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No, Riyaz, but I have spent years fantasizing about it. While he has slept with everything except for me.
Her untouched state was directly down to her feelings about Cairo.
He had rescued her. From her father’s crime syndicate when she was fifteen. She had been a near captive. Rapunzel, locked in a tower. And then her father had decided to sell her. To a rival crime lord. He was intent on selling his only daughter into what was essentially human trafficking, and Cairo had been... Somehow adjacent to all of it, which she understood now was part of his working undercover to gain access to the palace in Nazul again. He had rescued her from her father’s house one night at a party, after he’d overhead his father talking to a group of men about his plans to essentially sell her to a man he wanted to make his ally. He had gone in search of her, and she could still remember that first time he’d spoken to her.
He wasn’t too much older than her, tall and handsome, and she’d thought he had to be a fallen angel.
Your father is planning on selling you.
I know.
She had known, and she’d been...afraid. Desperate to get away. Because she knew what it meant. That she would be losing her freedom, her choice over...everything. She’d been making plans to run away but she hadn’t known what she would do when she did.
Come with me.
She’d known it was a risk. That it could be out of the frying pan and into the fire. But she had grown up in a world where she could never trust the adults around her, and in the end, she’d decided it was a risk she’d be willing to take.
The risk had paid off. He had helped her create a new identity, a new life. Had sent her to boarding school, had...
And of course she had fallen in love with him. Over the past decade, it had been unavoidable.
He wasn’t what she wanted, though, not really. He was a man who lived on the edge, a man who traveled all over and who took lovers whenever he wanted. She wanted a simpler life. Something normal. Something like the town house he’d bought her, which she’d always loved because it reminded her of her favorite family sitcoms growing up. Homey wallpaper, a clock in the kitchen, some ivy on the cabinets.
He wasn’t the sort of man to want ivy on the kitchen cabinets.
So she loved him, even knowing they would never be together. It wasn’t a reasonable love. But it occupied her heart, whether she was a realist about him or not.
He was her friend. He’d bought her house. He’d facilitated her business.
He brought her others to help. Because he dealt in people who were refugees from their old lives.
And she had so successfully navigated that transition herself that it seemed only right that she begin to help others to do the same thing.
What she hadn’t counted on, when she had agreed to this, was Riyaz.
When he had walked into the throne room, her heart had jumped up into her throat.
He was terrifying. Broad and bronzed, and well-muscled. His jet-black hair was shoulder length, his gaze piercing. His nose was straight, his mouth grim. He had a dark beard that had been expertly trimmed, allowing her to guess at just how sharp and square his jaw was.
He resembled Cairo in some ways. But Cairo held himself with ruthless sophistication, his wardrobe expertly cut, his body honed with lean muscle.
Riyaz looked like a warrior from another time. He was tall, and broad. He looked like he would be at home holding a sword. And maybe in his other hand, the head of one of his enemies.
There was something feral about him, and why wouldn’t there be? He had been captive all these years. How could he not be?
And it was her job to help him. Not... Tremble at the sight of him. And certainly not feel embarrassed that he had so quickly zeroed in on her connection to Cairo. The connection that only ran one way.
“How strange to eat at a table,” he said when he walked in and pulled his chair out, sitting down heavily at the head of the table. He was pushed away from it, the chair angled, his legs spread wide. There was something so... Blatant about it. It made her feel jittery.
She had never seen someone who just... Wasn’t bound by any sort of rule or sense of manners.
He simply was, and expected the world to shift around him.
“Well, it is sort of difficult to try and hold your food and your utensils and a drink without a table.”
“Not impossible.”
“Well. We are aiming for a little bit better than not impossible.”
