“I am scared, Ayaan,” she said, breathing the words into his neck.
He frowned at the shiver that spewed into her words. It spoke of a Zohra he had never seen or heard. “You afraid, Zohra? Of what?”
“Of truth, of seeing him, of learning of things that I never let my father say. But I have to ask him this time.”
He held her as she steadied herself, as she found her own strength again. “Remember what you said about truth, Princess? That even in its bitterest form, it is better than the sweetest lies. You have evaded it for thirteen years now, have let the very idea of it have power over you. He could have let you go to your uncle, he could have let you go through your entire life thinking he was dead, he could have easily shrugged off your responsibility, he could have placed so many restrictions on how you led your life. But he didn’t. It is time to face the truth, Zohra, time to see if it can really break you as much as you fear.”
“It didn’t break you, Ayaan. Being in this place, living through it, you are still standing.”
The very contentment he had felt a moment ago slid off him.
Still standing, that was what he was, that was what every small step he took amounted to in the end. Not that he gained control over his fears, not that he had made a small amount of progress, no.
His victory would always be that he hadn’t fallen back into the madness.
Even after he had realized the truth of what had happened to him, he hadn’t resented his life, he had accepted his reality without complaints, shrugged on the mantle of duty to the best of his ability.
But the moment he was near her, this crippling need flared inside him—to be more than what he was for her, this emaciating, perverse anger over circumstances he could not change, it gnawed at him.
Wasn’t that why he had risked this journey to the desert, risked his lucidity and everything it meant to his parents and Dahaar? Because he wanted to be a better man for her? Wasn’t he compromising the one thing he still had, his sense of duty, his honor, in her name?
Zohra burrowed into Ayaan’s embrace, even as she felt his cold retreat. Two days—she had held herself back, checked every impulse to go to him before she lost the little headway she had made with him.
The need to bear his pain for him, to help him through it, festered inside her. She couldn’t. Instead, she had wanted to dilute it, loosen its hold on him. And she was glad she had tried, she was ecstatic that he had let her, that she had held power over him in that moment, in making the powerful, honorable man that he was sway with need for her.
But that pleasure, she realized now, would always come at the price of losing whatever small connection she found with him.
Because until he realized everything he already was, Ayaan would loathe any pleasure he let himself feel, reject any happiness he found with her.
It was what she found with him, too. Even in his grief, his nightmares, being with him was what made Zohra the most alive. As if she had woken up from under a heavy blanket of resentment, of misplaced anger, of fear.
Even in the short time she had known him, seeing his struggle to rise above what he was, his honor in always doing the right thing, Zohra was finally awake. In a way she had never been until now.
She turned around in the cocoon of his arms, clasped his jaw, took a greedy kiss from him. As if she could bind him to her will by touching him. Because whatever she had from him, it was never enough. And today, she wanted another piece of him, she wanted something he had never given anyone else, she wanted his pain, his suffering. “Will you tell me what happened here?”
She thought he would refuse, shut her out, walk away. His tight grip on her fingers was the only sign that he had even heard her. “I have never spoken of it, to anyone.” A smile curved his mouth, bitterness etched into every strong line of his face. “Is this the final test, Zohra? Because if I speak of it, it will forever change how you see me. You will see what I see when I look in the mirror.”
“You can’t imagine what I see when I see you. Please, Ayaan.”
“It was going to be the last time our entire family attended the conference because Amira was to be married in a couple of months. Our parents had already left with most of the guard thinking we were accompanying them. But Amira and I learned that Azeez was staying back and decided to confront him.”
“Confront him?”
His breath fanned over her nape, his hold on her tighter. “The three of us, we had always been close. But something had been eating at him for almost a year. He became a different person, not the brother we knew. It hadn’t escaped our parents’ notice either. His coronation was only months away, and he had been avoiding both Amira and me. So we thought it was the best chance.