AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“My apologies for your struggle,” he said.
“Cairo...”
“You knew. You knew I would come for you. You were prepared to run. Your mother was prepared to text you to run. Do not act surprised by it now.”
“I had rather thought that murder would be the aim.”
“No. So you should be relieved.”
“I’m not.”
He looked at her, hard. “This was always how it would be. You knew that. You knew it when you were a child. You know it now. The al Hadid family is an inevitability. We are the sun in the desert. You cannot outrun us. And you cannot extinguish us. Your fate is sealed.”
CHAPTER TWO
THESUNWASso hot today. She felt like she might die of it, but she waited in the garden anyway. She waited and waited because she knew eventually...he would come.
“There you are,ya amar.”
She looked up, the throb of her heart painful. “Cairo.”
He’d told her she could call him by his name, and it had felt like a gift.
“Ari...”
The nickname on his lips made her feel a new kind of warm.
“Why doesn’t Riyaz ever come out?”
“He’s the heir. He’s going to be the sheikh. Do you prefer his company to mine?”
She bit her lip. “I should.”
His boyish grin became wicked. “But you don’t.”
If you could expire from panic, or perhaps have all the energy zapped out of you because you were in a state of heightened terror, then Ariel felt as if she had achieved that state. She had given up trying to talk to him. That snatch of memory was a lie. A joke.
That Cairo was long gone.
In many ways, he was dead, like she’d always imagined he was.
Because this wasn’t her friend. This wasn’t the boy she’d loved.
Her heart clenched tight.
Her father was responsible for this.
When she’d been a child, she’d been protected from the world. She’d had tutors at home, and she’d been well educated. She’d traveled all over. She’d been wealthy and comfortable. But she hadn’t realized that the choices her father had made for her weren’t...normal. Not in modern society.
She had been upset that she’d been promised to marry a sheikh, but her father had explained that people like them often had to make choices, alliances and marriages that others didn’t. It was how you protected wealth, it was how you stayed safe, that was what he’d told her.
She’d accepted it then.
She couldn’t say she was accepting of this now.
But there was some part of her that felt compelled to face this.
To see it through.
