Farrah ground her teeth together. “Take me to her.” Farrah stepped forward for Anahita to wrap her arms around her.
“Perhaps,” Anahita said, “we should simply knock on the door.”
Farrah’s head snapped back.
“No one will harm you while I am with you. Oliver would have my head.”
Try as she might, Farrah could not snatch any one thought from her mind to better examine it, but she thought she might be…angry with her mother. Farrah had lived her life on the streets and as a servant, fighting for her life and her virtue; if what Anahita said was true, her mother lived happily as the mistress of a mansion. “Lead the way,” Farrah bit out.
“I would caution you,” Anahita admonished, as she placed Farrah’s hand on her arm, “to not make hasty judgments.”
Too late.
Anahita knocked on the door, and it immediately opened. “We are here to see the mistress of the house,” Anahita said casually.
Farrah was so thankful she spoke up. No amount of effort could have produced civil words from her own mouth.
A conversation Farrah did not pay attention to took place with whomever had answered the door, and then they were moving into the cool interior of what was, indeed, an enormous home. Sound carried through the vast space. The hustle and bustle of people moving about echoed against the firm floor beneath Farrah’s feet.
Anahita placed a hand on top of Farrah’s, and the angel squeezed. It was a gesture meant to comfort, but it did nothing. They rounded a corner, and someone gasped.
“Farrah!”
Farrah was immediately engulfed in warm arms; her face pressed into someone’s neck. Familiar scents from her childhood wafted over her: honey and cinnamon.
Mother.
Without her permission, Farrah’s arms returned her mother’s embrace. Her body trembled. Tears streamed from her eyes, and sobs immediately followed.
It was true. Her mother was mistress of this house. She was living a life of luxury and safety. She had abandoned Farrah.
Farrah stiffened and jerked from her mother’s hold. Took two stumbling steps back and wrapped her arms around her stomach. Bile stung the back of her throat. “You…abandoned me.” Her voice was weak and tinny, like a child’s.
There was a sob. “Farrah, never!” Hands grasped her upper arms, and Farrah tore them away. She could hear her mother swallow. “We have searched for you tirelessly. Where have you been?”
Her temper detonated. “Where have I been? Living on the streets! Fighting for my life! Losing my sight and everything else dear to me!”
Her mother made a broken sound. “My baby.” A tentative hand lit on her forearm, and Farrah was just distracted enough by her rage to allow it. “You disappeared in the middle of the night. We did not know if you had been kidnapped or if you had run away.”
Farrah frowned. “Run away,” she repeated dully. “Why ever would I have done that?”
“You overheard Aaron and I discussing marriage. You loved your father so greatly. We worried that you ran away to honor his memory.”
Aaron. The very name gutted Farrah to her core. It was true: Farrah loved her father. But his memory was distant and dim. She had idolized Aaron. He had been her world, and he had cruelly destroyed her. “Mother,” she said, finally displacing her mother’s hand, “Aaron sold me!”
Her mother gasped so vehemently, Farrah paused.
“Little Farrah,” a man’s voice said, “I would never sell you.”
Farrah’s head whipped around. She would recognize that voice anywhere. “He is here?” Farrah backed away, suddenly transformed into the frightened six-year-old who had been betrayed by the man she had trusted implicitly.
“Aaron is my husband,” her mother said.
Farrah shook her head. “No.”
“Farrah,” Aaron said, “why would you think I had sold you?”
“The man who had me…said you—” Farrah stopped.
Oh, dear heaven. Farrah racked her brain. Was it true? Had she developed a lifetime of mistrust because she had relied on the word of a criminal? She had been so young. She poured through her memories, but could find nothing that could confirm Aaron as the man who betrayed her.
Everything she’d relied on as fact suddenly became suspect. “You…didn’t sell me?”
“My little one, I would have died to protect you. Never, never would I have done such an unforgiveable thing.”
Farrah swayed on her feet until she couldn’t maintain her balance anymore. As she toppled over she had only one thought: I have cultivated an entire way of life based on an untruth.
32
One week later
Farrah’s entire life had been a lie. Over the past week, Aaron and her mother had convinced her of the truth: Farrah had been kidnapped from her bed in the middle of the night. Since then, both had relentlessly searched for her, sparing no expense of Aaron’s vast riches to locate their daughter. And Aaron had been clear that he viewed Farrah as his own.
Her mother was blissfully happy, though the story of Farrah’s time in the streets and the loss of her sight tempered that happiness. She assured Farrah that she and Aaron would do everything they could to make sure Farrah was happy as well.
The past week had been several things: exhausting, exhilarating, emotionally draining. But it had also been some of the “blissfully happy” her mother promised.
One night, while her mother stroked her hair, she had told Farrah that a man like Aaron—a man who would die for those he loved—was a rare gift from God.
That night Farrah had cried into her pillow. Oliver had died for her. Countless times. And she had turned her back on him for reasons that had never truly existed.
Anahita checked in on her daily, never saying a word. Farrah knew the angel was present only by the supernatural charge in the air that always accompanied her. Farrah put on a brave face each time she felt it, knowing Anahita reported back to Oliver, but Farrah was growing more and more heartbroken.
And lonely for the man she loved.
In truth, she was gutted. Deprived of everything she’d strapped to herself as armor and strength. Deprived of Oliver.
It had been a miserable week.
Which is why, today, when she felt Anahita’s presence, Farrah spoke. “Wait!”
There was the rustling of feathers, but Anahita said nothing.
Farrah pushed up from the chair she’d been not-so-relaxedly lounging in. “I know you’re there, angel.”
Anahita sighed. “Oliver will be angry that I was not more careful.”
Farrah nibbled on her bottom lip. If this went the way she thought it was going to go…. “I think not.”
“Hmm.” The feather rustling moved nearer. “You have my attention, Farrah.”
Farrah stiffened her spine and lifted her chin, but in the next heartbeat, that chin was wobbling. She shuddered.
“Farrah?” Anahita’s voice was tinged with alarm.
“I miss him.” The simple sentence left her lips at a wail, and next thing Farrah knew, copious amounts of tears began to leak from her eyes.
“Oh, dear.”
Farrah dimly heard a rush of fabric as she covered her eyes with both hands, her ribs shaking with the strength of her sobs. So much had changed, but now it was too late. Oliver had let her go, and she’d accommodated him. She’d lost him.
“Baby!”
Farrah’s sobs paused, and between one harried breath and the next, warm arms encircled her, pressing her face into a broad chest that carried the scent of cardamom and pistachios.
“She just broke down like that.” Anahita’s fretful voice penetrated the buzzing in Farrah’s skull. “I do not know what to do with tears.”
Farrah removed her palms from her eyes and pressed them into the familiar, beloved chest she was cradled against. “Oliver?”
A rough palm cupped her cheek; his thumb brushed her bottom lip. “Who made you cry like this?” The words were fierce. Protective. So very
much Oliver.
With a cry, the tears started again. She clutched at his body, fitfully grabbing handfuls of his shirt as she drank in his physical presence like a flower feasting on sunshine after days of rain.
A rumble emanated from Oliver’s chest, and his arms tightened around her back. “Seriously, who did this to her?” The question was directed over Farrah’s head.
“I…think I did,” Anahita replied in a halting voice.
Farrah immediately shook her head, her cheeks brushing against the soft cotton of Oliver’s shirt. “It was me,” she sobbed. “I did this to myself!”
In the next moment, Oliver was sweeping Farrah up into his arms. Pressing a kiss to her brow as she continued to cry, he moved across the room in huge strides that swayed her back and forth. He sank into a chair, possibly the one Farrah herself had vacated just moments ago, and settled Farrah in his lap before wrapping her tightly in his arms again, continuing to rock her.
He rested his chin on the crown of her head and murmured soothing, nonsensical noises to her, one broad palm coasting up and down her back in the gentlest of caresses.
“H-He didn’t…k-kidnap me.”
Oliver stiffened. “He certainly better not have.”
Farrah shook her head. “I thought he had. I…trusted n-no one. I pushed you away—” She shuddered against him, and then everything came pouring out. All of her secrets. Things she never would have dreamt of telling another. About the man she’d thought had sold her into slavery. Her life on the streets and in the palace as a maid. The day she lost her sight. The day she found Oliver.
As every secret fled her, Oliver’s arms tightened. His breathing grew ragged. And when she confessed how she’d thought Oliver had sold her, a droplet hit her cheek.
Farrah frowned. Her own tears had abated as she told her tale. She lifted a trembling hand to Oliver’s jaw, finding several days’ growth of beard there before tracing up to his cheek. His wet cheek. “Oliver?”
A breath soughed out of him. He crushed her to his chest. “I can’t believe you went through all of that.” He buried his face in her hair. “I can’t believe I made it worse.”
He cries for you. She swallowed, the urge to cry leaving her at last. “You went through much worse,” she whispered.
He shook his head, her hair moving with the motion. “I went through something different. Not worse.” His arms trembled as he held her. “And God, but I’d go through it again if it meant you never had to live the way you did.”
This she didn’t understand. After an entire existence of fighting to stay alive herself. After knowing what he fought for to keep his own life. “How could you say that?”
He straightened and threaded his fingers through her hair. “Because I love you. Far more than I love myself.” He stroked her cheek with his thumb.
And then, she did understand. Because, she’d go through it all again, too, if it meant he’d never have to live the way he had. His life for hers; her life for his.
If she’d lived a charmed life, however, she never would have met Oliver. A shiver raced through her; a shiver she felt echoed in Oliver’s body.
“If I hadn’t been in that prison—hadn’t paired with you—I’d have never found you,” Oliver whispered, his tone horrified. “Not that I have you now,” he corrected quickly. “I told you I’d let you go, and, God help me, I’m going to stand by th—”
“I do not want you to let me go.”
Oliver froze. “You—? I think I might be dreaming. Again.”
She straightened in his lap, winding her arms around his neck. “I really don’t want to be apart from you.” She played with the curl of hair at the base of his neck. “I’ve been miserable. The worst version of myself I’ve ever been.”
“God, me, too.” Then he muttered something that sounded like please don’t be a dream. “I’ll move here. Please let me. I’ll do anything—”
She placed three fingers over his lips. Before she could speak, his lips parted, and his hot tongue touched the tip of her middle finger, sending a frisson of heat through her. Focus! “You will not be doing that.”
“Farrah—”
“Not with a war hanging in the balance,” she said quickly, the sheer pain in his utterance of her name more than she could bear.
He kissed her fingertips desperately. “I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do.”
A pause. “I don’t care enough.”
“Then I can help you stay motivated.”
He jolted. “You won’t…send me away?”
She shook her head. “I plan to fight by your side. And then, when you aren’t busy saving the world, you’re coming with me. And we’ll just keep going back and forth, back and forth, as many times as Anahita will take us.” She shrugged. “Honestly, as long as I’m with you, I’m happy.”
“Please don’t be a dream.” His voice trembled.
“It’s not a dream, love, I promise.” She pressed a chaste kiss to his lips. “I think it’s fate.”
And just as Oliver took her chaste kiss and morphed it into something very, very wicked, Farrah thought, And maybe Fate isn’t so blind after all.
About the Author
When she’s not writing or teaching, Micah Persell spends time with her husband, toddler, and menagerie of pets in her Southern California home. Of Blind Fate is her seventh novel. Learn more about her at www.micahpersell.com, or visit her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Pinterest.
Of Blind Fate (Operation: Middle of the Garden Book 5) Page 23
