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Chloe fell asleep before she could reach the end – the beast’s demise. From the inside out, his heat tore him apart, his malevolence no match for this world.

When Raffa entered her suite hours later, as the sun was beginning to slide over the kingdom, his wife was lying, fully dressed, on the bed, a book on her chest.

Curiosity for what she’d been reading had him moving across the room and lifting it, careful not to disturb her. The ancient text was one he knew well, despite not having read it nor thought of it since childhood. The story was well known in Ras el Kida, and in fact, a pile of ancient rocks just past the Northern way-bearing point of the Aläbi desert was thought to be the ruins of the Beast.

It was a cautionary tale but he didn’t need to learn about the perils of love from children’s stories. He’d had his own front-row seat to that lesson, courtesy of his parents.

“Raffa?” Her eyes pierced him, their blue clarity seeing right into his soul, so he had to work hard to straighten and assume a look of distant unconcern. “What time is it?” She pushed up to sitting and angled her pretty face towards the windows, then looked back at him.

“Dawn,” he murmured, stepping closer and reaching down, touching her hair against his will, his fingers moving of their own accord, finding the blonde lengths and freeing it from the style she’d pinned it into.

“How is he?” She asked, her eyes holding his, the anguish so easily discernible in her expression easily matched by his own heart.

He had thought her cold, at one time. Now, he saw her so much more clearly. There was passion inside of her, so much passion that perhaps the only way she could contain it was to repress it completely.

“He’s weak,” Raffa said, the words lodging in his throat, each a stone in his windpipe. “But doctors are optimistic.”

“Oh, thank God,” she smiled, a smile of such beauty and relief, her love for Malik easy to see. But then, like the sun hiding behind a storm-cloud, she sobered, pulling herself away from him mentally, hiding from him. “Thank you for coming to tell me,” she added after an icy beat had passed.

The ease with which she could shut him out had always fascinated him; now, it angered him. He couldn’t have said why; certainly not because he needed her. He was a man born to be King, he needed no one.

And yet… the removal of her affection, her warmth, was something he definitely railed against.

“You’re reading nursery rhymes?” He asked, the question gruff and yet somehow teasing.

She shrugged, her mode defensive. “Is there something wrong with that?”

He sat on the edge of the bed, and she stiffened in a way he hated. Was she afraid of him? He had been angry the night before. Not with her, with the situation they found themselves in. He’d wanted to protect her from seeing Malik, and yet she’d come to his bedroom anyway, she’d ignored his command, she’d done what she always did: exactly what she wanted.

/> Or was it what she needed? Her affection for Malik was genuine; had she wanted to see the old man so badly, to assure herself he was okay, to be there for him if he wasn’t?

“No.” He lifted his hand to her cheek in a gesture of intimacy that surprised them equally. “You were frightened last night.”

“Weren’t you?”

Raffa hadn’t admitted to fear in a long time. “The idea of him not being here is not an easy one to grapple with.”

“It’s the way of things,” Chloe offered softly.

“I know.” Raffa dropped his hand, but to her hip, where his thumb padded across the sheet slowly. His eyes watched the gesture, a frown on his brow. “He’s just always been such a force to be reckoned with.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “I felt the same, with my father. His death was sudden. There was no time to reconcile myself to the fact that it was the end, no time to fix what was broken between us.”

“You wanted to, though?” Raffa inquired.

“I wanted, more than anything, to be close with him.” Her smile was wistful. “But he didn’t want the same thing, so I have no reason to think I would ever have had success, even if he’d lived.”

“Your father was a stubborn man,” Raffa muttered.

“I know. But he was larger than life to me, someone I’d looked up to forever. There’s a void in my world now, even though he never really wanted to be a part of it. Does that make sense?”

Raffa’s eyes scanned her face. “Yes.”

“I’m sad for all the things we didn’t get to do, the conversations we never had, the laughs we didn’t share. I’m sad for what could have been, not what was. He was nothing to me, really, except a figure of ideals that would never come to pass.”

Raffa was surprised by the description, for it was so insightful, so correct, and so sad. “He was a fool to push you away. He spent a lifetime punishing you for your mother’s failings.”

“And then he died,” she said crisply, pulling away from him, stepping out of the bed and walking towards the window. The dawn light was a glistening gold and it caught her hair so that it sparkled as if it were a crown. “My point is, you get to say goodbye to your father, you get to fix whatever is broken between you.” She turned to look at Raffa and he was watching her as though she were a drug he couldn’t fight his addiction to. “Real peace for your father will come from knowing you forgive him.”

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