“Ah,” Khaled said, more to himself than Nasser, “but that only means she is one of their ‘every women.’ I learned at Harvard that Americans love nothing more than to tell themselves fairy stories in which little brown mice become great and powerful through their own inner strength, or some such nonsense. It is part of their cultural DNA.”
Inside the room, his own little brown mouse sat on one of the settees, bent over at the waist, elbows on her knees and her forehead cradled in her hands. He thought she was simply breathing deeply, not weeping. Not this one, with her talk of villains and axes and her foolish courage. He’d seen the hint of fear in her eyes when he’d ordered her back to the palace. He’d scared her, he knew, and if he regretted that—if he regretted the necessity of squelching that spark of defiant fire that had transformed her from a mouse into something far more interesting out in that alley, if he regretted the man he’d become that he could do these things so cavalierly—he ignored it.
There was no place for regret. There never was. There was only Jhurat.
“She has been traveling, as she said,” Nasser continued after a moment, diplomatically opting not to comment on either fairy stories or mice, which was only one of the reasons he’d been Khaled’s right hand and best friend since they’d been boys. “She flew to Scotland six months ago and has been wandering since, following what appears to be a largely whimsical itinerary south and east. One of those gap-year journeys, it seems, though she finished her university studies some years back. Perhaps she is ‘finding herself’?”
Khaled snorted at his aide’s dry tone. “And instead she found me. Poor little mouse.”
“There is no need for you to deal with this situation any further if you don’t wish it,” the other man said then. “We can handle a girl. Especially one who cannot possibly cause a single ripple, no matter what becomes of her.”
“And can you handle our enemies, too? Who even now work to have me removed from the palace because of my tainted blood?” What they whispered was that Khaled’s line was weak, that the son would inherit his father’s dementia before his time. And who was to say they were wrong? He shoved that aside. “I am certain they have already leaked the fact that I have a young female American in custody to the papers. It is inevitable.”
“The papers can be dealt with.”
“Our papers, perhaps.” But that was how his father had done things, and look what it had wrought: this mess Khaled had to clean up, though he often doubted he could. He doubted anyone could, but it was his duty—his fate—to try anyway, no matter what happened. “But what happens when they take it to the international stage? Which they are certain to do.” Because it was what he would do, and Khaled had the peculiar pleasure of knowing his enemies well. “How will we look to the world when I am painted as some kind of monster who abducts fresh-faced young American girls from the streets?”
He already knew what it would do to the contracts they needed to lock down to bring commerce to the country. To say nothing of the much-needed influx of international wealth, which, with the increase in tourism since he’d opened the borders again, might tip the scales in Khaled’s favor. In Jhurat’s favor, at long last.
He couldn’t afford any backsliding. Not now.
“The people do not want to revert to the Stone Age,” Nasser said darkly. “They want their movies and their technology right along with their paychecks from all the new jobs. No matter what that fool may tell himself.”
“That fool” was Talaat, the leader of the resistance movement that opposed Khaled’s claim to the sultanate with the assertion that Khaled’s blood was tainted with the same infirmity of mind that had taken his father down. Can we risk the country? Talaat liked to ask on the news and all over the papers, so reasonably.
Talaat was also Khaled’s cousin on his mother’s side. They’d played together as small boys. It made a kind of poetic sense that his own cousin should have become the greatest thorn in his side, Khaled thought, since he couldn’t remember a single instance in which his blood had done anything but make his life harder, including Amira’s stunt today.
“Talaat does not care what the people want,” Khaled said shortly. “He cares about power.”
Nasser didn’t respond, because this was an unfortunate truth that might not matter in the least should Talaat’s seditious behavior gain footholds in the proper places, and Khaled’s mouth twisted in a wry sort of smile. It wouldn’t do to become the next internet sensation at a time like this. It would take very little to tip public sentiment against him, and Americans, with their Kickstarter campaigns and their internet apps that could make civil unrest in far-off places into one more video game they could play from their couches, loved nothing more than to cry out against countries like Jhurat at the slightest provocation.
Or no provocation at all.
But that meant he had to think very carefully about what to do about the photogenic American girl who should never have crossed paths with Amira. What stories would she tell if he set her free? Who would listen to her when she told them? How would his enemies spin this story if they got their hands on her—and they would. He knew they would. They always did.
Inside the parlor, the girl shifted in her seat, then sat up, and Khaled studied her, bracing himself for what he knew he had to do. Had known since he’d pulled her out of that car, and if he was honest, was more interested in doing now that she’d shown him that surprising—if misguided—strength of hers.
She was a gift. And he would take all the gifts he could get.
As gifts went, he had to admit, she was an excellent one. She was delicate, with her large eyes and remarkably fine features, her hair a collection of reds, browns and caramels twisted inexpertly and pinned to the back of her head.
Pretty, something inside him noted, in a way that made him shift on his feet, then frown. Too pretty.
Elegant and unforgettable, in fact, with that face of hers and the coltish lines of her figure—yet she was dressed like a tomboy. Her clothes were deliberately mannish and casual in that Western style he’d never really understood during his studies abroad in England and the States, and which he most certainly did not appreciate in a woman.
Khaled was a traditional man. He had always preferred women who understood their own uniquely feminine appeal. Who boasted womanly hips and generous breasts to cushion a man in softness, instead of a boyish figure and too many bones besides. Women who offered him shy gazes to make him feel strong and musical voices to soothe him when he felt anything but. Demure and modest women, traditional women.
Not Western girls like this one in her androgynous clothes, flat-chested and skinny-thighed, who had stared back at him directly in the street, dared to scowl at him, and hadn’t had the sense to beg for his mercy.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found defiance anything but irritating.
And yet her eyes were extraordinary. More than extraordinary. They’d been filled with the setting sun out in that tiny little alleyway, and yet even when they weren’t they were a kind of bright, gleaming gold, like ancient treasure, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t get them out of his head.
Why it felt as if she haunted him, as if she had already worked her odd, scowling way into the heart of him when he should hardly have noticed her at all beyond her potential value to him. To his country.
Khaled told himself it was nothing more than strategy that made him walk inside that room then, whether he wanted to do it or not. Politics and power and the fate of his country besides.
Because it couldn’t be anything else. He knew better.
“I apologize,” he said, summoning up that charm of his that felt rusty from disuse, as though his smile was made from cut glass.
“And as it happens, I do require an apology,” she said drily. “I accept.”
But she stopped when her eyes met his, as if the sound of her