak for a long, cool moment that careened around inside Amaya’s chest, leaving jagged marks. She tilted up her chin and told herself she could handle it. Him. Or survive it, anyway.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” he asked.
She would never know how she held his gaze. How she managed to keep herself from reacting to that terrible, infinitely destructive question. She only knew that she did it. That she stared back at him, stone to his stone, as if her life depended on it.
“Are you talking about your mother, Amaya?” Kavian pushed at her in that quiet way of his that nonetheless made every bone in her body ache. She fought to restrain a shiver. “Or yourself?”
