Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8. Chantelle Shaw

would she spend the rest of her days wandering from lover to lover, playing out the same sort of vicious games and making everyone who came near her as unhappy and bitter as she was?

      There were fates worse than death, Amaya thought then, her head thick and dizzy with this knowledge she didn’t want. And that was one of them.

      “Are you all right?” Rihad asked, the beginnings of a frown between his brows. “Amaya?”

      She would never know how she managed to smile at her brother then, when inside her, everything was a great storm. There were no foundations left. She loved Kavian and she couldn’t have him and all was ash. Ash and grief and a terrible darkness that scarred her even as it burrowed deep. Because he’d showed her who he was. How he was made. He’d showed her how much he could bend already—and it was so little. Too little.

      What would happen when he no longer bothered to try?

      “Don’t be silly,” she said to her brother, the king of Bakri like their father before him. The ruler who had traded her to this man she’d never escape, not really, not intact. She was already in pieces. She understood she would never really be anything else.

      When she betrayed Rihad, Rihad and Kavian and two kingdoms between them, she imagined she would shatter even more. Turn to dust out there somewhere on that same lonely circuit, making history repeat itself in her mother’s bitter wake.

      And that was still better than staying with Kavian and loving him until it killed something in her. Better to love a brick wall, she thought miserably. It was far more likely to love her back.

      But here, now, she widened her smile and tried to look as if she meant it. She thought from Rihad’s expression that she almost pulled it off. Almost. “I’ve never been better in my life.”