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And so did she.
This wasn’t the time to break down. This wasn’t the time to start making things all about her, and her comfort. There was a broader scope to consider.
“You assume I might know where a prepared guest room is. I assure you I do not.”
“You don’t know the layout of the rooms in your own palace?”
He stepped down from the raised platform the throne sat on, making his way toward her. “This is not my palace. It is my brother’s palace. That is my brother’s throne. I wear my brother’s crown. Metaphorically, of course.” Olivia found it impossible to breathe with Tarek advancing on her as he was. He was nothing like the men she was accustomed to. Nothing like her gentle, sophisticated father. Nothing like her cultured, amusing husband. Or indeed her quiet and steady brother-in-law. If she was focusing on space metaphors, Tarek was a black hole. Sucking the air, the sound, the energy from the room around him, internalizing it. Creating a void that he alone commanded. “None of this is mine. I was not meant for this. If you intend to make me your project, then you should be aware of that fact.”
“What is the solution, then? Because you seem to be here, whether or not you feel destined for it,” she said, not certain where the strength to speak came from. Apparently, though he had sucked the air from her lungs, he had not stolen her ability to speak.
“I suppose you are the solution. My brother’s advisers despair of me. Fair enough, as I despair of them. I feel they are weak-minded sycophants, trained to be so by a ruler who required mindless servitude. I do not. Nor do I want it.”
“Come now, most rulers enjoy a bit of bowing and scraping.”
Black eyes clashed with hers. “Only a man craves praise. A weapon wants nothing more than to be used. And that, my queen, is all that I am.”
She swallowed hard, trying to appear self-possessed. Trying to feel self-possessed. “Then, I will train you to fight. The way a king must fight.”
He began to pace, making a circle around her. A shiver ran through her, chilling her down to her bones. “I worry. I worry about the things I have left behind, untended.”
“Then, use what you have seen. I’m sure you know more about many things than your brother ever did.” She had no idea if that was true; she was simply trying to prove her worth. “Use that. And let me assist you with the rest. Interacting with diplomats is simply politics as usual. My husband excelled at that. As do I.”
“Well, then, I expect for you to prove that within the allotted time. Follow me.” He strode past her, his movements decisive, abrupt.
She snapped to attention, doing her best to keep pace with him. It was nearly impossible. The top of her head came to his shoulder, and that was with the aid of her high heels. She had to take three strides to his every one, sounding like a panicked baby deer as she clicked along the marble. “Where exactly are you taking me? Because you just said you didn’t know where you were going.”
“Give me a skin of water, place me in the middle of the desert and I could find my way back. And yet, I find this palace difficult to navigate. It is too dark. I depend on the sun for my direction.”
“Interesting,” she said, “except, are you leading me to my room or the middle of the desert? Inquiring minds want to know.”
Just then a servant girl turned the corner and began walking toward them down the long corridor, her eyes averted. “You there,” Tarek said, his tone commanding. “Are there guest quarters in which I might install the queen?”
The girl stopped, her eyes widening. “Sheikh Tarek, we did not know to expect a guest.”
“Yes, because I did not tell you we were expecting one. Though I assumed my impotent advisors might have done. It is extremely difficult to accomplish simple tasks here. In the desert each man asks for himself. We have none of this foolish bureaucracy.”
The girl looked at him, her expression blank.
“I’m fine with whatever is available,” Olivia said, attempting to inject some diplomacy into the exchange. “I’m certain it will be fine. So I will need my bags brought from the car.”
The girl nodded. “I can do that. The room nearest the sheikh’s quarters has a made-up bed. It will be the simplest room to prepare.”
Tarek went very still, and Olivia had the feeling he didn’t want her staying near him. “That will be fine,” Olivia said before he could protest. Her aim was to be in proximity with him after all.
“See that it is done,” Tarek said.
The girl nodded and scurried off.
“I imagine you know how to find the room,” Olivia said.
He nodded once. “Indeed. Follow me.”
They wandered down a maze of domed corridors, with silver walls inlaid with stone reflecting off the polished floor. The palace at Alansund housed the crown jewels of the royal family. This palace seemed to be made of them. It was ostentatious, a show of riches that awed even her.
“This is beautiful.”
He stopped, turning to face her. “Is it? I find it oppressive.”
He turned away again, continuing to lead them in their journey. He was such a strange man. Impenetrable as rock, and yet, at the same time, honest in his speech. Still, for all that honesty, she found she could not understand him.
“I suppose when you are used to open spaces, it might be difficult to become used to living behind stone walls.”
“I’m used to stone walls. I’ve spent much of my time inhabiting caves, and an abandoned village out in the middle of the desert. But I have no good memories here.” He let his words die there, and she sensed there would be no reviving them now, no matter how persistent she was.
She didn’t need him to go on. She didn’t need to know his story, didn’t need to understand him.
She simply needed him to marry her.
A wave of fear, of uncertainty, washed over her. She wondered what she was doing here. Why she was agreeing to marry this stranger.
For Alansund. Because you were asked to. Because you are a queen who has no throne, no power. Because you have no husband. Because you have nowhere else, and nothing else.
Her internal voice had ample reason, and she found it difficult to argue. But fear was not looking for rationality. Fear was simply looking for a foothold, and it had found one.
Not so difficult to do in this situation.
Still, she followed on. He paused at one of the ornate doors that led to what she assumed would be her quarters for the duration of her stay. He pushed the door open without saying anything.
“You’re a scintillating conversationalist, has anyone ever told you that?” she asked.
“No,” he said, the sarcasm skating right over his head.
“I’m not that surprised.”
“Conversation was never required of me.”
In that statement, she felt all of the helplessness he would never otherwise express. And somehow, in that moment, with those words, she felt a connection with him. They were both in a situation they were ill equipped to handle. Olivia, having lost her status, having lost the man that was so much a part of her identity. And Tarek, pulled from the desert to become something he had never been trained to be.
“We will find a way,” she said. She wasn’t sure who the assurance was really meant for. Him, or her.
“And if we do not, you can return home.”
“It isn’t my home,” she said, speaking the words that terrified her more than any others. “I don’t have one. Not now.”
“I see. I have one. I simply cannot return to it.”
“Perhaps we will make one here?”
She tried to imagine finding a bond with this man, tried to imagine being his wife, and she found it impossible. Though not more impossible than returning to Alansund. Watching her brother-in-law sit on the throne, where Marcus had been before. Watching his fiancée take her place.
That was perhaps an even bigger impossibility.
“If not that, perhaps we can simply prevent the palace from falling into ruin? And the entire country with it?”
“That’s a lot of faith you’re placing in a stranger,” she said.
“I would more readily put my faith in you than anyone who worked under my brother.”
“Was he so bad?”
“Yes,” Tarek said, offering no further explanation. And she could tell, by the finality in that one-word answer, that he would not.
“Then, perhaps you don’t have as far to go as you might think. You may look good simply by comparison.”
“Perhaps.”
Olivia didn’t say anything; rather, she continued to stand next to him, feeling intensely uncomfortable. Socially at sea. That almost never happened to her.
“I thought you wanted to be shown to your room,” he said.
“I do,” she said, walking past him and into the vast space. Different than her quarters in Alansund, but no less grand. It glittered like the rest of the castle, full of gold and jewels, the bed wrought from precious metal, twisted together like gilt tree branches. “I suppose I just feel a bit—” She turned as she spoke the sentence, and saw that she was talking to nothing.
Tarek had excused himself without a word. Obviously finished with her for the moment.
She was alone. Something that had become far too common in recent months.
How she hated the emptiness.
She crossed the room, taking a seat on the edge of the bed, trying to squash the feeling of terror, of sadness climbing up inside her, mixing together to create a potent cocktail that made her head swim, made it difficult to breathe.
“You can’t break now,” she said. “You must never break.”
* * *
He wasn’t sure if it was a memory or a dream. Both.
Right now, though, it was agony, reality. As it had been ever since he had come back to the palace. Ghosts of the past long banished rising back up to haunt him.
He had spent a great many years out in the middle of the desert with nothing but a sword to act as protection. There, he had known no fear. Because the worst that had awaited him was death. Not so here in the palace. Here, there was torture.
He sat up, his breath burning like fire, sweat rolling down his face, his chest. He was disoriented, unsure of his positioning in the room. Certain, in that moment, that he wasn’t alone.
He was on the floor, a blanket tangled around his naked body. He stood, disengaging himself from the fabric, searching the dark space around him, his every sense on high alert. He felt as if he was dying. His brain lost in a cloud of fog that made it impossible to sort through what raged inside him, and what he had to fear outside.
He walked to his nightstand and took his sheathed sword from the surface. Something wasn’t right about any of this, but he couldn’t sort through what it might be. There was nothing in his mind but a tangle of demons, and he couldn’t see around them to figure out what his next action should be. So he defaulted to what he knew.
Violence. And the intent to draw blood before any could be shed by him.
He pulled the sword from the scabbard and held the blade high, walking toward the door, toward the threat.
* * *
A thunderous sound woke Olivia from her sleep. She sat upright, her hand pressed to her chest, her heart beating fast. Instinctively, because she was confused, disoriented, she looked to her left, checking to see if Marcus had heard the sound, too.
But of course he hadn’t. Because he wasn’t there.
He was dead. She knew that. Was unbearably conscious of it almost all the time. Forgetting now, in a palace in a faraway land, in the bedroom next to the man she was considering marrying in place of Marcus... It seemed cruel.
She heard the sound of metal scraping against stone and clutched the blanket more tightly. For the first time she questioned her safety. She had made a lot of assumptions about Tahar, about Tarek, based on the fact he was a royal. Based on the fact that this was a palace. Based on her position. She questioned all of it now. Now, when it was too late.
She got out of bed, grabbing hold of her robe, sliding the diaphanous fabric over her flimsy nightgown. She pushed her hair back from her face and walked quietly toward the door, the marble cold beneath her feet. That unbearable curiosity of hers was warring with her sense of self-preservation.
You are being overdramatic. You are in a palace. You’re a visiting political ally. Nothing is going to happen to you.
She was just firmly in that place of paranoid thinking she’d been knocked into after Marcus’s sudden death. Where everything was potentially fatal, and most certainly out to get her. She blew out a determined breath and took another step to the door, cracking it cautiously, peering out at the corridor.
Her breath froze completely in her lungs when she caught sight of the figure prowling in the darkness. A man, large, imposing. Naked. In his hand was a sword, a deadly, curved blade glinting in the moonlight that filtered through the high-set windows that lined the long hall.
She should be terrified. And she was, rivulets of fear sliding through her, freezing, increasing the icy terror that wound itself around her lungs. She was also fascinated.
He turned, long hair sweeping to the side with the movement, and she caught sight of his face. Tarek.
He didn’t look like anything that should be here in this time. He was like a relic of a bygone era. A Viking warrior or fierce desert marauder. His chest was broad, thick, the muscles of his arms massive. They would have to be to wield the sword the size of the one in his hand. He was a statue made flesh, the perfect specimen of a man lovingly crafted by an artist’s hands. Brought to deadly, feral life.
He turned away again, prowling down the same length of hall he had done the first time before coming back, moving toward her room. She froze, stopping her breath. She would have stopped her heart for a moment if she had the power. But just like before, he ended his march at the edge of the door to his chamber. A sentry, on guard, weapon in hand.
He didn’t know where he was, that much she was certain of. Though she couldn’t be entirely sure why she was certain. Perhaps simply because she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t normally stand watch without anything to cover his body.
A shaft of light fell across his bare back, highlighting the ridges of muscle along his spine and down lower. Now she couldn’t breathe even if she wanted to.
Her heart thundered a hard and even beat, the blood in her veins running hotter. Faster.
She had no explanation for it.
Except that it had been two years since she’d touched a man. But surely she wasn’t that basic.
So basic that she found herself captivated by a naked man holding a sword, a stranger, when she should be afraid and possibly calling for help.
But her mouth didn’t work anymore, her throat too dry for words to escape.
When he turned again, the light fell across his face. In that moment, it wasn’t his beauty she was captured by, but his torture. His pain. It was there, evident in the lines etched into his skin, in the deep hollowness of his eyes.
She could feel his pain. As though it had invaded her own chest, wrapping itself around her heart and squeezing tight.
That was when she closed the door. There was an ornate key jammed into the lock and she turned it, securing herself in the chamber. She wasn’t sure she was locking him out, or locking herself in. She wasn’t sure of much at the moment.
She grabbed the edges of the robe and held it more tightly around herself, climbing back into bed and covering her head. All she could hear now was the beating of her own heart, her own ragged breathing.
She had a feeling it would be a very long wait for sunrise.
CHAPTER THREE
TAREK FELT AS though he hadn’t slept. Odd, considering he now lived in a palace, when before he had lived in the hollowed-out shells of houses not inhabited by anyone other than him for the past two hundred years. One would think he would find better rest protected by guards, in a temperature-controlled environment. With a mattress. And yet, he found he didn’t.
He’d been awake for only an hour, and already he had been accosted by several members of staff while walking through the halls. So many decisions that had to be made before he had seen to his morning routine.
In the desert, he had started a fire early every morning, boiled water for coffee. Usually he ate bread or an instant hot-cereal packet he acquired from different traders that came and did business with him every few months.
He spent the morning getting into the rhythm of the day. Tasting the weather on his tongue, getting a sense for what the earth had in store for him. He worked hard, and when his brother had need of him, he did dangerous, bloody business. But he would also go many days in a row without ever speaking to another person. Without doing much beyond physical training and tending to his encampment.
When trouble was brewing, he would attach himself to the Bedouin camps, rallying with the men to see what could be done to protect their borders. Otherwise, he led a solitary existence.
The palace was never solitary. There were people moving about constantly. And it all seemed to revolve around him.
He didn’t like it. Not at all. He was the man who waited. Who said, “Here I am, send me.” He was the weapon. He was not the one who wielded it.
He was now in pursuit of coffee. The breakfasts they served here in the palace were too ornate for his liking. Cheese and fruit, cereals, meats. His brother had always lingered over meals. And Tarek had begun to believe that any indulgence his brother had was one that might cause corruption. Was one he ought to abstain from.
Food, in his estimation, was yet another tool designed to complete a specific task. It was simply fuel.
Coffee was a slightly more necessary fuel. A part of his routine he could not forgo.
He walked into the dining room and saw Olivia sitting at the head of the table, a bit of the type of food he had just been thinking of spread out over her plate. She looked up, smiling. She had a pleasing smile. Pink lips, even, white teeth. He liked the look of it.
He quite liked the look of her.
Much like lingering over food, he had never much lingered over women.
“Good morning,” she said. A dull blush rose in her cheeks. That, he felt, was also pleasing.
“Good morning.” He felt obliged to return the greeting, though he didn’t agree with her assessment.
“How did you sleep?” she asked.
“I would imagine not well. I’m still tired.”
She nodded slowly. “Oh. You don’t have any insight about why?”
A strange flash of memory broke over him. Terror. Pain. Restlessness.
He shoved it aside. These memories, memories long suppressed, had taken on new life when he’d returned. An even more violent life when he’d discovered his brother’s private journals.
Admission that Malik had ordered the death of their parents. A secret Tarek could never share with the country, for they had suffered so much already at the hands of Malik. His spending had left people poor, bereft, taxed beyond reason with the infrastructure of the city left to decay.
He could not do further damage.
In addition to the admission of his parents’ murder had been chronicles of how he’d tortured Tarek. To break him. To ensure that it was never discovered that Malik had ended the lives of the former sheikh and sheikha. To transform him into a malleable weapon to be used at Malik’s discretion.
If his brother was not already dead—of an overdose, naturally—Tarek would have, in fact, killed him upon discovery of those writings.
Because Malik had never broken him. He had hardened him.
His brother had transformed him; there was no doubt. But every drop of blood Malik had spilled from Tarek’s veins had soaked into the earth here. Had bound him, not to his brother, but to his nation. To his people.
He would not stray from that now.
“I do not like this place,” he said.
A servant bustled into the room. “Is there anything I can get you, Sheikh Tarek?”
“Coffee. And bread.”
The woman looked at him as though she feared for his sanity, but said nothing as she nodded and then left again. Only he and Olivia remained. He didn’t sit; rather, he began to pace the length of the room. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “You know I didn’t sleep,” he said, turning to face her. “Tell me.”
Her blue eyes widened, pale brows arching upward. “How do you know that?”
The edges of his mouth curved upward. He might have no experience of women, but he could read this one. “You become very still, very smooth when you are holding back an avalanche. There is much beneath the surface, I think. A very diplomatic woman, but occasionally you slip. You have a very sharp tongue. When you’re holding it in check this well I assume it’s because there is much to withhold.”
The color in her face deepened, and a sense of pleasure curled itself around his stomach. Unfamiliar.
Satisfaction, he supposed.
And why not? So often he felt out of his element in this place. It was immensely rewarding to have the sense that he had claimed a victory.
To go from being the master of his domain, a man who conquered the desert, who thrived in it, to a man who could scarcely sleep. A man who was caged... It was jarring indeed. There was nothing he despised more than a sense of helplessness. And that sense of helplessness had pervaded his being from the moment he had stepped back within the palace walls. That considered, he celebrated this small victory slightly more than was necessary.
“You sleepwalk,” she said, her words straightforward. Succinct. “Naked. With weapons.”
Something about that word on her lips sent a burst of heat through his veins. He wasn’t sure why. And yet again he was back in unfamiliar territory. Not just because of what she’d said, and how it made him feel, but because he was...doing things he didn’t remember.
Out of his own control.
That settled far beyond disturbing.
“I was not aware,” he said, keeping his tone flat.
“It would account for why you don’t feel rested in the morning,” she said. “Why don’t you sit?”
“I’m not in the frame of mind to sit. I have business to attend to.”
“It won’t hurt you to eat breakfast,” she said, a small smile playing at the edges of her mouth.
“What is so funny?”
“We already sound like a married couple.” She put her hands flat on the tabletop, looking down at them. “My husband never took time for breakfast. He would eat something terribly unhealthy while he drank a coffee on his way into the office.”
She looked sad, and he did not know what to do with that. “He sounds as though he was suited to this kind of life.”
“He loved his country. Though he was often in a hurry in the morning because he had stayed up too late at a party the night before. And he was rushing to catch up from the moment his feet hit the ground to the moment he lay back down. He was very young, with a lot of weight on his shoulders.”
“I am not so young, yet I find it quite the weight.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty. I believe.”
Little lines of concern wrinkled her brow. “You aren’t sure?”
“I lose track. It isn’t as though anyone has ever baked me a birthday cake.”
She frowned, the expression creating deep grooves by her mouth. She seemed, in his estimation, unduly distressed by his lack of baked goods. “No one?”
“Perhaps,” he said, battling against a memory that was pushing against his brain. “But I would have been much younger.”
It would have been when his parents were alive. And he never could remember back that far. Sometimes...sometimes he saw his father’s face... So serious. So earnest. And he was speaking. But the words were muddled. He could never hear them properly.