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‘Your Highness, we should perhaps head back to the palace,’ one of his aides was suggesting, ‘at least until the storm blows over.’ He was having to raise his voice so that Kadir could hear him above the increasing howl of the gale now battering them.
Kadir nodded his head, thinking ruefully that, whilst he wished the vines of Niroli no harm, he couldn’t help but be pleased that the storm was giving him an excuse to be with Natalia.
Natalia! The urgency of his desire to be with her was pounding inside his head and his heart, driving him, and for once in his life he was determined to follow his instincts and his heart and not his head and logic.
The first person Kadir saw as he walked into the palace was the countess.
‘My wife?’ he asked her. ‘Is she…?’
‘She is in your apartments, Your Highness. She asked not to be disturbed, but if you wish me to tell her that you—’
‘No, there is no need, I will go myself,’ Kadir said, thanking her.
‘You cannot escape, you know that, don’t you?’ Zahra told Natalia. ‘Even if you scream and someone hears you, by the time they get here it will be far too late.’
Natalia was struggling to accept what was happening. She knew that inwardly she had likened the previous intensity of Zahra’s manner to that of a potential stalker, and she had, too, felt irritated by Kadir’s typical male inability to see beyond the adoring, soft-as-butter, man-pleasing façade Zahra put up whenever she saw him, but it had never occurred to her that Zahra might physically attack her. The very idea seemed outlandish and like something out of a bad film. But it wasn’t a film and it was happening to her.
‘Zahra, you need to think about this and about what your own future will be if you go ahead,’ Natalia urged her, striving desperately to bring down the tension by talking matter of factly about what was happening. ‘You won’t be able to escape. You will go to prison and how can you be with Kadir then?’
Zahra, though, was refusing to be sidetracked. ‘Kadir will protect me,’ she insisted. ‘He is beyond the law and so I will be, too. Besides, why would anyone mourn you? You are nothing…and once I have given Kadir his first son no one will remember that you ever existed, but first of course I have to destroy the child you are carrying and you with it.’
How could she sound so casual? Surely only some kind of mental disorder could be responsible for such behaviour? And that surely meant that there was no point in trying to reason with Zahra. She had to try to get to those doors, Natalia recognised. There was no other chance of escape from her. With every deadly word Zahra uttered her madness became more clear. There was no point in trying to reason with her.
Natalia tried to judge the distance she would have to run; if she feinted and pretended to make for the far set of doors that might draw Zahra off and allow her to get behind her to the main set.
She took a deep breath and said a small prayer to her guardian angel, if she had one, and to her child for its forgiveness if they didn’t make it.
She must focus on the doors, on getting them open and getting out. Abruptly the main door to the suite opened, causing both women to turn towards them.
‘Kadir…’ Natalia sobbed his name in sick relief as she saw her husband standing there. Whilst he might have encouraged Zahra to come here to be with him, Natalia did not believe for one minute that he could have known of her obviously hidden precarious mental state.
‘What the—?’
Kadir took in the scene with one brief glance around the room. ‘Zahra,’ he began but she didn’t let him continue.
Without taking her eyes off Natalia, she said with mad glee, ‘It is all right, Kadir. Soon she will not come between us any more because I shall have killed her and the brat she carries.’
‘Guards. Guards!’ Kadir called out urgently into the corridor as Zahra made a swift lunge towards Natalia, ripping the sleeve of Natalia’s top with the downward plunge of her dagger as Natalia dodged her and started to run for the now-open doors. Natalia was fast, but Zahra’s madness had obviously given her even greater speed. Natalia could hear the sound of her breathing behind her, she felt the sharp, biting sting of the blade as it sliced into the flesh of her shoulder and then, incredibly, unbelievably and surely impossibly, just as she thought there would be no escape for her after all, Kadir, who must have moved at the speed of light, threw himself protectively in between them to shield her and to take the full force of Zahra’s savage stab towards his heart.
The last thing Natalia heard before she fainted was the soft, low grunt of pain Kadir gave as he fell forwards onto her.
‘Your Highness, the woman Zahra Rafiq was intercepted on her way to the airport. She has refused to undergo a medical examination here in Niroli. We have therefore as you instructed been in contact with the necessary authorities in Hadiya and they have given permission for her to be escorted there to undergo a medical assessment and receive treatment.’
Kadir’s mouth compressed. He knew he would never cease to blame himself for not realising the dark truth Zahra had been concealing behind her mask of apparent sanity. Natalia, saint that she was, might have urged him to think compassionately of her and to understand that her behaviour sprang from an undiagnosed mental condition, but for the moment Kadir was finding that hard to do. The true guilt, of course, was his own for not realising the truth about Zahra himself, and he doubted he would ever forgive himself for that.
Having thanked the minister for his report he turned to the palace aide waiting anxiously to talk with him. ‘King Giorgio is most anxious to see you, Highness,’ he told Kadir. ‘The news of the dreadful attack on you and the Crown Princess could not be kept from him and he is beside himself with anxiety.’
‘Please tell my father that I am well and that I shall be with him as soon as I have spoken with the Crown Princess’s consultant.’
Not even to reassure his father did Kadir intend to leave the hospital until he had spoken with Natalia and told her what he had to say.
He knew that from now until his dying day he would never, ever forget the emotions that that seized him when he had thrust open the doors to the apartment and seen what had been happening. The reality of her own imminent death had already been shadowing Natalia’s eyes, her hands clasped across her body to protect her, his child, and in that moment all he had known, his single and only thought, had been his need to protect them both. Not just Natalia, but the child she carried as well, for he had known instinctively then, when it was almost too late, that the baby could not have been fathered by anyone other than himself. He had felt protective of the baby and he’d been filled with the most tender love for him or her. Who would protect them both if he did not do so, who had more responsibility, more right to stand between them and whatever harm might threaten them? His wife…His child…
His last thought as he had begun to lose consciousness had been that he loved them both almost beyond bearing.
It had therefore been a shock to arrive at the hospital, still barely conscious himself from his loss of blood, to be told there was a grave danger that Natalia might lose the baby—all the more so because of his own only just discovered feelings. ‘You must save the baby,’ he had told them as they had worked to cleanse his wound—not, fortunately, as deep as it had first looked and not having damaged any vital organs despite the flow of blood.
‘We will do our best,’ they had assured him, not knowing his concern was not because the child was his heir, but because he knew how distraught Natalia would be if she were to lose it, and how he couldn’t bear it if neither she nor the baby ever got to know how wrong he had been and how much he loved them both.
