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“It is the desert.”
“I want to go back to Europe. I hate it here.”
“Europe? You’re American, Ari, are you not?”
“We spend half the year in Paris.”
“Ah, how very nice.”
“Nicer than this.”
“Tell me, are you angry at this place? Or at its intent for you?”
“It’s all the same.”
“I don’t think that’s true. If you look around you might see that the place and the purpose are not one in the same. And perhaps...you might enjoy aspects of your time here.”
And then he’d reached up and picked an orange from the tree above and handed it to her.
“Whether you wish to like it or not, the trees yet grow fruit. It cannot be all bad. Think on that,ya amar.”
My moon. He had called her that for some reason she had never been able to figure out.
He said it as if to mock her and yet she’d always felt such an odd tangle inside her when he said things like that.
Cairo had been the closest thing to joy on those trips to Nazul. Though it had gotten thorny and complicated when she was twelve, and he thirteen, and he had suddenly grown very tall, and she’d found it hard to speak to him.
It had been such a funny thing. One year she’d gone to visit and they’d run around the palace like wild, feral things like they had since she was eight. And the next...she’d been shy around him. They’d had one whole year of barely speaking.
But that day she hadn’t hidden from him. That day, he’d given her an orange.
And from there something else had blossomed between them. Something tender and precious and aching. She thought she might be in love, and she knew it was impossible. After five days she’d gone back to Paris. And the day after that...
The world had ended. At least in Nazul.
The heir, her fiancé, Riyaz was taken prisoner. Held as collateral.
And Cairo?
He had either been killed along with palace resisters, his body discarded as if he were nothing, not even important enough to be identified.
Or he had disappeared.
It didn’t matter now. Riyaz was out. And that meant...
He would either seek to claim his bride or his revenge, and she wanted no part of either.
The sins of her father were his to pay, not hers.
But she would still have to face consequences.
She put on her backpack and headed to the door, and opened it.
And stopped.
Hewas there.
Standing there. Taller, broader and just plain more than when last she’d seen him. It wasn’t Riyaz, or a cavalcade of soldiers, like she’d seen in her nightmares. It wasn’t the monster she had trained herself to fear, to run from.
