She looked like something out of a dream she hadn’t known she’d had. Her dressmakers had truly outdone themselves, somehow managing to fuse both Tarek’s world and hers into the sweep of the long white gown. She looked exactly as she should—like a beacon of a kind of hope.
Like the future she imagined here, bright beyond measure.
And then, perhaps inevitably, her father walked in.
She could tell by the way he marched into the salon, holding his body sharply and crisply, that he was still in high dudgeon from the other night. That he was deeply offended hung around him like a cloud, likely discernible even to those who hadn’t spent a lifetime parsing his moods. The way he snapped the door shut behind him only underscored it.
That he wanted her to apologize to him—even though he’d had an entire day to get over what had happened at that dinner, having not been part of yesterday’s rituals—was clear by the imperious way he glared at her as he stood there, Charisma standing to one side and slightly behind him, as if he didn’t notice his only daughter on a dais before him.
In a bridal gown, with jewels in her hair.
Tarek’s sister Nur had teared up when she’d seen Anya. “You look like everything my brother deserves,” she’d said.
But her own father looked at her and saw only himself.
Anya kept herself from sighing, barely, because that wasn’t anything new, was it?
“It’s so nice of you to come and wish me health and happiness, Dad,” she said, and she imagined she saw Charisma wince a bit. “Thank you.”
Dr. Preston Turner did not wince. He hardly reacted.
“This is a low, even for you,” he told her, the force of his outrage making his voice even crisper and more precise than usual. “It’s not enough that you should humiliate yourself in this way and on such a grand scale when you are clearly in no fit state to make decisions of this magnitude. Look at the mess you’ve already made of your life. But that you should sit silently by and allow me to suffer such attacks...”
His voice trailed off. Anya mused, almost idly, that she had never seen her father at a loss for words in all her life. Not until now.
Point to Tarek, she couldn’t help but think.
Sadly, he recovered. With a furious glare. “I thought I couldn’t be more disappointed in you, Anya. Trust you to go ahead and prove me wrong yet again.”
Anya looked at this man who she had tried and failed to please for her entire life. This man whose expectations sat so heavily upon her that she had found a dungeon preferable to the weight of them.
She knew she favored her mother in looks, but she had always imagined that there were similarities between her and her father anyway. Not his famous hands, maybe. Not his drive. But certain expressions. The color of their eyes.
But today she looked at him and saw a stranger.
No, she corrected herself. Not quite a stranger. Something worse than that.
A father who had made himself a stranger to his only child. By choice.
“Your disappointment has nothing to do with me,” she said, with a quiet force she knew her father did not miss. “I can’t help you with it or save you from it.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her stepmother, fluttering as ever as she murmured something to Preston.
“For God’s sake,” her father snapped at her. “Just stand still, Charisma.”
“She’s not your lapdog, Dad.” Anya shook her head at him. “I know you like to think she’s stupid, but she’s not. She knows exactly how to handle you, which is an art I certainly failed to master. You’re lucky to have her.”
“I’ll thank you to keep your opinions about my marriage to yourself,” her father barked.
Though next to him, Charisma blinked. Then smiled.
Anya smoothed her hands over the front of her dress, because it made her think of her wedding and the life she would live here, far away from her father’s toxic disappointment. “I thought we were commenting on marriages today. Isn’t that what you came to do? Tell me your opinions about the man I’m marrying in a few hours? Or did you miss that I’m standing here in a bridal gown?”
“I would advise you not to speak to me in such a disrespectful manner, Anya.”
“Or what?” It was a genuine question. “I’m not a small child you can spank. Or one of your surgical residents or nurses you can bully. You’re standing in a palace that is to be my home, in a kingdom I am to be Queen of in a few hours. Really, Dad. What do you plan to do to me if I don’t obey you?”
“I’m your father,” Preston thundered at her.
“And I’m your daughter.” Anya felt the swell of something inside her, bigger than a wave. It crashed over her, into her, and she couldn’t tell if it was drowning her or drawing her out to sea. But she found she didn’t have it in her to care. “I’m your daughter and you treat me a lot worse than a lapdog. I’ve spent my whole life trying to make you proud of me, but I realize now that it’s impossible. No one can make you happy, Dad. No one. You don’t have it in you. And that has to do with you, not me. I can’t make you a different man. What I can do is stop pretending that I’m someone I’m not when you don’t even appreciate the effort.”
She had been afraid of saying something like that her whole life. And now she had, and she didn’t feel a burst of freedom and joy, the way she’d thought she would. Instead, she found she felt sad. Not for herself, but for him. For the relationship they’d never had.
“I have no idea what you mean,” he was raging at her. “You had every opportunity to do the right thing and you squandered it, each and every time. That’s on you, Anya.”
And Anya was already swimming far from land. This was already happening. Last night there had been too many stars to count, and here was her father, determined to ruin it.
She lifted her hands, then dropped them. Not a surrender, because it felt too...right.
Too long overdue.
“I don’t want to be a doctor,” she told him, the words she’d never dared say out loud falling from her lips as if it had always been easy to say them. As if she should have long ago. Because there was no sadness in this. There was only truth. “I never did.”
Charisma actually gasped.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her father snapped. “You have obviously let this awful place get to you. You need help, Anya. Psychological help. You’ve always been far too emotional and your ordeal has clearly put you over the edge.”
What struck her then wasn’t the dismissive tone her father used. Anya was used to that. It wasn’t the contemptuous look on his face, because, of course, she was familiar with that, too.
But she wasn’t the same woman she’d been the night she’d gotten arrested. Those eight months had changed her.
Yet she still paused for a moment, tried to look inside herself, to see if anything that he said had merit. After all, hadn’t she wondered if she was suffering from some kind of psychiatric issue? Hadn’t she made little jokes to herself—and her friends once she’d started using her mobile again—about Stockholm syndrome?
No, came a voice from inside her, deep and certain and undeniably her own. That’s your father talking. You know what you feel. You always have.
“It doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life,” she said quietly. “In the end, it’s really very simple. You either love me, Dad—or you don’t.”
And then she waited. She didn’t look past him to the closed door with the palace staff waiting on the other side. Guests and soon-to-be in-laws celebrating as her own father couldn’t. She didn’t look at her stepmother, who was still standing at Preston’s side. She didn’t fidget. She didn’t look away.
Anya trained her gaze on her father, direct and open. And watched as something impatient moved over his face. With possibly more than a little distaste, mixed right in.
�
��My God, Anya,” he said. And when he spoke, that distaste was unmistakable. He didn’t quite recoil, but managed to give the impression that he might at any moment. “You’ve become completely unglued.” His gaze, so much like her own, sharpened in a way she hoped hers never had. She found she was bracing herself, though she couldn’t have said why when she knew him. There was no point bracing for the inevitable, was there? “Unglued, emotional, and pitiful. Just like your mother.”
He meant it like a bomb, and it exploded inside her like a blinding flash of light. She stared back at him, seeing nothing but his gaze like a machete, aimed right at her.
Aimed to hurt. To leave wounds.
On some level, Anya was aware that her father, brimming with triumph at the blow he’d landed, had turned and was marching for the door. She met her stepmother’s gaze, bright blue and stricken, but all either one of them could do was stare. Then Charisma, too, scurried for the exit.
And once the door was open, the room filled up again. There was laughter again, sunlight and brightness and that glorious sense of expectation and hope that Anya herself had felt so keenly earlier.
She was aware of all of it. She smiled for her photographs. She shook hands, smiled wider, and did her job as the Queen she would shortly become.
Yet all the while, the bomb her father had lobbed at her kept blowing up inside her. Over and over again.
But not, she thought, in the way he’d intended it to.
Because all she could seem to concentrate on were memories of her mother she’d have sworn she didn’t have.
She’d been seven when her mother died. Anya wasn’t one of those who had memories dating back to the cradle, but she did have memories. That was the point. When all this time she’d convinced herself she didn’t.
“You are brave, Anya,” her mother had used to whisper to her. She would gather Anya in her lap, tucked away in the corner of the house that was only theirs. Sometimes she would read books. Other times, she would have Anya tell stories about her day. About school, her friends, her teachers. Or perhaps her stuffed animals, if that was a mood Anya was in. “You are brave and you are fierce. You can do anything you want to do, do you hear me?”
“I hear you, Mama,” Anya would reply.
What she remembered now was that when she’d thought of all the things she could do, it had never been becoming a doctor. She had been far more interested in learning how to fly, with or without wings, much less a plane. And dancing, which she had loved more than anything back then, despite her distinct lack of talent or ability. And the masterpieces she’d created with her crayons, that she’d secretly believed were the sort of thing she ought to do forever, if only as a gift to the world.
Anya remembered walking in the backyard holding tight to her mother’s hand, listening intently as Mama had pointed out a bird here, a bug there. She had repeated the names of flowers and plants, all the trees that towered over them, then made up stories to explain the tracks in the dirt.
She remembered her mother’s laugh, her joyful smile, and if she focused as hard as she could, she was convinced that she could almost remember the particular smell of her mother’s skin, right in the crook of her neck where Anya liked to rest her face when she was sleepy. Or sick.
Or just because.
Once one memory returned to her, all the rest followed suit. She was flooded with them. And it was clear to her, when it was finally time and she was led from her rooms, that somehow, this was her mother’s way of being here today.
It was what her private moment with her father should have been, yet wasn’t. All these memories dressed up more brightly now, and almost better for having been lost to her for so many years.
Because it felt like her mother was here. Right here. With her she walked through the palace halls, surrounded by Tarek’s sisters and aunts. It was as if her mother was holding fast to her hand all over again, her simple presence making Anya feel safe. Happy.
And absolutely certain that there was nothing wrong with her. No psychological damage from her time in jail. Just hope.
Anya knew, then, that every step she took was right and good, and better still, her mother was beside her for all of it.
She waited outside the great ballroom, open today to the even grander courtyard beyond, and she knew something else, too. As surely and as fully as if the words were printed deep into her own flesh. As if they were scars like Tarek’s, angry and red at first, then fading into silver with the passage of time.
But scars all the same.
Because her heart was pounding at her. Her stomach was fluttery. But she knew that none of that was panic.
She thought of her long-lost mother and the things she’d said so long ago. That Anya was brave and fierce, capable of choosing any life she wanted. Anya had believed her.
Anya believed her so hard, so completely, that when she was gone it was as if she’d taken all of that with her.
Without her, Anya had never felt brave. Or anything like fierce. And she hadn’t known what she wanted, except her mother back.
But that was never on offer.
And without her mother there, there was nothing to temper her father’s coldness. Back then, he’d been a different man. She could remember him, too. Never as warm as her mother had been, but he’d smiled then. He’d laughed. He’d danced with her mother in the backyard on warm summer nights, and held Anya between them, her bare feet on his shoes. In every way that mattered, she’d lost both her parents when her mother died.
Anya almost felt sympathy for him, in retrospect. But back then, as a little girl awash in grief, all she’d known was that she didn’t want to cause her father more pain. She’d wanted him to love her. She’d wanted him to gather her up in his lap, tell her stories, and make her feel better. Dance with her in the yard while the summer night stretched out above them, warm and soft. But he didn’t.
He never did.
So she’d made herself cold instead, to please him.
But she was not cold, no matter how hard she tried. And maybe, Anya thought, as she waited for a panic attack to hit her when surely it should—poised to walk down an aisle to marry a king in the full view of the better part of the planet—the panic attacks had been her actual, real feelings trying to get out all along.
The doors opened before her, then. And then it was happening.
She was walking toward Tarek. She could see him there, waiting for her at the end of the aisle, magnificent in every way.
But best of all, looking straight at her. Into her.
As if this thing between them was fate and they’d been meant for each other all along.
When she finally reached him, he took her hands and they began to speak old words. Ancient vows. Sharing who they were and becoming something else.
Husband and wife. King and Queen.
And so much more.
But inside, Anya made a different vow, there before the assembled throng. That she would not be cold another day in her life. That she would never again be buried in stone or locked away behind iron. That she would not allow herself to feel dead while she was alive.
Not with him. Not with this man who had freed her from a cell first, and then from the life she’d never really wanted.
So she married him, and then she lived.
She danced at the reception. She smiled until her cheeks hurt. And when Tarek finally stole her away, bundling her into a helicopter that raced across the desert, suspended between the shifting, undulating sands beneath and the heavens above, she loved him so much that she thought it might burst out of her like a comet. Another bomb, and a better one this time.
Anya didn’t know how she kept it inside.
The helicopter dropped them in an oasis straight out of a fairy tale. The water in the many pools was an indigo silk, lapping gently against the sand as the breeze hit it. Palm trees rustled al
l around, while waterfalls tumbled over rocks like a song.
And a glorious, sprawling tent blazed with welcoming light, beckoning them in.
“Welcome, my Queen,” Tarek said when the helicopter rose back into the air and the sound of its rotors faded away. He had led her into the vast living area of the tent, outfitted with a thousand pillows and low tables, like a desert fantasy. Now he smiled down at her. “This is the royal oasis. Some claim the water is sacred. Some believe it heals. We will have to test it, you and I.”
Anya was sure that all the things she felt must be emblazoned on her face. But that wasn’t enough. Nothing could be enough.
She reached up, placed her palms on either side of his beautiful face, and sighed a little as his strong arms came around her. She thought, this is home.
She was finally home.
“Tarek,” she breathed, with her whole heart. With everything she had and everything she was. With all the bright hope inside her after this magical, beautiful day. “I love you.”
And watched as his face turned to stone.
CHAPTER TEN
“YOU MUST BE TIRED,” Tarek said, taking each of Anya’s hands in his. He pulled them away from his face, as if that would erase the words she’d said.
The words that seemed to fill the tent and more, roll out over the desert like a storm, blanketing everything.
Burying him alive.
“Not particularly,” she replied, that frown he liked too much appearing between her brows. “On the contrary, I’ve never felt more alive. And in love, Tarek.”
In case he’d missed that the first time.
And there was that pressure in his chest. That pounding thing inside him that he thought was his heart, but it seemed too large. Too dangerous.
Too catastrophic.
“Come now, Doctor,” he said, not sure he sounded like himself—but it was hard to know what it was he heard with that storm in him. “There are far more pleasurable things to do tonight than forget ourselves.”
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