AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The closer he got to losing every last shred of protection he’d placed around his soul.
“Riyaz...”
“I will fail you. I have failed you. But I won’t again. You will go. And you will not come back.”
“Riyaz,” she said, looking shocked.
And he felt a shard of glass work its way up through his chest.
“I’m the Sheikh. And I have spoken.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHEWASFROZEN. Ashamedly paralyzed. And it lasted until the sleek private jet touched down in New York. Until she was back on American soil, feeling like a foreigner in her own country. In her own skin. In every way.
Every time she breathed it was like shards of glass being ground deeper and deeper into her chest. And she had to ask herself... Why? Why had she gone so easily? Why had she walked away from the life that she had chosen?
She had been rescued before. This wasn’t the same. She didn’t need to be rescued from Riyaz, and yet...
She knew why she had gone. Right then, she knew why. She had gone because he needed her to.
He needed to set her free. Or maybe he needed to set himself free. And in the end, the thing that made her laugh was... She was willing to do that. To walk away because he might need a reprieve.
She would not become his dungeon. Even though that might be his motivation for letting her go... She wouldn’t be that for him either. She refused.
He had precious little choice in his life.
And if he asked her to go... If he said he didn’t want to hear that she loved him...
There were two things, she knew it. There was something in him that was afraid to be too strong, afraid that he might be overwhelming her with force. And something else in him that scared him perhaps even more. Something that he thought might be too weak. The kind of weakness that he saw in his brother, even though he loved him. The kind of weakness he saw in his father, even though he loved him.
And it was all twisted up in that haunting last thing his mother had said to him. He was a man who simply didn’t trust. Not the world. Not himself. And how could she ask him to?
She didn’t have an answer. So she just stumbled into her town house and looked around. It was a nice place, because of course Cairo would never have bought her a home that wasn’t nice. But there was also something incredibly... Normal about it. It was one of the things that she had liked. Right away. The lightly flowered wallpaper, the little breakfast nook in the corner.
It usually made her happy.
But unfortunately, she had been right. The thing that made those families enviable was their love. The thing that made those lovely, normal houses an object of desire was the love within the walls, not the walls themselves.
She had been totally cut off from her family.
She’d had to cut herself off from them, and she had to conform to the outside world. And only with Riyaz had she really felt free.
Maybe there was another lesson in there as well. That you could be normal, or you could be free. But you couldn’t be both.
Her chest ached. And she wished she had a friend. One other than Cairo. And then she remembered that she did.
Hesitantly, she decided to call Ariel, whose number she had put in her phone a week or so ago.
“Hello?” She breathed out heavily. “Thank God, Brianna. I was worried.”
“I just made it back to New York.”
“We’re trying to keep word from spreading about the canceled wedding. Just... Just in case.”
Brianna looked at the clock on the wall. A very normal-looking clock. Except for who had clocks on the wall anymore? But she had thought that it made a nice accessory. It was a set, this place. She had never really noticed it before.
And owed to the kind of normalcy that she had long thought she needed in order to feel whole.
