And he felt heartened by it.
Even with his heart cold in his chest, he still had so much in the world to live for. He placed a kiss to the top of his mother’s head, the scent of her calming him.
Wiping her hands over her cheeks, his mother smiled at him. “I have my sons back.” She turned toward his father, the regal dignity that had always been her strength inching back into her shoulders. “More than I ever hoped for.”
Turning toward his father, Azeez clasped his hands, saw the toll the past few years had taken on him. It was time for him to shoulder that burden, time for his father to rest. No matter that he was burying his own heart in the process.
When Azeez tried to speak, his father shook his head. “Let us leave the past where it is, Azeez. You’re here now and prepared to aid your brother in serving Dahaar. That’s all I’ve ever asked of you and Ayaan.”
Azeez knelt in front of his king, the man who had taught him everything he knew, the man whom he had always looked up to. And felt the rightness of what he was about to say, knew that the woman he loved, would always love, would be proud of the man he had finally become again.
“If you and Mother will allow me, and if it’s acceptable to Ayaan, I will spend the rest of my life doing what I was born to do, what you have prepared me for all my life, Father. I am ready to be king, ready to be Dahaar’s servant for the rest of my life.”
The shocked gasp from his mother, the unconventional and totally characteristic shout of joy from Princess Zohra, the sheen of tears in his father’s eyes, the glint of shining pride in Ayaan’s eyes as he reached Azeez and enfolded him in a tight hug, it flew through Azeez, lending him the strength he needed.
His father’s simple yes reverberated in the room, and through the congratulations that followed the rest of the day, through the very joy and celebrations that began to pervade the palace, through his brother’s concerned questions about Nikhat and him, Azeez kept a smile on his face and swallowed his own heartache.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NIKHAT WASHED HER hands at the sink in the attached bathroom of her clinic and grabbed a hand towel. Even though the building for her new clinic was air-conditioned and she had been back in Dahaar for a few weeks now, she wasn’t used to the blistering heat of the day yet.
Making sure her hair stayed in her braid, she shied away from the mirror quickly, refusing to give in to the chasm of self-pity that was just waiting to drag her down.
She walked back into her consulting rooms. After almost a month, it still caught her breath every time she looked around and realized she was living her dream.
The new clinic was more than anything she had hoped for, in scope and breadth, thanks to the Princes of Dahaar.
It had been a month since she had left the palace…or rather she had been, with the utmost respect, kicked out. She had not let herself sit down for a minute, would not let herself stop even for a second.
When night came, she fell into exhausted sleep after being on her feet nonstop for twelve to thirteen hours. There were interviews she was conducting to find more qualified personnel—nurses, even midwives, not necessarily with the highest credentials, but the ones that most of the population in Dahaara trusted.
There was inventory to be organized and sorted every day, medical supplies to be distributed. Not that any resource that she needed had been left out.
From an administrator for the clinic to oversee bureaucratic roadblocks she came across everywhere she turned, to a finance manager who had access and control over the fund that the royal family had set up for the clinic, from a twenty-year-old woman who was pursuing her degree in health care and was putting together educational material, pamphlets, even booklets to spread word about the clinic, to an elderly woman who brought lunches and coffee for the staff…every little detail had been sorted out.
All Nikhat needed was to finalize the candidates—which was proving the hardest, because qualified female doctors, ones that families would feel comfortable about sending the women of their families to, were hard to find.
She got a thrill every time she saw her name plaque outside the building. So what if, at the same time, she felt as if there was a hole in her chest? So what if she caught a spasm of such intense longing in the middle of the day that she thought she would never smile again?
The one thing she did wish she could do was tune out the world around her. It was hard enough, every second of every day, to push back the realization that he was just a few miles away in the palace and yet he had never been farther from her.
It was a month in which every day she felt her heart breaking again, in which Dahaar and its people had exploded with the news that Prince Azeez bin Rashid Al Sharif was alive and back in Dahaara.