CHAPTER EIGHT
REFUSING THE INVITATION to stay another night, Azeez turned just as one of his contacts stepped into the perimeter of the encampment and nodded at him.
He had visited two different camps in the last twenty-four hours across a hundred miles, trying to locate him. Glad that Nikhat wouldn’t be lonely and wondering about him, because she would had her sisters not been there, he took his leave from the chief of the Mijab.
The older man clasped both his hands, his gaze dancing with a million questions.
“You’ll always have a place with us,” he said in an older dialect of Arabic that the bedouins had used and that his father had insisted he learn. The chief had recognized Azeez within a week of finding him in the desert, and he would always be grateful to the older man for keeping his secret.
Azeez shook his head, knowing that now he couldn’t bear to live in the desert anymore. He thanked the chief for his hospitality for the past day and joined his contact.
His heart thumped loudly in his chest as he walked a mile off the beaten path where another man, a native of Zuran was waiting for him. Fierce satisfaction fueled him. The network of contacts he had built over the years was still intact, and something almost like a thrill chased his blood.
But this time it wasn’t just the fiercely alive feeling that had kept him going for six years. This time it was coupled with the fact that he could go back to Ayaan and give him some much-needed information.
Signaling his contact to stay behind, Azeez slowly made his way to the small group gathered outside a tent. One man stood up from the group and walked inside as soon as he spied him. Checking that the pistol he had strapped to his left leg was still intact, Azeez stepped inside the tent.
Shock waves pulsed through him as the man turned around, and the feeble light from the two hanging lanterns illuminated his features in a garish yellow glow.
His own features wreathed in mirroring shock, Zayed Al Salaam, his oldest friend, stared back at him. “Inshallah, it is you.”
Dressed in combat uniform, his face half covered in sand and mud, his dark golden eyes gleaming in the half light, Zayed covered the distance between them in two steps and embraced Azeez hard. “Of all the things to crawl out from under the desert sand…Azeez Al Sharif…” Zayed said, his voice harsh and yet unable to hide the tremor within. A spark of anger colored his gaze as Zayed studied Azeez with undisguised intensity. “I would have given anything to have the aid of an old friend these past years, Azeez.”
Azeez closed his eyes as a cold sweat seized his insides. His breath fisted in his throat, cutting off his words.
Would there be no end to the faces that greeted him from the past? Would he never be rid of the unrelenting guilt?
He had done everything he could to bring Zayed and his sister, Amira, together, and done it so covertly that even his parents and Ayaan hadn’t known. He had made it look like a treaty agreement to Zayed’s uncle, Sheikh Asad, who had used Zuran and its people as pawns in his pursuit of power. Azeez had convinced his parents that marrying Zayed, the army commander of Zuran, was better for Amira than marrying Sheikh Asad’s spoiled, degenerate son.
Just because Amira had begged him to help, just because, flouting every convention, his rebellious sister had fallen in love with Zayed. And Zayed with her.
And yet, he had killed her two months before her wedding to Zayed.
Had he, in a way, killed Zayed too?
“There was nothing I could do for anyone, Zayed. I was—”
Zayed shook his head. “I do not believe that. I do not believe that Azeez Al Sharif could become so heartless that he didn’t even have a word for his oldest friend who had lost the woman he loved, that he had to hide himself from the world.
“I heard rumors about a man who collected information for Dahaar,” Zayed spoke again, more than a hint of distrust creeping into his words now, “about a man who appeared with the Mijab suddenly six years ago…but then I thought why would a man born to rule his country hide like a coward in the shadows? Why would he forsake his parents, his friends and everyone else who needed him?”
“Zayed, you have no idea—”
“I do not, Azeez. But that is the way you wanted it, isn’t it?”
The hardness in Zayed’s eyes, the savagery in the tightness of his mouth, the undiluted arrogance in his words pierced through Azeez. And suddenly, he realized how much Zayed must have suffered losing Amira in such a way; Zayed, who had been captivated by her boldness and laughter; Zayed, who had never known any love or kindness.
Hardening his heart, Azeez infused steel into his voice. He was not here to reminisce with an old friend. “This from a man who pretends ignorance while his uncle wreaks havoc on the nation that he’s pledged to protect, the man who should have been the rightful ruler of Zuran?”