I adore all these flowers. What part of the palace is this?”
Amaya understood where she was going then. Perhaps it had been inevitable from the start, given how furious her mother had always been at her father. Given how hurt she still clearly was.
“The guest part,” she replied. Grudgingly.
Her mother smiled over her shoulder, but her gaze was hard. “Is that its formal name, then? How strange.”
She watched her mother trail her always elegant, always red-tipped, always diamond-studded fingers along the petals of the nearest bougainvillea vine.
“I think you know perfectly well that this is technically part of what was once considered the harem complex,” Amaya said quietly. “But Kavian does not keep a harem.”
Her mother glanced at her. “Not now, you mean.”
“He kept a harem before we met, if that’s what you’re trying to tell me so subtly.” Amaya was proud of how cool she sounded. How very nearly bored, as if the number seventeen were not flashing behind her eyes. “But then, he’s never claimed to be a monk.”
Her mother turned to face her, and Amaya was struck, as she always was, at how much she looked like the darker version of her mother’s precise blond beauty. Where Elizaveta was like an ice sculpture, carved to sharp perfection, Amaya was so much softer. Blurrier.
Misshapen, she’d always thought. And yet today she found she was glad they weren’t more similar.
“Did he give up his concubines for you?” Elizaveta asked, with that pointed smile that was her fiercest weapon. “That is enough to make the heart sing, I am sure.”
Amaya had not spoken to her mother much in the six months she was on the run. There had been enough speculation in the papers that Amaya assumed Elizaveta had guessed that her daughter had run away from an arranged marriage, but Amaya had never confirmed it. Now she was happy she’d played it that way. That she’d confided nothing. That Elizaveta knew nothing at all about Kavian, or Amaya’s relationship with him.
“Kavian is deeply romantic,” she told her mother, giving her all to that lie. “He might not show it to you or the world. But he is a hard man who has only one bit of softness, and that’s me.”
Her heart skipped a beat at that, as if it was true. More—as if she wanted it to be true.
But her mother’s cold eyes gleamed. “Is that what he told you?”
“I wouldn’t put much stock in it if he’d told me,” Amaya said, and even smiled. “I’ve learned one or two things from you, I hope. Actions speak louder than words, isn’t that what you always said?”
“And when you are big and fat and ugly with his child, as you will be often,” Elizaveta said, as if she was agreeing, “you must anticipate that he will see to his needs as he pleases, with as many other women as take his fancy. Men always do. That is their favorite course of action, Amaya. Always. Especially men like him, in places like this.”
Amaya rose to her feet and skimmed her hands down her skirts, angling her head high. She wasn’t eleven. She didn’t have to listen to this. She certainly didn’t have to believe it.
“I’m sorry if that was your experience, Mother,” she said quietly. “It won’t be mine.”
And she hadn’t understood until she said it out loud that she wanted that to be true. That more of her wanted to believe in Kavian than didn’t.
She had no idea what to do with that.
“Does he love you, then?” Elizaveta asked, her voice so light. So terrible. “Or has he merely claimed you?”
Whatever she saw on Amaya’s face then made her cluck in what sounded like sympathy. It washed over Amaya like something far more acidic, and wrenched at her heart besides.
“Darling.” Elizaveta shook her head, and Amaya felt everything inside turn to ice. “They’re not at all the same thing. And a woman must always know where she stands, or she will spend her life on her knees.”
KAVIAN KNEW THE MOMENT Amaya walked into their rooms as the afternoon edged toward evening that her mother had gotten to her. He could hear it in the heaviness in her step out in the foyer. The particular weight of her silence.
The pen he’d forgotten he was holding snapped in his hand and he muttered a curse, throwing the pieces into the wastebasket that sat beside his desk in his private office, the pen fragments making an oddly satisfying sound as they hit the metal sides.
He wished it was the poisonous Elizaveta instead.
“You are not truly planning to sneak past me, are you?” he gritted out, as if to the walls around him. As if to the ghosts that the locals claimed had plagued this place for centuries. “Do you imagine that is wise?”
A moment later, Amaya appeared in the doorway. She was still wearing the gown she’d had on in the throne room earlier, which displayed her femininity so beautifully and yet with such exquisite restraint that it made his throat hurt. That hair of hers that he was beginning to view as an addiction he might well succumb to completely was still caught up in all the braids and twists that he thought made her look something like ethereal. Something so much more than merely a bartered bride, his for the taking, though she was that, too. She was everything.
She was so lovely—so very much Amaya and his—it made his chest feel hollow. Scraped raw.
But it took her too long to raise her gaze to his and when she did, those chocolate eyes of hers were much too dark. Too troubled by far. He eyed her from across the span of the room, temper beginning to pound through him as if he were running flat out across the desert sands, straight on toward the enemy.
Amaya crossed her arms over her chest and he hated it. He hated the defensive gesture itself. He hated that she felt she had to make it. Even after he’d combed the whole of the earth for her. Even after everything he’d told her. Even though she knew the truth about him and it had not made her hate him.
Apparently only her mother could do that.
He wanted to throw back his head and howl, like some kind of wild thing, all claws and fangs.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Amaya’s voice was a scrape against the quiet and did very little to calm him.
“How am I looking at you?” he asked. Mildly. “As if I think you might be rationalizing a new way to betray me even as we stand here?” He studied her. “Are you?”
Something sparked in her dark eyes. “I can’t betray you, Kavian. By definition. First I would have to pledge myself to you in some meaningful way, of my own volition.”
“Careful, Amaya.” His voice was rougher, deeper. “Be very, very careful.”
The elegant column of her throat moved as she swallowed, but she didn’t look away.
“Did you sleep with all seventeen of the women you kept here in your harem?”
He muttered something harsh in Arabic that he was quite certain she understood, but she only tipped that sweet chin of hers higher and let that mouth of hers go mulish. “It’s a simple yes or no question.”
“Ten of my so-called concubines were under the age of fifteen,” he told her, and it was a remarkable experience for him. He had never explained himself to another living soul, as far as he could remember. He had never felt the slightest compulsion to do so. “They were gifts from each of the ten tribes who live in the great desert, as is tradition. I brought them here to educate them, to make them aristocratic women who could do as they pleased rather than chattel to be bartered and traded in the desert encampments. Most of them are currently studying abroad, or have made excellent marriages.” He tried not to grit his teeth. “And,