“Shh...I meant it would be a torture to be near you and to not touch you, to not hold you.” He breathed into her hair. Tugging her toward him, he held her at her waist, loosely, striving for control over himself. “All I feel is joy when you are near, pure, freeing, like I have never felt before. How can you think you bring pain?”
“I will kill you myself if you leave me again, Ayaan.” Fighting words, but Ayaan heard the pain in them.
“Shh....” he said, and ran his palm over her back, up and down, more to soothe himself than her. She was so fragile in his grip, and yet inside where it mattered this woman he had had the good fortune to marry, this woman he had had the temerity to fall in love with, had a core of steel and a heart as big as the desert.
And he would spend the rest of his life loving her as she deserved to be loved.
He touched his forehead to hers, his heart lodged in his throat. “You brought light into my life. If not for you...” He shook as the grief he’d held at bay since the minute he had laid eyes on his brother burst through him. Tears he couldn’t stem, tears that needed to be shed, wet his cheeks.
Her slender arms tightened around him, her body a cocoon of warmth. And everything she gave him was a precious gift. “Ayaan?”
“I have seen what it means to be truly broken, Zohra.”
Her heart crawling into her throat, Zohra clasped Ayaan’s chin and tugged it up. Fear beat a tattoo beneath her skin. Even in the most painful moments, even when he had been drowning in his nightmares, she had never heard such stark desolation in his words. “Whatever it is, Ayaan, we will beat it together.”
“You have already saved me, ya habibati. I was just too stubborn, too blind to see it. But he...there is nothing inside him, Zohra.”
A ghost of a shiver passed over her at his words. “Your brother?”
“If eyes were windows to the soul, then there is no soul left in him.” He tugged her hard against him, his arms steel vises that could snap her in two. Rising on tiptoes, Zohra held on, letting him take what he wanted from her.
“I was so afraid, Ayaan. Khaleef said he was in bad shape. And my heart sank. I thought seeing him like that would mean—”
“That guilt would claw through me once again? It does. It hurts so much to see him like this. But the worst is knowing that for God knows how long he has been aware of his identity and he has been in hiding. If I hadn’t followed up on that hunch, we would have never known he was alive. He doesn’t want to be here. And even in the state he is in, it took both Khaleef and me to force him to come with us. And my mother, Ya Allah—”
“How is she?”
Ayaan smiled and kissed her again, intense sadness still clouding his eyes. “He refuses to see her or my father, said he will put a bullet through his head if I bring her to him.”
Shock waving through her, Zohra frowned. “You think he would?”
“Whether he is bluffing or not, he knows I won’t risk calling him on it. He said he wants to be free of this family, he wants nothing to do with any of us. If I became mad, he...he has devolved into pure emptiness. Maybe my madness protected me from the worst.”
Anger fired those words and Zohra stared at Ayaan. His family, his duty, his country—they had always come first with him.
“For the first time in my life, I wish I could walk away from all this, steal you away, give you a life free of my demons, a life free of duty... All I want is to prove my love to you but all I see is more pain, more sorrow ahead. If you leave me...if you walk away, that is what I will become, too. And I don’t want to, Zohra.
“I want to live with you, I want to laugh with you, I want to snatch any happiness I find with you. If you don’t leave tonight, there is no turning back, ya habibati. I will never ever let you go again, not even if you beg me.”
He clasped her cheeks, his long fingers greedy in the way they moved over her. His gaze shone with everything Zohra wanted to see in it when he looked at her—his pain, his honor and his love. It was all she ever wanted. “I am in love with you, Zohra. You were right. I let guilt pollute everything I felt for you, everything I found with you. But no more, ya habibati. You and I and our happiness together, I will allow nothing to mar it. Will you still have me, Zohra, knowing what lies ahead for us?”
Zohra kissed him, melting into his embrace, joy flooding every inch of her. His hunger matched hers, as his mouth moved over her lips as if he would never get enough. “There was no turning back for me from the moment you kissed me, the moment you came to my defense, the moment you said my honor was your honor. I will always love you, Ayaan.”