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Prologue
Twenty three years earlier
“Don’t cry, Zamir.” She crouched down, her body slim, her hair plaited into a perfect style that wrapped around her head. “Please don’t cry, darling one. I’ll be back soon.”
The four year old boy with his spectacular complexion and enormous amber eyes did his best to stave off any more tears. “But you are always going, mama.”
“I know,” she smiled wistfully and took one of his hands in hers. With her other, she reached behind him, to the far more stoic and seemingly unaffected Ra’if. Only two years older, he was cut from an entirely different cloth to his brother. Where Zamir felt all things deeply, Ra’if had always possessed an ability to hold a tight reign over his emotions.
“Why must you?” Zamir muttered, using her grip to lift her arm around his waist so that he could sidle close to her. She smelled like jasmine and magnolia.
“Because it is my job.”
His jutted lip was petulance itself. “You don’t have a job. You are the Queen.”
Cait swallowed her smile. “True, but I have duties I must carry out. There are thousands of people waiting for me in Pilati,” she explained quietly, referring to the capital city of Dashan.
“You’ll come back tonight?”
“Yes, I’ll come back tonight.” She joined the two brothers’ hands together and smiled to encompass them both. “Ra’if will keep you company until then. I promise to come and give you a goodnight kiss as soon as I am back.”
Zamir sniffled miserably. “I don’t want you to go.”
“Zami,” she laughed indulgently, standing and ruffling his thick black hair. “You always say that.”
“And you always go,” he countered.
“Yes. But I always come back.”
She could have had no idea, of course, that this would be the one and only time when she wouldn’t.
That her beautiful boys, watching her walk elegantly down the long marbled corridor of the Central Palace, would never see her again.
If she had, she would have stayed longer. She would have hugged Zamir and Ra’if so tight, and listened to the beatings of their hearts.
Instead, she left; not to Pilati, in the end, but to her destiny and her death.
Zamir and Ra’if and would never be the same again.
Chapter 1
“You are to serve me?”
His eyes were like balls of flame and gold, amber with flecks of sunshine and starlight. In the same way a masterpiece in a gallery was framed in a manner that was worthy of it, his eyes were surrounded by the most luscious, thick curling lashes she’d ever seen.
“To serve you?” Olivia responded, grateful that years of floating around the world meeting strangers had resulted in a confident appearance even when her heart was hammering and her pulse was racing.
Zamir compressed his lips. It was a gesture of impatience, but it only served to highlight his dramatic bone structure and fascinating features.
“You are from the agency?”
Sophie nodded, her brain struggling to keep up when faced with such an outrageously distracting man. She didn’t believe in love at first sight. But lust at first sight? Yes, definitely, and she was unequivocally experiencing it. Her nipples were taut, her throat was dry, and she felt a racing of blood in her veins that was making her body hot and cold. He was staring at her with
“Yes,” she said, finally.
Zamir rolled one of his shirtsleeves up to just below the elbow, revealing tanned, slimly muscled forearms and drawing attention to his capable fingers. He performed the same action on the other arm then manoeuvred his rapier sharp gaze back to her face. At the moment his eyes clashed with hers, her heart gave an answering trill.
“You have done this kind of work before?”
