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CHAPTER ONE
Run.
ARIELHARTSTAREDat the text message on her phone. For just one breath.
Then she sprang into action. She had known this moment could come. She’d known to be prepared for it.
“Darling,”her mother had tried to reassure her,“he’s been imprisoned for years. He may have died in captivity. You don’t know if he’ll come for you.”
But shehadknown.
Her father had meddled in affairs he never should have and he’d used her as a chess piece and...
No time for self-pity, Ari, get it together.
She changed her clothing, quickly, taking off the cashmere sweatpants and equally soft cable-knit sweater she was wearing, trading them out for a pair of black leggings and a black hoodie that felt stiff as cardboard. She put the hood up over her white-blond hair and tucked each strand beneath it. She slipped on a pair of black trainers, picked up her black duffel bag and looked around her beautiful Parisian apartment one last time.
She’d felt safe here.
It was tranquil. Beautiful. All pale pinks and soothing tans. That she now looked like a cat burglar seemed an affront to the subtlety of the space.
She’d made a life here. Started her career.
For years she’d lived looking over her shoulder. Moving all the time, using assumed names. But about seven years after she’d...stopped. It was in the back of her mind that it could happen, she still had a go bag. But it had seemed unlikely. She didn’t know if Riyaz was alive. She didn’t know if Cairo was alive.
That was one reason she and her mother had taken it on themselves to simply...be wary. How could you call the police or an embassy about a potential threat from another country by persons who had not threatened you, in all actuality, and might in fact be dead?
But in her heart she’d known.
That he could come for her in search of revenge, or marriage.
And she didn’t want either.
She’d leave it all behind now.
She’d be a fugitive, not a fashion designer.
But there was no space for pity. Not now.
It was possibly a matter of life and death, and there was no time to feel sorry for herself in the face of that.
She’d felt sorry for herself twenty years ago when she’d discovered—at age eight—that her father had promised her to a stranger. She’d felt sorry for herself, wandering the glittering halls at the palace in Nazul, looking at all the glorious mosaics and sitting by the fountains, the scent of orange blossom in the arid desert air.
And when her father had used the access he’d gained to the palace to assist in a coup that overthrew the royal family of Nazul and left the sheikh and sheikha dead, one son thrown into a dungeon and the other...
Missing.
Cairo.
She didn’t think of him often, or at least, she tried not to.
The younger brother, the one with a ready smile and engaging dark eyes, so unlike the one she was promised to marry. The boy who had become her friend. Her confidant. Her first heartbreak.
When she was thirteen, she’d been sitting in the courtyard one day, baking in the sun and sulking, and there he’d been.
“Not enjoying yourself,ya amar?”
“It’s very hot.”
