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“How can it be?”
“Goodbye, Raffa.” She whispered, disconnecting the call.
There was silence on the other end. He wrapped his fingers around the phone and he pitched it at the wall opposite. It crashed to the ground, shards of black on the ancient tiles.
His eyes lifted to Fahir’s and his servant had the sense to look concerned. “Find her,” Raffa said, the words choked from deep within him. “Find her at all costs.”
But Chloe, it seemed, was determined not to be found.
At first, he thought she would change her mind; at least that she would make contact with him in some way, and if not him, Malik or Amit. He brooded for days, he went to her room and stared at her empty bed, he rode out across the desert to the ruins of Shakam al abut, and remembered the way she’d looked with wonderment at everything there. He fingered the objects she’d touched, as though in doing so he might be able to tether himself to a fragment of her in the present, rather than the ghost of her past. He held the jewels she’d marveled at, he ran his fingers over the ancient walls, he stared across the desert and wondered how things might have been different if Goran hadn’t come to the palace.
If Raffa hadn’t fallen on his wife the second they’d gone to the tent and been alone. Yet again, he’d behaved like an animal, ripping her dress, desperate to be with her. Desperate to have her.
He’d planned to make their time in the desert different. To forge a connection with her beyond the physical, and instead, he’d reduced what they were to sex – yet again.
And yet, now that she was gone, it wasn’t her body he was missing. Oh, he was, but more than that, he was missing her. Her smile, her eyes, her laugh, the way she stood up to him even when he was being a monumental bastard. He missed her. He missed knowing she was in the palace and he missed knowing he would see her every evening. He missed sharing dinners with her and the way she’d tilt her head to the side when she had a question.
He missed the way she cared for his father and Amit.
He missed her. Every damned thing about her.
Out in the desert, he roared like the animal he had morphed into around his wife. He pummeled his fists into the side of the ancient ruins they’d explored together until his fists were scraped and bleeding.
He rode harder and faster than any man should.
And it didn’t bring her back; it didn’t help.
Nothing did.
Where was she?
And more importantly: was she okay?
Chloe lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. Weak morning sunshine pushed into the room, creating a kaleidoscope of pink and yellows across her ceiling. She watched the patterns made by the shuffling of clouds, and wondered when she would start to think of American sun light as normal? When she would remember that these were the skies under which she’d been raised, this was the sun she’d grown up warming herself beneath. When would she stop thinking of Ras el Kida with a sense of longing that defied explanation?
When would she be herself again?
She tossed onto her side, squeezing her eyes shut, the now-familiar warmth behind them ebbing out of the corners.
She’d cried often since leaving Raffa.
She was mourning so much. Not just their marriage, but the hopes she’d cherished that they would become so much more. That one day he might feel for her as she did for him. That even if he didn’t, their child would be loved by both of them, that their child would be loved. And in making that wish, she knew how vitally important it had been to right the wrongs of her own past: to somehow magically reach through time and correct the neglect of her childhood by ensuring her children were always adored.
There were to be no children.
A sob escaped her, a sound that months ago she wouldn’t have been able to imagine she could make – crying wasn’t for Chloe. Now, Chloe cried often. Something inside her had snapped; she was broken. Nothing had done that to her before. Not losing her mother, not the neglect nor coldness of her father, not the distance from her half-brother, not her father’s death. Nothing.
But now, it was as if everything had tumbled together and Chloe carried an ache low in her gut all the time.
Three months. It had been three months since she’d left Ras el Kida and the days were passing as if weighted down by stone. Seconds seemed to take hours, and all the while, Chloe was on the periphery of existence. Cognizant of little, caring for even less.
She’d sublet an apartment in Chicago, paying cash to her landlord to keep her name off a lease. It was childish to have hidden from Raffa instead of telling him the truth – but if she’d told him the truth, she knew he would have insisted on staying with her. On honouring their marriage, on doing the right thing. Because he was an honourable man, and she was his wife, as he’d said over and over again.
But Chloe didn’t want to be his burden, she wanted to be his everything – and now she was nothing to him.
She groaned, rolling onto her back once more. The divorce papers had been sent a month ago. He should have signed them by now – any day and she’d receive notice from the lawyers she’d engaged. Any day now and she’d know it was officially done. And then, he would no doubt marry quickly.
Vile, disgusting anger tore
