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And if the price was that he give up the last ounce of his self-respect, if the price was that he stop hiding and face his demons, face the reality of everything he had ruined with his reckless actions, then so be it. He couldn’t have escaped the consequences of his actions forever anyway.
“Azeez?” Ayaan’s question reached his ears, unspoken, guarded, with a wealth of pain in it.
Azeez licked his lips and cleared his throat. The words stuck to his tongue. He forced himself to speak them. “Help me up, Ayaan.”
For a few seconds, his brother didn’t move. His shock pinged against the corridor walls in the deafening silence. Gritting his teeth, Azeez strove to keep his bitterness out of his words. “Do you want to exact revenge for that punch I threw three days ago?” he mocked. “Will you help me if I beg, Your Highness?”
A curse flying from his mouth, Ayaan spurred into action. Shaking his head, he tucked his hands under Azeez’s shoulders. “On three.”
Azeez nodded, and took a deep breath. He gripped Ayaan’s wrists and pulled himself up.
Ayaan leaned against the opposite wall and folded his arms. “Is it always like this?” There was anger in his brother’s words and beneath it, a sliver of pain.
Curbing the stinging response that rose to his lips, Azeez shook his head. “It’s my own fault. The less mobile I’m, the worse the hip gets.”
“Why didn’t you just summon me then?”
“I never did that. You are the one forever coming into my suite for one of your bonding sessions.”
Frowning, Ayaan opened the door behind him and held it for Azeez. Azeez stepped inside and froze.
Smells and sensations, echoes of laughter and joy, they assaulted him from all sides, poking holes in his deceptively thin armor.
A chill broke out over his skin as his gaze fell on the majestic desk at the far corner. A wooden, handmade box that had been in the Al Sharif dynasty for more than two centuries. The gold-embossed fountain pen that had passed on through generations, from father to son, from king to king. And the sword on display in a glass case to the right.
The sword he had been presented in the ceremony when his father had announced him the Crown Prince and future King, the sword that had represented everything he had been. Now, it was his brother’s, and Azeez didn’t doubt for a minute that it was where it belonged.
A portrait of their family hung behind the leather chair.
The smiling face of his sister, Amira, punched him in the gut. He had killed her as simply as if he had done it with both his hands.
Enough.
He hadn’t come here to revisit his mistakes. He’d come to stop more from happening.
Shying his gaze away from the portrait, he walked toward the sitting area on the right and slid into a chaise longue. Ayaan followed him and took the opposite seat.
“Nikhat says it’s because of me,” he said without preamble. He needed to say his piece and get out. He needed to be out of this room, needed to be back in the cavern of self-loathing that his suite had become. Before the very breath was stifled out of him by broken expectations, by excruciating guilt.
Ayaan frowned. “What is because of you?”
“Zohra’s complications with the pregnancy.”
His mouth tight, a mask fell over his brother’s usually expressive face. Cursing himself for how self-absorbed he had been, Azeez studied him, noticing for the first time the stress on Ayaan’s face.
Dark blue shadows hung under his brother’s eyes. His skin was drawn tight over his gaunt features.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Ayaan spoke finally, with a sigh. “For reasons the doctors say they can’t speculate over, it’s been a high-risk pregnancy from the beginning.”
“Then what did Nikhat mean by saying it was because of me? I know she didn’t say that to manipulate me.”
“I thought you didn’t want to see her or hear a word from her mouth. Now you trust her opinion?”
“Nikhat wanted to be a doctor since she was ten years old. If there’s one thing that she would never betray, it’s her profession. So if she says I’m the reason for Zohra’s stress, then I am. What I don’t understand is why. I might be a cripple but I have a working mind.”
“Do you? Because, so far, I haven’t seen evidence of it.”
Azeez continued as though his usually even-tempered brother hadn’t just snarled at him. “I have watched your wife growl at me like a lioness, as if she needs to shield you from me. I don’t think she would crumble because her husband is dealing with his difficult brother. So what is it, Ayaan?”
A flash of utter desolation came alive in his brother’s gaze. Azeez stared, shock waves shivering through him. Ever since he had learned that Ayaan had returned after six years, Azeez had known that his brother would do his duty, no matter what. And Ayaan had risen to every challenge.
Only now did Azeez realize what he had overlooked. His brother had fought his own demons for so long and Azeez had not given a passing thought to it until this moment.
“She’s worried about what this—” he moved his hand between Azeez and him “—is doing to me.”
A chilly finger raked its nail over Azeez’s spine. “What do you mean?”
“I have nightmares, vicious ones. I have had them every night ever since I… since I became lucid. Sometimes, they are minimal. Sometimes, I get violent. And…”
Azeez held his head in his hands, feeling his breath leave him. Guilt infused his blood, turning him cold from inside out. Looking up, he forced himself to speak the words. “They have become worse since you found me.”
Ayaan shrugged.
There was no shame or hesitation in his brother’s gaze. Only resigned acceptance. And in that minute, Azeez realized what he had been too blind to see until now.
His brother had lived through his own version of hell and had come out of it alive and honorable. And Dahaar was blessed to have him.
Unless he, Azeez, ruined it all again.
“I keep reliving that night and every time I see all that blood in the stable, your blood, I wake up screaming. And Zohra is right there with me, suffering through them, right by me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“When would I have told you? In between the punches you threw at Khaleef and me? When you refused point-blank to see Mother even though you could hear her heartbreaking cries on the other side of the door and informed Father to assume that his firstborn is still dead? Or in the few hours that you have been sober in the last four months?”
Azeez shifted in the seat restlessly. He wanted to run away from here. “Be rid of me,” he growled, his powerlessness eating through his insides. “All this will be solved in a minute.”
Ayaan rocked forward onto his knees, a fierce scowl on his face. “You think I can just wish away your existence as you have been doing?”
“Then send your wife away. Protect her.”
“I can’t,” Ayaan said, a sarcastic chuckle accompanying his words. “I am to be crowned king in two months, but I can’t dictate my wife’s behavior. I have ordered her to sleep in a separate wing, to go back to Siyaad for a few days. But, like you cleverly noticed, my wife has a will of her own. She won’t leave my side.”
From the moment he had met her steady gaze, Azeez had realized how much Princess Zohra loved his brother. Something he had wanted once, something he had thought he had once.
He swallowed back the surge of envy that gripped him. He would not envy the little happiness that Ayaan had. This had to stop today, now. “Fine. What is it you want from me?”
“What?”
“Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me what I can do to make this…make you better and take this stress off Zohra.”
“Why now, when you have all but thrown back my requests in my face?”
“Because there’s already too much blood on my hands and I don’t want more.”
Ayaan’s face tightened, his gaze filled with pity that Azeez didn’t want. “Azeez, that’s not—”
“This is your chance to protect your wife, Ayaan. Don’t waste it on useless matters.”
“Fine,” his brother said, standing up. “I want you to take care of yourself. I want you to have physiotherapy, I want you to see a psychiatrist, and I want you to see Mother and I want you at my coronation in a—”
“Don’t push it,” Azeez said, feeling the shackles of his brother’s demands binding him to Dahaar. Just the word coronation was like sticking a steel spike into his heart.
With his hand on the armrest, he pushed himself off the chaise. There was only one choice left to him, only one solution to stop the ruin he had begun again. And everything within him revolted at it. “I will do this, but I will do it my own way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t see a team of doctors. Nikhat can attend to me in between attending to Zohra.”
“Azeez,” his brother’s voice rang with warning as Azeez walked toward the exit, keeping his gaze away from everything in the room. “Whatever you are planning to do, don’t. She is here by my request.”
“Exactly. You brought her into this, Ayaan. Now that I’m following your orders, don’t complain about it.”
Stepping outside his brother’s office, Azeez slowly made his way back to his own quarters. He still planned to leave Dahaar. For his own sanity, he had to.
But he would postpone it until things were right with Princess Zohra. And he couldn’t live the rest of his life the way he had been doing, either.
He would do what his brother asked him to do because nothing else would be enough for Ayaan. However, there was no point in a team of doctors poking through his head. There was nothing anyone could do to fix him.
But Dr. Zakhari, he had been mistaken to dismiss her so quickly. She owed him. And she would become his route to freedom from this palace, from a life that would slowly but surely do what a bullet hadn’t been able to do— kill him.
* * *
Nikhat finished her dinner and dismissed the maid from her quarters. Ten seconds later, she couldn’t remember what it was that had been served to her in the glittering silverware.
She only remembered looking at her reflection in the plate, rushing to the long, oval mirror in her bedroom and redoing her unruly hair.
She stood before it again now, going over herself with a critical eye. Her long-sleeved, high-collared caftan in unrelenting black was made of a stiff silk that instead of clinging to her breasts sat on her shoulders like a tent. Small diamond studs, a gift she had given herself for her thirtieth birthday, were her only jewelry.
Sighing loudly, she grabbed another pin and slapped it over one strand of hair that refused to sit back in her braid. Satisfied with how she looked, she pressed her temples with her fingers and massaged.
She was used to braiding her hair back tight for the operating room. But this time, she had done it so tight that her head ached.
She checked the pile of gifts she had spent hours wrapping, unable to sit still. Had she known that Princess Zohra would allow her father to come straight into Nikhat’s suite in the far-off wing of the palace that housed her, she would have straightened a little more. As it was, she had made the maid nervous with her own twitching and needed to dismiss her.
Pulling her sleeve back, she checked her watch again. Her father was due any minute.
She was pacing the floor, wearing out the ancient, priceless rug when a knock sounded. Her feet flying on the floor, she opened the door.
And froze.
Azeez stood on the other side of the threshold. His jaw was clean-shaven, his gaze steady, a glimpse of the old him peeking out of it. She had forgotten the compelling effect his very presence held.
Her already strung-out nerves stretched a little more.
The fact that he was a few doors away in the same wing as her, night and day, rang like an unrelenting bell in the back of her head however busy she was. Seeing him outside her suite, in the palace of all the places, was a shock that needed its own category.
“I need to speak with you.”
He didn’t wait for her answer. In true arrogant-prince fashion, he pushed his way past her into the suite. Flustered at his sudden appearance, Nikhat turned around.
“Close your mouth, Nikhat. And the door.”
She shut her mouth, not the door. Hopefully she looked defiant, because inside she was trembling. “Why?”
The curve of his mouth turned up in a smirk, his gaze shining with an unholy light. That spark, that smile, had once played havoc with her senses, and apparently it still could. Because her legs were barely holding her up.
“Are you afraid to be alone with me?”
She closed the door shut behind her with a thud that should have silenced the resounding yes in her head.
Her luxurious and vast suite, which had mocked all her New York sophistication, suddenly seemed impossibly small with him standing in the middle of it. He was like the sun, reducing everything around him to colorless insignificance.
Standing close, his gaze moved over her like a caress. “Why are you dressed in that awful thing? And what happened to your hair?”
Nikhat stared back at him, all her worldliness, her sophistication, sliding away like sand between her fingers.
She had prepared herself to bear the brunt of his contempt, even hatred, in the coming months. But his attention, especially of a personal nature? No amount of preparation could help her deal with it.
“If this is how you dress usually, no wonder they were so happy to be rid of you in New York.”
“I left of my own volition. I left a good position in a cutting-edge hospital to come back.” Too late, she realized he was playing with her. His whole demeanor today was different. It was as if he had a strategy, as if all the fire of his emotions was neatly packed away for now. And even as he cut through her with his acerbic words, she still preferred him like that. The real him. “To build something that’s very much needed here in Dahaara.”
“Ah….I heard about all your plans for the clinic. Princess’s Zohra’s pregnancy, Ayaan’s desperation to fix me, your history with me, everything’s falling into place for you, isn’t it? Like always.”
Anger burst through her. “You think it’s easy for to me to be back here? To leave behind the freedom, the position, the respect I had in New York? To constantly fight against invisible prejudices just because I’m a woman? Even being the Princess’s personal physician is still apparently not recommendation enough.”
“If you expected anything different, then you’re a fool, Nikhat.”
“Because I want to change some things for the better in Dahaar? You had a dream like that once, Azeez. Or have you completely wiped out everything from the past?”
He remained unflappable, even as her temper soared. “You chose a difficult path for yourself and an even harder one by coming back. Why stay if it’s so hard?”
“Because I know that I can make a difference. I want all the hard work I put in to amount to something for Dahaar. And I refuse to let any prejudice masquerading as tradition stop me.”
His silence this time didn’t grate on her. Because being back in Dahaar was harder not only on a professional level but a personal one. She had tasted freedom in New York. She could go wherever she wanted, she could talk to whomever she wanted to, without written permission, without seeing questions lingering in gazes wherever she turned.
“No, you never stray from your path once you decide, do you?” A grudging respect filled his words. “Just don’t expect any changes overnight, Nikhat.”
She nodded, fiercely glad for this discussion. Because even if he said his words in a mocking tone, Azeez gave her a sense of being understood that she needed so much.
“So, dressing like you’re going to your own execution is the first step to convince everyone here to take you seriously?”
She raised a brow and smiled, smoothing a hand over the stiff silk. “Your mask of indifference in slipping, Azeez. You sound rather interested in how I’m dressed.”
Something playful entered his gaze as he shrugged. “You look like a black hole, Nikhat. Unless you tell me why, I will assume it’s to dissuade my interest. Then I’ll have to inform you that I would rather take another bullet in the hip than touch you.”
Heat flaring under her skin, Nikhat glared at him. “My father is coming to see me any minute. And my sisters. If you need me to be your punching bag, I would like to schedule the session for some other time that suits me better.”
She checked her watch again, unable to contain her anxiety.
“You have to look like this to see your father? Is this some new law that Ayaan passed?”
She looked down at herself, knowing he was right. But she didn’t want to give her father any more reason to be angry with her, or to find fault with her in any way. Loneliness she had battled for eight years solidified in her throat. “I…I have not seen him in eight years, Azeez. My sisters…can you imagine what Noor would look like now?” she said, thinking of her youngest sister. “Please, just leave, for now. I don’t have the luxury to turn my back on my family like you have done.”
The humor faded from his face. “Why didn’t you see them all these years?”
“My father’s condition for when I left Dahaar to study was that I not return. What you don’t know, and I didn’t realize, is how intractable he is. He forbade me from seeing him or my sisters.”
Before he could reply, a knock sounded on the door. Panic tying her stomach in knots, she grasped his hands and jerked back as the contact sent a jolt of sensation through her. “Please, Azeez,” she whispered, turning toward the door.
With a hard look at her, he walked around the sitting area and into her bedroom.
Only after she heard the click behind her did Nikhat’s heart settle back into place. Wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, she opened the wide, double doors.
The smile froze on her mouth when she saw her father, alone. “Hello, Father,” she said, unable to pull her gaze away from the eerily silent corridor.
His hands folded behind him, her father stepped into the suite. He stood there stiffly, casting a glance around the room, not a hint of warmth in his gaze or welcome in his stance.
Swallowing back her disappointment, Nikhat gestured toward the seating area. “Would you like something to drink?”
“I cannot stay long, Nikhat. There’s an urgent security issue that I have to address with Prince Ayaan.”
Nikhat nodded. “I understand how busy you are. I just…I thought the girls were coming with you.”
His gaze remained steady on her, nothing betrayed in his set face. “I wished to make sure it was suitable for them to visit you here.”
“It’s the palace, Father. It’s the most secure place in Dahaar. Ayaan said—” She caught herself at the spark of displeasure in his tight mouth. “Prince Ayaan informed me himself that I have permission to have guests. I’m the personal physician to the Crown Princess, not a prisoner of state,” she said, bitterness spewing into her words.
“I did not think you were a prisoner.” Even more hardness settled into his features, making his expression intractable. “I have heard rumors, however. Nothing I would repeat. In fact, it is what I need to address with the Crown Prince. But between the rumors and his sudden command to call you back to Dahaar, I do not like the conclusions I had to draw.”
Anger filled her, replacing the powerlessness that had been clawing at her. All she wanted was to see her sisters. One small thing. And it seemed as if the whole universe was conspiring to deny her that. “What are these conclusions, Father?”
“I will not repeat them. And certainly not in front of you.”
Hot fury filled every inch of her. “Yes, you will. I am your daughter and I’m thirty years old. I have lived outside Dahaar, in a foreign land among strangers for eight years. Without any man’s protection, I have seen the world. I have not only taken care of myself but I have also flourished in my career. If I’m being denied the chance to see my own sisters—” she knew she was shouting at him now, that her voice was breaking, but she didn’t care anymore “—you will damn well tell me why not.”
“Swearing when you speak to your father? Is this what you have become?”
She gritted her teeth. For so many years, she had kept quiet. Even before she left Dahaar, she had always tried to be a model daughter, tried to be the son he had always wanted. “What have I become? What have I done that is so wrong that you’re still punishing me for it?”
He shook his head and Nikhat felt the one thing she had wanted slipping away from her hands. Everything she had achieved amounted to nothing if she still couldn’t see her sisters. “You owe me the truth at least.”
“Who are you serving, Nikhat? The Crown Princess Zohra or Prince Azeez?”
Nikhat could feel the blood fading from her face. “You cannot mention your suspicions to anyone. You cannot betray them.”
Her father flinched. “I would never betray the royal family. It’s all the small things I’ve been hearing. And no one else can come to the conclusion as I have. You and Prince Azeez…” He looked away from her as though his very thoughts were shameful. “I knew there was something between you all those years ago. Time and again I reminded you to keep your distance from them, to remember the disparity between our life and theirs. You never paid any attention to my warnings. You never do once you settle on something.”
Nikhat tried to wrap her mind around what he was saying. The truth of it shone in his unforgiving eyes.
He had known she had been in love with Azeez and he had assumed she had left Dahaar because her relationship with the prince had fallen apart. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at how perceptive her father was. “I have never done anything to bring shame upon you.” Even when she had known that she had to walk away, she had still refused herself what she wanted more than anything in the world.
“It does not matter. But if the Crown Prince has summoned you back to the palace, if he’s keeping you here because he thinks it will…help Prince Azeez…then I can’t risk bringing your sisters here. Your life, your reputation, it’s out of my hands. You took the right to protect you away from me when you left Dahaar. When you finish this…assignment, you will leave again. Leave whatever scandal you might create behind you. Your sisters have to live here, marry and make their lives. And I am still their father. I have to protect them.”
“What would you have me do, Father? Deny the Crown Prince’s request after everything King Malik has done for this family?”
“No, do your duty, whatever it…entails.” Tight lines fanned his mouth, and Nikhat knew what it cost him to say those words. And yet, it didn’t shock or surprise her. Her father had served King Malik for forty years. His loyalty was what had brought Nikhat to the palace to be educated at Princess Amira’s side. “But do not ask me to involve your sisters in this. Not until whatever you are doing for the Crown Prince is finished, not until I know this will not affect their reputation.”
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