LUCA_Her Ruthless Don

by Theodora Taylor

  He walks toward me with his arms spread, only to stop when Zahir says, “Luca…” his tone clipped in warning.

  “Sorry, bro,” Luca says, backing down. “You know me. Gotta test those boundaries and see what I can get away with.”

  Zahir and I exchange a look, possibly thinking the same thing. I am your boundary. I am your control.

  I switch my gaze to the stranger, not wanting to think about sex with so many people in the room. “Hey, I’m Prin,” I say, placing my hand over my heart and bowing my head, so as not to touch.

  The ease at which I fall into the Jahwar style of greeting a man who is not related to me shocks me a little. I guess I still haven’t adjusted to being back in the States.

  “Hey, Johnny. Friend of Luca’s. Nice to meet you,” he says with a thick Jersey accent. “You’re right on time. We just rolled out the plans I pulled from the city for your house.”

  “You—wait, what? You pulled the plans for my house?” I ask, surprised. “On a Sunday?”

  Johnny glances at Luca who just smirks and says, “I’ve got friends in a lot of places.”

  “Come, Prin. Stand over here next to me,” Zahir says, indicating a spot on his left.

  Confused but curious, I move over to where Zahir gestured and, no joke, I find the original plans for the mansion in Alpine weighted down by a phone with a heavy-duty otter box around it and a metal measuring tape dispenser.

  “So, Mr. Zaman here was telling us your place needs some extensive remodeling and repairs, including plumbing and landscaping,” Johnny says to me.

  “Yes, it does,” I answer, blinking down at the blueprints. “But I can’t afford to do much right now.”

  Luca snorts. “You really think ZZ Sheikh here is going to let you pay for any of this?” he asks me, like I should have known better than to even bring it up.

  “I’m not a charity case,” I answer, my pride flaring.

  “No, you are not a charity case, you are my wife,” Zahir answers, his much larger hand enveloping mine. “And Sasha was right. You didn’t ask for a big enough dowry, habibti.”

  His wife. It’s funny how often he has referred to me that way since our return to America. And his hand around mine turns my heart into warm goo in my chest. I’m unable to keep protesting, even though this wife status he keeps on referring to is a temporary thing at best.

  “I’m thinking we can go through the blueprints room by room and then tomorrow, we’ll do a walk through,” Johnny says, taking my silence as his cue to continue. “Mr. Zaman was saying you got a sister who will probably want to join us…”

  “Yes,” Zahir answers, before I can. “Sasha needs to rest tonight, but from tomorrow on, please be sure to include her in all of our decisions…”

  So Zahir says, and so it goes.

  Early the next morning we tour the house with Johnny and two men he introduces as “Giorgio, my landscape guy” and “Danny, the only guy I trust when it comes to the pool and fountain shit.”

  Other than Zahir issuing Johnny a stern edict not to curse in front of the women, the walk-through is amazing. Zahir is right about getting Sasha involved. After finding out money is no longer a problem, she reveals her list of dream repairs and renovations—including an at-home recording studio and an updated home gym.

  Even Kasha, who had to be dragged here by her tough but secretly co-dependent twin, gets involved. “I’m sick of all this white on top of white shi—I mean crap,” she complains to Zahir. “Can you hook us up with an interior designer?”

  “Of course,” Zahir says, before I can step in with my usual, “we’ll see.”

  And just like he’s been doing all day, he ignores my “Seriously, Zahir?” look.

  He might make me fight, heel, and beg for every privilege he extends, but with the girls he is indulgent AF. And I am beginning to see why little Aisha was so surprised when her amo became angry with her. I sense that Holt and Sylvie’s wedding isn’t a one-off and with most people, Zahir can be quite generous—yet another aspect of his personality I wouldn’t have guessed at when we first met…or during my training.

  “Is this the room you said you didn’t want touched?” Johnny asks when we get to the third door past the crumbling entrance stairs on the right.

  “Yes,” Sasha and Kasha answer in twin stereo after years of being told not to go in there.

  They quickly push past that room to Dad’s old master suite, which they want to turn into an office…or maybe, oooh…a music library!

  Zahir listens and answers attentively, but I notice him eyeing the skipped door as we walk to my dad’s old room.

  I could let him stay curious. Keep this from him as he has chosen to keep so many things from me. But in the end, I guess I am starting to feel it, too…

  That he’s my husband, truly my husband and not just a piece of paper I signed to stay out of jail.

  When the tour is done I ask the guards to take Sasha and Kasha to school, then I take Zahir by the hand. “Can you come upstairs with me? I want to show you what’s inside that locked room.”

  Chapter 48

  Funny, it has been so long since I’ve stepped foot into this room, that I often think of the door as locked.

  But the door isn’t locked. It never was. And that morning, the knob, so long untouched, turns easily in my hand.

  I lead Zahir into the room. It’s been closed up for so long that there’s a layer of dust over everything, including the four-poster white silk canopy bed. But it still smells faintly of her long-discontinued DKNY fragrance, and it’s still easy to see all the writing on the wall.

  Lyrics, written in sharpie. Some neat, some scrawled across in a manic rush. Some of the words are pretty, lines about sunshine in alleys and knowing you’re going to be somebody no matter what anybody else be saying. But some of the words, most of the words, are dark. You think you coming for me? Watch me put a fuckin’ end to you. Set you on fire. Leave the body for the EMTs.

  Besides me, Zahir stills. I can tell he is trying to reconcile what he’s seeing here with that room in his palace that he also keeps closed but not locked.

  “What is this place?” he asks, his voice hushed as if we have walked into a sacred space or…a graveyard.

  “My mother’s bedroom,” I answer, taking a good, long look at the room for first time in over a decade. “She shared the master suite with my dad, but she…um…also needed her own space when…but there’s a connecting door…” I point it out before nodding over to a dust-covered kid’s desk in a far corner. “Once I got old enough to write, she let me hang out with her in here.”

  My eyes grow distant with the memories of how official big girl I felt at that desk, writing on paper while she did the same on the wall between pulls on her joint. “I wasn’t supposed to come in when she had guests, and usually I didn’t, but that night with Darius Ross…”

  Fear pits my stomach as I recall, “I was in my room. And I heard her screaming, begging him to stop, and then she started calling for my dad…” A flash of pain ignites in my chest at the memory her normally strong voice calling out, “Charlie…! Charlie…!” His real name. Not Majesty, the one he made up. Only to suddenly cut off.

  “I knew I wasn’t supposed to go in there, but I got scared that my dad couldn’t hear her from downstairs because the music was so loud. So, I opened the door. And he had her against a wall. He was choking her, telling her she liked it. But she didn’t like it. They weren’t even having sex. He was hurting her to hurt her. And she already had this cut across her cheek from where he’d hit her with his rings on. I yelled at him to get off her. Then I jumped on his back. He threw me, and I think I must have passed out for a bit, but when I came to, my dad was slapping me, telling me to wake up. He normally didn’t get emotional, but the next Monday, he cancelled Darius’s contract and he ended up at another label. Dad called me his little soldier for, like, weeks after, all the way up until—”

  It’s one
of those moments when you think you’re ready to jump off a cliff but end up stopping right at the edge. I cut off with a choke, suddenly unable to continue.

  Zahir doesn’t say anything, just takes my hand in his. Refusing to interrupt before I’ve finished telling my tale, even when the silence stretches on and on.

  Finally, I turn back to the wall and say, “I know you don’t listen to rap, but a lot of these lyrics became lines in a few of the songs my dad produced. She was a pretty good singer, but writing was her real talent. She just had trouble channeling it and staying focused.”

  I eye the wall, understanding so much more now than I did then. “She was a lot of fun…I mean, most of the time. Very…I guess you could say giving and free. Not a slut like Darius labeled her. She just did not have the ability to be monogamous, and she wasn’t reserved at all. She once told me her mom had a ‘church addiction—I think she was raised with a lot of restrictions. But Mom never talked much about her past in Minneapolis—she just said she grew up there and never got to meet Prince.”

  I chuff at the memory of her derailing the inevitable Prince question before anyone could ask it once they knew where she hailed from. “She lived moment to moment and had a lot of fun. But you know, like a lot of artists she had to deal with periods of darkness. And that’s when things would become fucked up. She didn’t mind sleeping with my dad’s new artists—for her it was fun. But when she was in a dark period, Dad gave her drugs to help her feel up to it. And Darius…well, he was her perfect storm.”

  Darius had been right. That night was a long time ago. But right now, I slip back to it as easily as if it were yesterday. Watching the situation unfold from my desk, there but forgotten again as my parents argue about letting Dad send his latest signed artist up to her room.

  “Mom didn’t like him…he gave her a bad feeling…” I told Zahir.

  My eyes go to a messy sentence near the bottom of the wall. Sour throw up in my stomach. That was the last thing she wrote there and though my dad pretended not to notice the final line, I understood with utter clarity what it was all about.

  “But my dad just gave her something and told her it would be fine. It wasn’t fine. Darius hurt her. No broken bones but…it took her weeks to recover. She never came out of that dark period and a month later, I walked in and found her dead on the floor with the marker in her hand. I don’t think she was trying to kill herself. She was too good of a writer to have done something like that without leaving a long note. I think she just wanted the pain to stop and she overdosed. Either way, that’s why I hate Darius Ross’s fucking guts. And that’s the story I couldn’t tell you when you asked me about it back in Jahwar.”

  Zahir is silent and then, “Are you sure you do not want me to end him, habibti? My guards took him home yesterday. It would be an easy thing to find him and finish what I started yesterday.”

  Unexpected laughter bubbles in my chest at his question. I turn to him, cupping his face, and running a thumb over his dark beard. “No, Z, this isn’t about revenge. Or hate. I know how lonely growing up with…” I drop my hand from his face to indicate the wall, “…all of this can feel. And that’s why I wanted to show you this room. To let you know you weren’t alone. Your mom had her wall…and so did mine.”

  Zahir nods and appears to understand my reasoning, but then gives a fierce shake of his head as if he can’t force himself to accept it. “I wish you would let me kill this man,” he admits quietly. “If only because he is something I can easily put an end to. There is no way to avenge my own mother’s death, and in many ways that makes me that much keener to avenge the death of yours.”

  I think I get what he’s trying to say. But I decide to take a cue from his book. Not interrupting and waiting for the real finish before I offer him any words.

  I’m rewarded for my restraint when he continues. “My mother was the only daughter of a very powerful business man both in Jahwar and also in his home country of India. The marriage was arranged, but my father once told me that when he saw her, he knew she would be his, even if she did not share his Arab blood. She, much like your own mother, could be charming and fun. But her dark periods…”

  He pauses, and I can see from the look in his eyes that he, like me, would be haunted forever by what he saw. “By the time I was three, it had become obvious that she would only get worse, not better. My father did what any ruler in his position would do. He locked her away, far from the public eye, and took a second wife. Asir’s mother, a perfect princess from the royal Ardu Alzuhuwr family with no Indian blood. But he visited my mother every day when he was not away on business, and when she wasn’t too far gone into one of her ‘spells,’ he often took me along. My mother made a very big deal, as you would say, of my visits and she became very clever within her restraints. We flew kites with fans, and when I was a very little boy, she would turn her room into an obstacle course for my bike. Sometimes we would surf together, even though we only had a couch to use as our ocean—I still have very good balance to this day. And of course, we often listened to her records.”

  With a bittersweet pang, I return to the memory of what I saw in his mother’s room. The kites…the planks…the surfboard…the little bike—they’d all been bought for her son’s enjoyment.

  And as if echoing my thoughts, Zahir says, “She suffered greatly from her mental illness but I loved her very much. And while I was living abroad, I came up with a plan. I knew my father could never abide the public embarrassment of having his first wife committed to an institution. But when he died, and his throne became mine, I vowed to free her from that room and seek professional help for her. I would do whatever it took to bring her back into the light, and that was how I managed the guilt of living my life while she withered away in that prison.”

  Zahir’s breath hitches. “But as it turns out, she also had a plan for when my father died. And it did not involve staying alive much longer than he. Some of the writing you saw on her wall was the last story she wrote. About the wife of a Hindu king who loved her husband deeply and chose to throw herself on his funeral pyre rather than live without him. Although her Indian family has been Muslim for many generations, my mother poured herself into this particular story. And when she finished it, she opened a window and jumped out.”

  Now his story is done. I take his hand and let out a long breath before saying, “So…your mom was a writer, too?”

  A reluctant smile flits across his lips. “Some poetry, but mostly short stories, only a few of which made any sense.”

  I chuff again, my small laugh soft and ironic. “We have soooo much in common.”

  Zahir laughs, too, and we look for a while longer at my mom’s wall.

  “Those two days when I left you after you asked me to stay the night? It was not meant as a punishment. I received, well, I suppose you could call it an offer from Buck Calhoun Jr., the Texas steel magnate who refused to do business with me when I met with him at Holt and Sylvie’s wedding. He, like your sister, believed my reasons for marrying you were based purely on sex. He proposed a trade. He’d sign a deal to finish my mall project and complete the increasingly necessary renovations on our oil lines, if I would fly you to Texas for one night with him and his wife.”

  “Jolene,” I supply, remembering the Texan and our strange conversation at the airport. “She’s a big fan.”

  Zahir’s eyebrows raise in wry bemusement. “Yes, as I discovered. However…” The amusement fades from his expression. “I declined the offer. Everything is riding on me proving myself during this first year as king. Finishing the Kingdom Mall and updating the oil lines would convince my people that I’m a worthy successor to my father. But I did not accept his offer. I could not even consider sharing you with another, woman or man. Even for a night. So you see, though I can only have you for six months, I am incapable of doing to you what your father did to your mother and the twins’ mother. You must understand I did not stay away because of what you asked me, I
stayed away to see if I could do it at all. Forty-eight hours is as far as I got, and in truth, I would have found an excuse to bring you with me to Asia. It was just a matter of spinning it to myself.”

  He looks stricken, and I shake my head because, “Do you think I want to be with someone who would pass me around like that? I’m still not clear what happened in Jahwar, but I do have enough basic psychology skills to realize something in me responds to something in you.”

  Zahir shakes his head. “Even when I tried to get a hold of myself, I could not be like Asir for you—”

  I cut him off. “Asir? He’s what I thought I would like when I was young and wanted everything to be the opposite of how I grew up. But you—you make me feel safe and protected. You take away the out of control feeling I’ve been carrying around all my life. And for reasons that may only belong to me, I like that you keep me only for you. That you cover me up and don’t want other men to touch me. It’s fucked up—and I would never recommend a relationship like that for most women or the twins, but for us…”

  I peep up at him while making myself vulnerable to a man for the very first time. “It works. We get each other, and I may not know what a healthy relationship looks like, but when I said no the first time we met, I was saying no to doing that with Asir, not with you. He didn’t have my consent, but you…you do.”

  He looks down at me, his eyes so full of emotion, it makes him look like a completely different person, and then he lets out a long, shuddering breath. “My father raised me to be the king of a desert land, and I lived in fear of nothing for a very long time. But this scares me, habibti. This marriage…how quickly it has become an obsession. Especially when I know my extended family and my kingdom will not allow me to have you for more than the allotted six months and remain king…”

  I nod in understanding, recalling Asir’s visit and his explanation to me of the thin ice that kept him from returning my feelings, even though he’d like to remain friends.

  “I get it,” I say quietly. “Your people would never accept me.”