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“Do you really know that? Or is that why you’re here? Do you hold out hope?”
She began to look uncomfortable.
“No. I’m actually not. I decided that this... This would have to be the last thing that I did for him. Because I can’t love him, not like that, not for real. I can’t. Not when... Not when I want something else.”
“What else?”
“This isn’t about me. This is about you.”
“And Cairo. Admit that you are curious about him for your own benefit.”
“Fine. I am. But after this, I won’t be as close to him anymore. He’s planning on taking over as the head of your military, after all. It matters to him. A great deal. Your health, your happiness...”
“He got along with my intended much better than I did,” said Riyaz. “We used to fight about that a bit. He was my very best friend, until summer, when Ariel would come to visit. She was afraid of me. I can’t say that I really blame her. She’s two years younger than I am. The same age as Cairo. They got along immediately, and he would abandon me for large portions of the day to run wild with her. My parents thought they would make companionable in-laws. Keep each other occupied while I ruled. I always wondered...”
He had always wondered if Cairo loved her. But they had been boys. Children, and Riyaz had never questioned a dictate of his father’s. If his father said that he was supposed to marry Ariel, then he was supposed to marry her.
His father could not be wrong.
He gritted his teeth.
What a harsh blow it had been to find out that his father could be wrong. That he could trust the wrong man.
What a harsh thing to realize that in the final moments of his father’s life. It made him no less Riyaz’s hero. But it did teach him that his father was human. Very, very human.
And he had died like one.
“Cairo,” he said, redirecting his own thoughts. Trying to turn off the images in his head of the bloody throne room. The very room they stood in now.
He could not afford to lose himself. Not with her. Not again.
“He was always a big personality. Always brilliant. Always in trouble.”
“And you weren’t?”
“No. I was the heir. The heir could not afford that sort of behavior.”
“And you just... Knew that. Accepted it?”
“Like I said. I wanted to be like my father. And that was the manner of man he was.”
He looked at the tray of cupcakes. He wanted another chocolate one. Except... Looking at her, what he really wanted. What he wanted with all of himself, was her. He might not have tasted chocolate in sixteen years, but he had not tasted her either. And he wondered if she tasted like he thought her name did. Like lemon and raspberries and sunshine.
So he took another cupcake.
Because she had offered it. And that was really why it mattered.
Because of her.
“You should have one,” he said.
She looked down at the tray. “I don’t have a free hand.”
He took the tray from her swiftly, and set it on the throne.
“I imagine that’s against some kind of tradition.”
“If it is,” he said, “then I have forgotten the tradition. Therefore it no longer exists. I am the Sheikh, after all.”
