The truth was, she didn’t think Zair looked anything like the sultan. He was leaner and much, much harder. He was beautiful. He radiated courage and that deep, dark heat from within him, formidable and powerful at a glance. The sultan, by comparison, looked soft and pampered in all the pictures Nora had ever seen of him. Twisted and smug and evil all the way through.
But the men who were making this delivery tonight wouldn’t see any of that. They would see the Ruyi noise. The fierce profile the brothers shared. They would see the family resemblance, and if they thought he looked any different than usual, they’d never dare say so.
That was what Zair and Nora were counting on. That was the only way this would work.
And this had to work.
There were so many ways it could all go wrong that Nora had to force herself to stop thinking each and every terrible possibility through to its grim conclusion. She had to force herself to simply sit there and wait, her breathing too loud and shallow. Her heart racing and near to breaking as it did.
It took a handful of forevers before the Gulfstream’s door opened and unfolded into stairs, and more than that before a man in a dark suit stepped out onto the small landing at the top. He looked around and called something to Zair’s driver, who moved to stand at the foot of the steps.
“Stop talking!” Nora ordered in a harsh whisper, inside the SUV with its tinted windows where no one could hear.
Another age crawled past, filled with male laughter and a noted lack of urgency all around, and then three woman came out the door and started down the steps with another man behind them.
And Nora had to look away then, because she was knocked sideways with panic and hope and instant, paralyzing terror that she hadn’t really seen what she thought she’d seen, that she wanted it too much and was imagining it—
She peeked again, and realized she was shaking hard as she did. Breathe, said that voice in her head that sounded so much like Zair’s, bossy and cool.
It really was Harlow. Right there, in the flesh. On the other side of the car window, stepping down onto the tarmac. Dressed in strange clothes, clutching the hand of the woman next to her and with her arm slung over the shoulders of what looked like a teenage girl on her other side. Harlow, looking tired and drawn and too skinny. But it was really, truly, indisputably her.
Harlow. At last.
It was only when the tears began to tickle the bottom of her chin that Nora realized she was weeping. Sobbing with her hands over her mouth. But they weren’t yet in the clear. Zair had said the sultan’s men would expect to gas up the plane and leave for Ruyi immediately, but first they were escorting the women to the car.
And with every step Harlow took across the tarmac, every step closer to safety, Nora’s heart beat out about a hundred hard kicks against her chest.
Closer. Closer, now.
Zair’s driver opened the passenger door to the SUV and Nora curled herself into a stiff, tense ball in the farthest corner. The woman who had been holding Harlow’s hand slid inside, her guarded gaze meeting Nora’s briefly then sliding away, as if she hadn’t seen her.
As if it’s no particular surprise to see another woman here, with tears pouring down her face, because in the hell she’s been in that’s obviously par for the course.
Nora’s stomach twisted, but she didn’t say a word. She waited, on edge, as she heard Harlow’s voice on the night air.
“—really didn’t think it would be you,” Harlow was saying. She sounded exhausted. But within that, defiant somehow. “I definitely didn’t see that coming.”
“Shut up,” Zair said, lethal and vicious, and only Nora could possibly know it was for the benefit of the sultan’s goons nearby. “Get in the car.”
But it was the teenage girl who climbed in, ducking her head and sliding in hard to the other woman’s side. She didn’t meet Nora’s gaze. She didn’t acknowledge that Nora was there. She only shuddered and tried to make herself smaller.
“This puts a whole new spin on everything,” Harlow was saying, her voice arch and amused, as though she was having fun. “It’s like I woke up and found out the world really is made of jelly beans. Sick, evil, fucked-up jelly beans.”
“I don’t even remember your name,” Nora heard Zair say in his cruelest voice, and she winced. “And you don’t want to make me learn it. Trust me on this.”
She heard Arabic then, and laughter from the men, and then Harlow was getting into the car. Harlow checked the teenager before she was even fully seated, then frowned at the other woman, who shook head hard, once, in response. She settled next to the teenager, put her arm around the younger girl again, and only then did she look across the interior of the SUV.
Her gaze locked with Nora’s.
Harlow blinked. Her face remained blank. Nora held her breath.
Outside, there was more laughter.
Zair swung into the car, next to Nora, and barked out an order. The engine turned over as his door slammed shut.
Harlow was still staring straight at Nora. She blinked again. Her brown eyes, usually so merry and anything but that tonight, moved over Nora’s face as her own tightened, then crumpled. She paled.
“Harlow—” Nora began, in a thick whisper.
“No,” Harlow said in a soft voice.
The SUV moved then, pulling away from the two men who still stood on the tarmac, one lighting a cigarette while the other checked his phone.
“No!” Harlow cried, louder, and she tore her gaze from Nora’s and turned it on Zair. Then she screamed, “I’ll kill you!”
And she launched herself at Zair as though she wanted to put out his eyes with her fingers.
Nora didn’t think. She lunged for her friend, and everything was a desperate crush, loud and awful. Harlow was falling apart and screaming bloody murder, Zair was using some kind of martial arts hold to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else as she thrashed there, trying to get to him, and Nora was holding her as best she could.
“You’re safe,” she kept saying, or crying, because she was sobbing while she said it. The other girls were grabbing on to each other without a sound but Harlow was still screaming. Over and over, until Nora’s whisper seemed to penetrate.
Zair let go of her the moment she took a deep breath, but Nora didn’t.
“You’re safe,” she said, again and again and again. “Harlow. Listen to me. You’re home. You’re safe.”
And slowly, gingerly, Harlow sat up. She pushed her dark hair back from her face. She ran her palms over her eyes as though she wasn’t entirely certain she was awake. She looked at Nora, kneeling down on the floor of the SUV with her, half on the seat and half off. Then she looked at Zair.
“He’s not…?”
Nora’s reply was swift. Unequivocal. “Never.”
“And you?”
“No,” she whispered fiercely. She reached over and squeezed her friend’s hands. “Harlow. I promise. You’re safe now.”
And her best friend smiled such a sad, broken smile it did more than shatter Nora. It altered her. She understood even as Harlow was aiming it at her, even as she returned it, that it would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever believe you,” Harlow whispered.
“That’s the great thing about it,” Nora said. She met Zair’s bleak gaze then, and it made her feel stronger, somehow. Better, despite everything. She held on tight to Harlow. She’d do it forever if that was what it took. Harlow gripped her so hard it hurt, but Nora didn’t care. “You don’t have to believe it and it’s still true. I’ll believe it for you.”
And she didn’t let go of Harlow for the rest of the drive into the city.
Chapter Nine
NORA TRIED TO convince herself that the Ruyian consulate’s welcome reception for the sultan was like every other ball she and Zair had attended over the years for this or that high society charity or cause or lavish celebration. The band played a jazzy interpretation of a once-popular song, the
ballroom gleamed and everything in it seemed to shimmer, and the party was packed tight with tuxedos and gowns and enough jewels to blind a murder or two of crows.
Zair held her in his arms as they danced, waltzing around and around the center of the grand room as if they were having a perfectly nice time at yet another obligatory function. As if this—as if anything—were normal.
They’d done this a thousand times before, in the years she’d adored him and in the years she’d claimed to detest him. His strong arms surrounded her, making her yearn for things that could never be. Her hand was clasped in his as if they’d been made to fit together like that. The heat where his other hand anchored her to him, low on her back, made her remember what it was like to lose herself in this man.
And long for more.
“You look like you’re attending your own execution,” Zair said. She felt the heat of his gaze, dancing over her cheek, then away.
“I get the distinct sense that possibility grows by the moment.”
“Courage,” he murmured, as soft as that touch of his gaze had been. She felt the graze of his fingers over her cheek, then they were gone again, leaving only heat and longing in its wake. “It’s almost over.”
And Nora was a shallow, horrible, pale imitation of a real person—of any kind of good person—because she was fairly certain he meant that in more than one sense. And it hurt.
Nora was fully aware she shouldn’t care about that. She shouldn’t care if he left her the way she suspected he meant to do, assuming they survived the night. What did or didn’t happen with Zair was surely the lowest entry on a very long list of things she ought to be concerned about tonight. The very lowest. So low it bordered on offensive that she was allowing herself to think about it at all.
She knew all of that. And still, she wanted to move even closer to him and to hell with official protocol and all the watching, judging eyes. She wanted to press her mouth to the place where his pulse beat against his throat. She wanted to sob and fall apart and all the rest of the things she hadn’t been able to do in the past twenty-four hours, because nothing was wrong with her. Nothing had happened to her.
Her entire life was a series of almosts.
And Zair was no more than the latest almost in a long line of them. He’d never been anything else. He never would. You have to change this life of yours, something whispered inside her. Before you turn into stone and stay that way.
“Here we go,” Zair said then, a tautness in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “His aide beckons. Our presence is requested.”
And there was no more time for aching, for yearning for the things that couldn’t be. There was no more time to worry about her tiny little heart and all its cracks and fissures. This was what they’d been waiting for. This was where it had all been leading.
Zair offered her his arm and Nora took it. She reached into her clutch and pulled out her phone, relying on Zair to guide her through the crowd as she fired off a text. When she was finished she wedged the clutch beneath her arm and tried to settle her stomach.
You can do this, she assured herself.
There wasn’t even much to do. Harlow had done the gut-wrenching thing. Zair had done the noble thing. All Nora had to do was walk across a ballroom. Then up a flight of stairs.
She’d already been presented to the sultan in the stiffly formal receiving line, as Zair’s date at the start of the evening. The sultan had accepted her hand and then spoken to Zair in chilly Arabic, when everyone was well aware he could speak English if he chose. Nora had been meant to feel small, insignificant, ashamed.
Instead she’d smiled at him and waited for him to release her hand.
And the longer she’d simply smiled serenely at the sultan and waited, the longer she’d exuded all the fine breeding and excellent deportment her mother would have been so proud to see her emanate, the worse, somehow, the sultan had looked in comparison. Boorish. Even cruel. All things he certainly was, but might not wish to proclaim in quite so public a manner.
When he’d released her hand, Nora had had the strangest feeling that she’d won something.
“He’ll want to make you pay for that handshake,” Zair told her now in an undertone, his arm so solid and strong beneath her hand, like a promise she had to remind herself he wasn’t going to keep. No matter how it might feel. “Depend on it. He’s nothing if not petty.”
“Wonderful,” Nora said, keeping a pleasant expression on her face as they made their way up the wide stone staircase to the open balcony where the sultan was holding court on the second level of the ballroom, gazing down at so many well-heeled New Yorkers and foreign nationals celebrating his presence. “That’s one more thing to look forward to in this delightful evening.”
They were waved past the looming guards when they reached the balcony. Azhil stood at the far end near the stone balustrade, and the look he leveled at Zair as they approached made Nora’s skin crawl.
Does he know already? Has he figured out what we’re doing here tonight?
But she couldn’t let herself think that way. She couldn’t give in to the panic. She thought of what Harlow had gone through—what she continued to go through. She thought about how it must feel to Zair to have been so deeply betrayed by the only man he’d ever considered his family. And she kept her smile firmly in place.
Azhil stood tall and only slightly stout in his fine tuxedo, draped in the bright ceremonial sash that proclaimed his position, every inch of him the Sultan of Ruyi, and Nora thought he was the most evil creature she’d ever beheld. It was that flatness in his dark eyes. It was the malevolence that lurked near him, around him. Like something in her peripheral vision that she could only see when she didn’t look at it directly.
Jason Treffen had at least appeared kind. This man did not. He obviously felt he didn’t need to.
“My brother, you surprise me,” Azhil said in perfect English once the bowing and curtsying was done, with a certain oiliness to his voice that put Nora on alert. Beside her, Zair didn’t seem to react at all, though she could feel his muscles go solid beneath her hand. Azhil laughed, and there wasn’t anything amused in the sound. “You would link my family name to a piece of ass like this? She must make magic with that mouth.”
Zair turned to steel beside her, but said nothing.
Azhil’s gaze moved to Nora, then slid over her, taking in her gown and the neckline that hadn’t felt at all low until now, then lingering on her mouth as if she didn’t matter. As if she didn’t exist.
It was harder than it should have been to simply stand there quietly and let him.
Then the sultan let out another one of those laughs that made Nora’s bones feel too cold to bear her weight—so cold they might snap in half or crumble if he kept making that nasty sound.
Only then did he meet her gaze, hard and cruel and a sudden, sharp reminder of that awful yacht back in Cannes and that hideous energy she remembered from it, though when he spoke, it was directed at Zair.
“I believe I’ll require a demonstration,” Azhil said, and then snapped his fingers in the direction of his royal feet. “She can get on her knees right here.”
*
Zair didn’t hurl Azhil off the side of the balcony, tossing the sultan to a richly deserved death on the floor far below. The fact that he managed to refrain from doing what all his instincts were screaming at him to do would confound him forever.
Instead, he looked at his brother and smiled.
He felt a telling shudder move through Nora, but he couldn’t look at her then. Because he knew himself. He knew. If there was a single shadow in those pretty eyes of hers because of what his brother had said to her, the way there was nothing but shadows in her friend’s eyes now, he’d take Azhil down. It would take every last guard the sultan had to pull him off, and he knew they’d manage it eventually, but first he’d geld the motherfucker for talking to her that way.
But there were broader concerns at play tonight, so he smiled inste
ad.
And he kept his eyes on his brother.
“Have I told a joke?” Azhil asked softly. “I thought I was perfectly serious. Perhaps you can share with me what you find so amusing.”
The years he’d spent working toward this moment fell away, folded into the lifetime of unquestioning belief in this man he’d lived before then. It folded in on itself and became a kind of heavy iron ball inside him. Zair wanted it out.
Then he wanted to shove it down his brother’s throat but first—first, he wanted it out.
“I’ve spent the time since our meeting last night asking myself how I could have failed to notice the way you speak to me,” Zair said after a moment, and that wasn’t what he’d meant to say. Azhil blinked, but Zair kept going. “Have you always treated me like something you scraped off your shoe? You couldn’t have, I concluded. That must be something new, something recent. But nothing has happened. There has been no change in our relationship. Everything is business as usual.”
“Are you insane?” Azhil asked, in a kind of wonder. “To address me like this? In the presence of your whore?”
“It isn’t you who’s changed, brother,” and there was a knifepoint pressure on that last word. An unmistakable edge. Zair thrust it deep. “It’s me.”
It was Nora, Zair knew, though he wouldn’t say it here. Nora who trusted him with every part of her. Nora who had delivered herself into his hands and in so doing, had remade him. Without Nora, he could never have gazed back without a shred of fear at this man who had used him all these years for his own perverse ends. Without Nora, he never would have seen how little Azhil cared about him.
That he’d believed this sick thing, this calculated manipulation, was any kind of love in the first place made him deeply, profoundly sad. It only pointed out how empty he’d been all these years, how dark. It reminded him that Nora was the only light he’d known for a long, long time, no matter how all of this had started. Or where.
“You forget yourself,” Azhil said with quiet menace.
The Billionaire's Innocent: Zair al Ruyi (Forbidden Book 3) Page 17
