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She looked up at him, his dark gaze measured there from across the table.
“My father told us. He told my mother and I as if we should be proud. He knew that I had never wanted to marry Riyaz, so he thought that I would... Celebrate. That he had gotten money for betraying your parents. For helping their enemies figure out how to get into the palace. For helping them find their weakness. We were both... Horrified.”
She remembered throwing herself to the ground and weeping until she could not breathe. She hadn’t wanted to marry Riyaz. She hadn’t been happy there in Nazul. But the sheikh and sheikha had never been anything but kind to her, and Riyaz, though serious and distant, had never been an object of hatred for her.
But it was Cairo. The thought of Cairo, bleeding on the mosaic tile that had broken her.
“I asked about you. My father said that no one had ever found your body. But that you were presumed dead. Cairo, I...”
“Your father was shocked that you and your mother did not praise his perfidy?”
“Yes. And I think even more shocked when my mother left him over it. He had thought that money was what she wanted. It wasn’t. I know that my father understood loyalty. I don’t think he understood love. My mother could not stay with a man who had caused so much pain. And I... I could never look at him again.”I felt like I died that day with you.
But she did not say that last part out loud.
Instead, she looked down at her plate, and then back up at him. “How did you escape?”
“It wasn’t easy. There was a battle. Intense and bloody. My mother was killed. My father raised his sword to fight. And he took down many of the men who invaded the palace. Before he died, he whispered to me that I had to survive. That I had to run. He said they had not killed Riyaz but that he had been taken prisoner. Sometimes I... Over the years, I wondered if he had lied to me. If he had told me that to keep me from staying and dying. If he had given me a mission as a gift. It was a despairing thought. I needed to believe that my brother lived. But there were persistent rumors that he was a prisoner. And I hoped in those rumors.”
“But how did you escape?”
“It was a melee. I knew a secret entrance out to the gardens. I slipped away in the fighting and got free of the palace. There were soldiers—enemy soldiers—stationed in the garden, but... You remember the orange tree.”
“Yes.” Of course she did.
“I climbed the tree to escape over the wall.”
“But what was out there beyond the wall?”
“The desert. When I speak to you of the harsh sun, the jackals, of flash floods and freezing nights, it is because I have survived in the desert. I walked until I escaped over the border into Turkey. And from there I was able to gain safe passage to England as a refugee. There were many people who left Nazul around that time. By the time I arrived there, I was unrecognizable as Cairo. I had lost so much weight and was chapped and weathered from the sun. There was a man who gave me fake papers. Syed. The name that you had seen in the media. That was when I adopted that name. That is how I escaped.”
“It sounds... Awful.”
“It was. It was only the thought of Riyaz that kept me going. For a great number of years. And then... I went to school, and I made friends. I started my own business and began to earn money. I of course discovered pleasures of the flesh. And the pleasures of alcohol. I was... Rudderless for a time. And I will not say that I am proud of everything that I did. I felt that there was no reason to leave any stone unturned when it came to substances or sex. It was like a delayed response to surviving the massacre. A celebration of being alive. Or perhaps a punishment to my body for doing so. And then gradually I became adept at figuring out how to work my way toward staging the next coup for Nazul and pleasing myself. I became quite good at the balance.”
It was funny, for even though she felt as if she had left desire and attraction behind in Nazul along with him, and even though she had not done the same thing he had, it felt much like the same. For the way he talked about sex was as if it were a self-medication of some kind. Not so much about desire as it was about the need to blot out unfortunate memories. It didn’t sound like pleasure.
Not really.
He spoke of it as if it were any sort of drug.
And she wondered what other damage had been done to him. Wondered what else had scarred his soul. Changed the course of who he was. Because the fact was...
She might have escaped her betrothal to Riyaz, but she had never really escaped Nazul.
They finished eating, and then were brought a fresh pot of coffee to go alongside the cake.
The staff melted away again, leaving them alone. And suddenly, it did not feel like a rehearsal for anything. It simply felt like she was out in the desert at night with Cairo. Much like that night when they had been teenagers.
Her body ached with it.
She looked up at him, and pain bloomed in her chest.
Pain for what he had been through. Pain for what he had lost. Pain for what the two of them had lost. For they both had lost something that day.
He picked up the cake, and moved around the table, coming to sit in the chair beside her, and she found her breath freezing at the base of her throat. He pushed his fork into the end of the cake and brought it up to her lips. “Try it.”
His eyes never left hers as she parted her lips slowly and took the cake inside. As the sharp, citrusy flavor burst on her tongue. It felt intimate. Sitting this close to him while tasting the decadence of the dessert. The moon was bright. And the stars shone with vibrance. And then he reached out and touched her cheek.
