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It washim.
Cairo al Hadid.
Very much alive.
And in her hallway.
“Ya amar,”he said. “I have come for you.”
Sheikh Cairo Ahmad Syed al Hadid had been a man without a country for far too long.
Perhaps that was not an accurate portrayal of the situation. He had a country. And he had not forgotten. He had made it his mission to take down the invading forces. All these years, he had not forgotten. The screams of his mother. The dying bellow of his father as he took his sword and did battle, though it was futile. Because he was King of Nazul, and he would have never let it fall without a fight. And it would never have fallen if not for the betrayal.
A betrayal at the hands of the Hart patriarch. Dominic Hart had gotten greedy. He had taken his connection to the royal family of Nazul, and he had decided instead to take the money of a vicious warlord in order to betray the al Hadid family.
The man had been an Eastern European mercenary who’d decided he was done running missions and gaining power for others, and had decided to take power where he could for himself. He’d chosen Nazul because it was rich in natural resources, and small enough, with few enough allies on a global scale that he would face few consequences for his actions.
But Cairo had seen that there were consequences. That man had been on the throne these past years, and Cairo had taken great joy in ending his reign. In watching his face when Cairo and his army for hire had stormed the palace and he’d known.
He’d known.
Cairo was not there to take prisoners.
Bloody battles had a cost. Revenge had a cost.
But Cairo owed that debt. He still owed a debt.
His life, his desires, his body, his soul. They were not his own. He’d lost his right to a life that belonged to himself all those years ago on a desert night when he’d made a mistake that had cost everything.
And so he’d lived these past years knowing this moment would come, and that when it did, he would give all to see his country restored.
To his brother sitting on the throne, as the rightful leader of Nazul.
He’d escaped the palace that day.
But he’d known he would return.
He had moved to England and begun using the name Syed al Shahar, his mother’s family name. He had used his wit and his understanding of systems to get himself into the finest schools on scholarship. From there, he had begun to build an empire.
And people might know Cairo as a playboy, businessman and mogul, but they did not know that he had been a boy who had watched his family die in a palace in a far-off desert kingdom that made few headlines.
What was yet more global unrest, after all? It had been a blip on the radar of the news media in Europe and the United States, for what did they care? People killing each other in a country that none of them wanted to visit anyway.
That was how they ranked their concern. Did they wish to vacation there? Or was the country in question potentially going to invade them? If not... A cruel footnote in the history of a world filled with cruel histories. Unremarkable. And yet, it had changed his entire life.
He had known, though.
He hadknownthat Riyaz had survived. He had felt that in his bones. Either way, Cairo’s loyalty was to Nazul. And he had built his empire on the foundation of wanting nothing more than to destroy the men that had killed his family. That had taken his legacy.
And he had known that if his brother truly were being held captive, then he must be rescued. Cairo would always come for him.
He might be Syed to the world, but he had always been Cairo.
Always.
He knew what he had to do. All the parties, all the excess...it was never for him. And if it successfully helped to burn away the memories of what had happened in Nazul?
He did not mind having those memories blurred.
