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“But you don’t. I want to understand.”
“All right, but we could get in trouble.”
She knew they could. She had sensed that as their friendship deepened. As her feelings for him became more and more difficult. As it became clear to her she...
She thought he was the most beautiful boy she’d ever known, and she wanted to hate Nazul with all that she was, but she could never hate Cairo.
“I don’t care,” she said. “Show me.”
She didn’t know why she found this conversation so... Infuriating. Perhaps it was the way he pretended that he cared. The way he acted as if her feelings mattered even a little bit. When she knew they did not. He was going to do exactly what he wanted to, no matter what she said to him. There was no appealing to his better nature. That nature did not exist.The boy that you want him to be doesn’t exist.
She had to confess, even if to herself, sitting there feeling guiltily sated from the meal that he had just put before her, that she had felt a sense of... Jealousy twisted up inside of her when she had overheard him speaking to that woman.
When she talked about Stockholm syndrome, in part, she wasn’t kidding. And she didn’t like it one bit.
But his raw, masculine beauty called to her. As did something about being here in the desert. She thought of the way that she had stood before the window, naked. The way that she’d felt... Thrilled by it.
And just then, she felt a surge of something wild within her.
“Would you show me the desert?”
She hadn’t meant to ask that, in quite those terms. She hadn’t meant to echo the conversation from that last day. Oh, that last night.
How she’d wished she’d kissed him that last night.
But she’d been fourteen. Engaged to his brother. Even if it was against her will.
Even if it had been him she’d desired.
Shedidn’twant to kiss him now. She ignored the throb in her body that called her a liar.
“Excuse me?”
“I wish to tour the grounds,” she said, rephrasing. “We did once sit outside in the gardens at the palace, did we not? When I felt hopeless about the future. About my position in your country. About everything. We sat there in the blossoms, and we talked like human beings. I just... I want to go outside for a moment.”
“As you wish,” he said, standing and looking at her with distrust. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew that her heart was pounding like a bird trapped in a cage. Or rather, like what she was. A woman caught in a trap.
One thing she knew... She would fight.
Because if she did not she wouldn’t be able to respect herself.
It was a slow dawning realization that while her mother had always been kind to her, she had been passive. She had been passive in her own life, and in Ariel’s. And Ariel feared that in many ways she’d fallen into that same passivity. Acceptance.
Her mother had accepted a husband who had decided their daughter would have a political marriage, and who knew what other red flags she’d ignored? She’d expressed sympathy for Ariel’s desire to not marry Riyaz, but in the end had done nothing to stop it.
She had told Ariel to be on guard for Riyaz’s return, and yet had treated it like an inevitability, and Ariel could see the echoes of this in her own life.
Yes, as a young girl she’d accepted what her father had told her but eventually she’d begun to want her own, separate things.
When she’d been bundled up to go to Nazul every year she had complained, she hadn’t fought.
When she’d been fourteen, she hadn’t fought. She’d wanted to kiss Cairo, and she hadn’t done it. She’d wanted him and not Riyaz and she hadn’t done a thing about it. It wasn’t a kiss she needed now, but the spirit remained.
She did not want to marry Riyaz. She didn’t want the life that had been prescribed to her, and she would fight, even knowing she couldn’t win.
She would fight because it would make her something more than a captive.
She had to be brave now, where she hadn’t been before.
