Shahrzad stared up at Khalid, warring with a resurgence of emotions. Her throat tightened, and the anger threatened to pour from her in a storm of words he did not deserve to hear.
Because he did not deserve to know her deepest thoughts. Her truest desires.
How much she cared for him. And how little it should matter.
May your secrets give you solace, Khalid Ibn al-Rashid.
For I won’t.
Shahrzad lifted her chin and turned to leave.
Khalid snared her elbow as she passed him.
“I knocked at your door last night,” he began.
Her heart shuddered to a stop. “I was tired.” She refused to look his way.
“And angry with me,” he said softly.
Shahrzad glared at him over her shoulder.
He studied her features. “No. Irate.”
“Let go of me.”
Khalid released her arm. “I understand why. I was remiss in not telling you about Yasmine. I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
“Remiss?” Shahrzad faced him with a caustic laugh. “Remiss?”
“I—”
“Do you know how foolish I looked? How foolish I felt?”
Khalid sighed. “She wanted to hurt you, and it troubles me to see how successful she was.”
“How successful she was? You miserable, unfeeling ass! You think I’m angry because of what she did? Because she danced for you? My God, Khalid, how can you be so intelligent and so inexcusably dense in the same instant?”
He flinched. “Shahrzad—”
“This has nothing to do with her. You hurt me, Khalid Ibn al-Rashid. The secrets—the locked doors I will never be given keys to—they wound me,” she shouted. “Time and again, you wound me and walk away!”
Her pain followed the same course as her laughter, striking against the cornices above and back to the marble at their feet.
Khalid listened to its echo and closed his eyes with a grimace. When he opened them again, he reached for Shahrzad.
She drew back.
I will not cry. Not for you.
Undeterred, Khalid grasped her wrists in each of his hands and lifted her palms to his face. “Strike out at me if you wish, Shazi. Do whatever you will. But don’t inflict the selfsame wound; don’t leave.”
He placed her hands on either side of his jaw, skimming his fingertips down her arms while awaiting her judgment.
Shahrzad stood frozen, a mask of ice and stone between her palms.
When she did nothing, Khalid brushed back the hair from her face with a touch that soothed and burned all at once.
“I’m sorry, joonam. For the secrets. For the locked doors. For everything. I promise to tell you one day. But not yet. Trust that some secrets are safer behind lock and key,” he said quietly.
Joonam. He’d called her that before. My everything.
As on the night she’d told the tale of Tala and Mehrdad, why did it have such a ring of truth to it?
“I—” She bit her lower lip in an effort to keep it still. To stop the fount of words longing to spring forth.
Longing to confess the yearnings of a capricious heart.
“Forgive me, a thousand times over, for wounding you.” He leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to her forehead.
I’m lost to him. I can’t ignore it any longer.
Shahrzad closed her eyes in defeat and slid her palms to his chest. Then she reached behind him in an embrace of sandalwood and sun. Khalid wrapped both his arms around Shahrzad, and they stood together under the dome of the Grand Portico, with the indecipherable art of love poems giving silent testament.
• • •
The hollow in his chest was nothing now.
He would gladly go back to that, if it meant never having to witness this sight again.
When Tariq first entered the vestibule leading into the Grand Portico, he thought he was in the wrong place. It was so quiet. There was no way Shahrzad could be here.
Then, when he rounded the corner, he saw the reason for the silence.
It stopped him like a dagger hurled through the air.
The boy-king was holding Shahrzad in his arms. Placing a gentle kiss on her brow.
And Shahrzad was leaning into his embrace.
Tariq watched as she shifted her slender fingers to the boy-king’s back and drew him closer, resting her cheek against his chest as a weary traveler to the bole of a tree.
The worst part of it all—the part that took the very breath from Tariq’s body—was the unguarded look of peace on her face.
As though this was right. As though she wanted nothing more.
Shahrzad was in love with Shiva’s murderer.
The guard behind him deliberately made noise. Apparently, he did not care to learn the consequences of eavesdropping on the Caliph of Khorasan.
From the distant shadows to Tariq’s right, Shahrzad’s mammoth bodyguard twisted into view, flashing a silver blade and a guise of punishing promise.
But the thing that truly gave Tariq pause was the reaction of the boy-king.
The supposed aging camel.
At the first hint of an unforeseen threat, he pulled Shahrzad behind him. He shielded her in a menacing stance augmented by the metallic rasp of his shamshir, which he held steady in his right hand, with the blade pointed to the floor—
Poised to attack.
The boy-king’s usually expressionless face was drawn and tight, with signs of barely leashed fury rippling along his jaw. His eyes blazed like molten rock, livid and single-minded in their purpose.
Shahrzad grabbed the boy-king’s shoulder.
“Khalid!” she cried. “What are you doing?”