“Lauren? Are you sick?”
“No. I’m fine. The baby’s fine.” He heard her hesitate, the rustle of clothes, and then she cleared her throat. “I was sleeping.”
“But you never miss your yoga class. Did something upset you?”
He felt her amazement, and his own, stretch tautly in the silence, an incandescent flicker in the darkness that he could sense was coming at him. Among all the million things that ran through his brain on a given day, he’d remembered that and hadn’t even known it.
“Lauren?” he prompted again, and this time, he knew what it was that pulsed through him.
Desperation. Panic. As though he was sinking in the middle of the vast, stark Behraati desert, swallowed up by its great jaws like every other ruler had before him. As though after all his struggle, after everything he’d learned from Rashid and everything he’d been forced to learn since being thrust into power, he was somehow still empty-handed.
“It’s early morning here, Zafir.” Clear, cutting, she was in control of herself again. “In New York.”
His breath punched out of him and his hand fisted by his side. A great, big roar began in his chest, crashing everything inside him into pieces, thundering its way out. But he swallowed it away. Like he had always done any emotion, any impulse, anything that would be detrimental to his dream, his rule of Behraat.
“And why, exactly, are you in New York?” He sounded edgy, rough and he didn’t care.
“I left. You and your beloved Behraat.”
He exhaled, his breath stuck in his throat like cut glass, every inch of him shaking, as if he stood cold and naked. As if every ounce of warmth had leeched out of his world, never to return.
“Why?” he still asked. As if it could be some small, mundane reason that had prompted her to flee when his back was turned. As if he had been finally rendered into this weak, pathetic shell of a man who hoped for impossible things.
Everything inside of him clenched tight, waiting for her answer.
“You don’t know, Zafir?”
Now, she sounded like the Lauren he knew. Like the Lauren that had brought such joy and light into his life, the Lauren that had made him think of himself for the first time.
Like the Lauren that somehow kept wrenching parts of him away.
“God, you looked into my eyes, you held me in your arms and you told me this was for our child. While all along...it was to cement your rule of Behraat.” She sounded so angry and yet her voice shuddered. “You...lied about everything.”
“No. What I did was try to do right by everyone. Just like you said. When the opportunity came, I grabbed it with both hands. It was unbearable for me to know my child would not know his or her place, just like me. Untenable for me to walk away from Behraat. Unbearable for me to...
“And then you...you made it all possible. For once in my life, I had a chance to have everything I had ever wanted. And I took it.”
“You’ll always put Behraat first.”
Pushing a hand through his hair, Zafir tried to breathe through the knot in his throat. And for the first time in his cursed life, he asked something for himself.
“Don’t ask me to be someone else, Lauren. Don’t walk away when we have something so good. Do not call it love and then wreck what we have with its weakness and its exalted expectations of sacrifices and grand gestures.
“Don’t ruin it all because it doesn’t fit your vague notion of what love should be.”
* * *
Lauren felt the dark anger in his words like a whip against her skin. “I threw myself into this marriage with everything I had and more. I...” Tears threatened to steal away her words, her very will. “I even told myself that your feelings for me didn’t matter. Not when you...”
“Then come back.”
“But I’ll always wonder what could take you away from me. When Behraat will make you choose over me and our child.
“What new political alliance and promise of power would be the thing that makes you decide it’s worth more than us? It’ll kill me, Zafir.”
“Then you do not know me at all, much less love me. And the kind of reassurance you ask for, it’s not in me to give.” He sounded like the crack of thunder, angry and cruel and final, and it seemed to suck away the breath from her very lungs. “Your vow, your grand declaration...they are nothing but empty words, lines from a fantasy you have of what love should be.
“And I...” it trembled then, his voice and Lauren shivered, “I am the fool that I believed you, that I tortured myself every minute that I didn’t deserve this thing between us...and you, that I hoped at all,” he said in such a tired, empty voice that Lauren could imagine that dullness that would dim his golden gaze, the weight that would pull at his sensuous mouth, the tightness that would descend on those broad shoulders.