by Olivia Gates
She fell on the bed and curled into a tight ball. She felt she might explode from too much love and relief and gratitude otherwise.
Then she burst up in a frenzy of purpose, dialed the number of her informant. She was told the number was no longer in service. She tried again, just to make sure she hadn’t dialed it wrong. She hadn’t. It must have been a temporary number so it couldn’t be tracked. On the same thought, she went online, shot him an email, listing her phone number.
Moments after she hit Send, the phone’s distinctive three-tone ring shot through her again. Harres. He must have more info.
Her flailing hand dropped it twice before she could answer. Then she almost dropped it again.
It wasn’t Harres. It was a distorted voice that scraped her every nerve raw. Her informant’s.
She hadn’t dreamed he’d get back to her that fast. But it wasn’t that that shocked her mute. It was what he’d said.
“Hello, Dr. Talia Jasmine Burke.”
She squeezed her eyes. So their precautions hadn’t worked. She didn’t know how, but her cover was blown.
“Don’t worry, doctor. I still want to do business with you. You’re now in an even better situation to do the most damage. Harres is doing all he can to stay on your good side, to exploit you, so I hope you aren’t falling for his charm and forgetting your original goal to redeem your brother.” At her gasp, the distorted voice gave a macabre chuckle. “Yes, I know everything. That’s why I went after you in the first place. Because I wanted someone with a cause, and because you are a woman. It suits me to have the Aal Shalaan’s downfall be at the hands of someone who has a vendetta against them, and who better than a woman to bring all those mighty men to ruin.
“And now, I’ll tell you who the mastermind behind the conspiracy is. Yusuf Aal Waaked, prince of the neighboring emirate of Ossaylan.”
Talia at last found her voice. “But why expose him and risk having the Aal Shalaans stop the conspiracy in its tracks once they learn who they have to fight and where they need to look for their missing jewels?”
“Oh, there’s nothing the Aal Shalaans can do with his identity. My exposure will actually guard against him changing his mind. It will guarantee he’ll see this through to the end.”
Suddenly there was a long silence then the voice became uglier, scarier. “You idiot! You’ll use the info to help Harres, won’t you? He has gotten to you. I should have known, with a woman in the legendary playboy prince’s clutches for so long. He must have you willing to sell your soul for him by now. But I’ll prove to you that he and his family don’t deserve your help, but your vengeance.”
The line went dead.
She didn’t know how long she’d stayed there, staring into space, shaking with agitation.
At last she roused herself. She had to call Harres, give him the new info. No matter what her informant said, she was sure Harres would do something with it, maybe solve this whole mess.
As she began to dial his number, two masked men burst into the room from the French doors that opened to a patio leading to the gardens. The gun in the first’s hand made sure she didn’t attempt a scream or a struggle.
“We won’t harm you,” the armed man said, “if you don’t try to expose us. We just want you to come with us. There’s something our master wants to show you.”
They took her from the French doors, swept her around the palace through the extensive grounds.
They entered through another open French door into a room. It was empty. Before she could say anything, she heard Harres’s voice.
Her heart fired with hope, then dread crashed right on its heels. What if he walked in here, and they panicked, shot him?
But then she realized he wasn’t moving. He was in an adjoining room, talking to someone. On the phone.
“…and how many women have you seen me take and discard? You think this American means more than any of them? The others at least were pleasant pastimes I remember with some goodwill. She, on the other hand, almost cost me my life. Can you even imagine the distaste I suffered as I catered to her for so long, struggled to save her miserable life, to get her to trust me and spill her secrets, and to change her mind about exposing them? Do you realize how enraged I was when I found out she knew practically nothing? But I had to continue to play along. I knew she could still renew her mission and secure the rest of the promised info.”
He was silent for a moment, then he drawled, his voice pitiless, “Why do you think I gave her the trivial incentive of setting her brother free? She trusts me with her life now, will do anything to get me my coveted intel. I went so far as to proclaim my love, would have even offered to marry her if necessary.”
He was silent for a moment more as the person on the other line interrupted him. Then Harres gave an ugly laugh, a sound she’d never thought could issue from him. “I might have afforded a measure of chivalry and human compassion in other circumstances. But anyone is expendable in my quest to fulfill my duty to protect this kingdom. So if she’s useless to me on that front, do you really think I care if she lives or dies?”
Twelve
“Did you hear enough, ya ghabeyah?”
Ghabeyah. Stupid.
She’d been far beyond that.
She was beyond devastated.
The nightmarish voice continued. “That’s what your prince says when he’s having a private conversation with his crown prince, who’s taking him to task over you. That’s the ugly truth of his feelings. Still want to run to him with the information? Or will you now finally take the revenge you’re owed?”
Talia stared at the phone on the bed. Who’d turned it on? How had she made it back to this room?
Her eyes panned around, unseeing. She was alone.
Her escorts must have led her back, turned on the phone’s speaker. Their master, her informant, was pulling at the hook embedded inside her, shredding her insides.
Then at some point, the mutilation stopped. And silence decimated what was left intact of her.
She found herself on her side on the bed, a discarded body paralyzed with pain too huge to register yet. Her eyes were open and bone-dry. Harres’s words revolved like a serrated wheel inside her skull, mashing her brain to tinier fragments.
He didn’t mean it. Whimpers of denial spun in a countering direction. There’s an explanation. He was placating Amjad, his odious brother, to get him off his back, off my case. Or something. It must have killed him to say those things. He’ll explain why he did. He loves me. I won’t believe otherwise…
“Talia.”
Harres. Here? Or in her feverish hopes?
She jerked up. He was here. Looking down at her.
Please, my love, take it back, explain it away. Just look at me with love in your eyes and it will all go away.
But for the first time since she’d laid eyes on him, his were empty.
No. Give me something.
He gave her nothing, his face as expressionless as his voice. “Sorry to interrupt your rest, but my private jet is ready.”
“Ready for what?” She heard her bleeding whisper, wondered how she could still talk.
“To take you home.”
She stared up at him, the void emanating from him engulfing her. Then she found herself rising, as if a closer look would make her see inside him, decipher the truth.
She saw nothing. Only the abyss of uncaring he’d professed to feel for her.
And it all crashed down on her, the full weight of his betrayal, of his heartless exploitation. It crushed her.
But she realized one thing. Even hurt beyond expression or endurance, injured beyond healing, she couldn’t retaliate in kind. She wouldn’t. This was the one thing her informant hadn’t taken into consideration in his quest to destroy the Aal Shalaans.
Harres had systematically destroyed her, for his duty, his family. But even had she wanted to exact revenge on him, she wouldn’t destroy the royal family and the whole kingdom along with him. And she didn’t wa
nt to avenge herself. She just wanted to curl up and die, far away from this land where she’d lost her heart and her faith in anything forever.
One thing was left in her wreckage. “What about Todd?”
“The procedures of his release are ongoing as we speak.”
She saw the truth of this at least in his eyes. Or maybe she imagined it as she’d imagined everything between them so far.
And she gave him what he’d ruined her for. “The conspiracy’s mastermind is Yusuf Aal Waaked, prince of Ossaylan.”
His eyes flared. But she’d lost the ability to read them. She’d never had it. And she no longer cared. She just wanted out of his orbit. Wanted to go somewhere far to perish in peace.
“I know,” he finally said in the same expressionless voice.
He did? How?
One thing explained everything. He’d monitored her phone call and got his coveted information the moment she had.
So the master secret-service man had adjusted his plan on the fly every second since they’d met, according to her reactions and based on an unerring reading of her character. She’d fallen in step with his every undetectable nudge. His masterstroke had been that last bit of reverse psychology. While indirectly stressing the danger Zohayd was in, he’d forbidden her to reinstate contact with her informant, knowing the first thing she’d do was just that. As the coup de grâce, he’d secured Todd’s release. It clearly had required no effort or sacrifice on his part, had been insurance to make sure she would do anything for him.
Now her purpose to him was over. He couldn’t wait to get rid of her.
It made sense. Far more sense than this all-powerful prince falling in love with her, so totally.
With this last shard of rationalization tearing into her heart, it was like a dampener dissolved and every memory of the past twenty days bombarded her, rewritten in the macabre new perspective.
Agony mushroomed to unmanageable levels, humiliation inundating her. She felt she’d suffocate, shatter.
She lashed out with all her disillusion and devastation. “So you know. But you can’t say I didn’t give you something in return for my brother’s freedom and redemption. Now that I have them, I can’t wait to leave this godforsaken land.”
There was no mistaking what slammed into his eyes now. Shock.
Of course. He must have thought she’d simper and fawn and beg for him to keep her on any degrading terms he wished to impose. As he’d reassured his brother, he was an old hand at using and discarding women. He must have fully expected the dumping to be one-sided.
Before he could say anything, Amjad stuck his head around the door. “What’s taking you so long?”
Harres tore his stunned eyes from hers, turned them to his brother. He still said nothing.
Then he shook his head, as if trying to credit what she’d said. She could only imagine how she’d sounded, looked as she’d said it. If a fraction of what was stampeding inside her had been apparent, he must be flabbergasted at the seemingly out-of-the-blue change that had seized her.
He stood aside, staring at her with eyes crowded with so many things it made her sick trying to fathom them. She gave up, on everything, preceded him out of the room.
Amjad was leaning on the wall outside the door in an immaculate sports jacket, his arms folded over his chest.
As she passed him, his eyes gleamed ruthlessly. “Give my…regards to your brother. He’s to be congratulated for having a sister like you.”
She stared at him, felt the urge to ask for an explanation. It fizzled out as it formed.
Feeling ice spreading from her center outward, she turned away, let Harres steer her outside the palace.
He sat beside her in his limo, the eerie silence that had replaced their animated conversations, his feigned interest and indulgence, deepening her freeze.
They arrived at the private airport they’d landed in only hours ago. What a difference that time had made.
He rushed out of the limo before it came to a full stop. He materialized on her side in seconds, handed her out of the limo, led her to the sleek silver Boeing 737 purring like a giant alien bird on the pristine tarmac.
His movements were measured, his hold the epitome of composure. The vibes emanating from him were the opposite.
At the stairs he turned to her. But though the move was controlled, his eyes were anything but, storming with emotions barely held in check. His voice sounded even more agitated. “What was that back at the palace?”
It couldn’t be just his displeasure at her rewriting his expected dumping scene, could it?
Stop it. She must stop casting anything she felt from him through the prism of nobility and sincerity. She’d heard the truth with her own ears. What was she waiting for? To have it said to her face?
She wouldn’t survive that. End this. Now.
She shrugged, started to turn away, to run away.
His hand snagged hers. But it was the confusion and hurt she thought she saw eclipsing the twin suns of his eyes that stopped her, captured her. “You’re saying it was all for your brother? To manipulate me into setting him free?”
How could he still sound so genuine? How could she still be so pathetic that she wanted to believe him, melt into his arms, to answer her walking orders with proclamations of undying love?
Ghabeyah. Stupid. That was what her informant had called her.
No. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her weep for him. She was so far beneath him, so disadvantaged, in every way, but especially in the depth of her involvement. She could only try to leave him on equal ground in at least that.
She heard the acid that now filled her arteries drip from her voice. “That wasn’t too far to go to make you help an innocent man prove his innocence, don’t you think?”
She’d seen him get shot. He hadn’t reacted this spectacularly then. After his recoil, he stilled, seeming to loom larger, his vibe darkening until it was deeper than the night enveloping them.
Then he finally snarled, “It is I who has gone far farther to help a guilty man get away with his crimes.”
For a moment she didn’t get his meaning. Just as it dawned on her, he gritted out, “I guess committing fraud runs in your family, after all.”
She staggered out of his hold. “I didn’t think even you would go that far.”
“Even me? What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. None of it meant anything.” She’d crumble at his feet any moment now. Get away from him.
She groped for the rails. He caught her back, twisted her around to face him. His face was a conflagration of every distraught emotion humanly achievable.
You’re seeing what you want to see.
Pain skewered her, tearing the last tatters of her sanity.
“What is it?” she rasped. “Is your ego smarting? You want me to go but still want me to beg to stay? Or maybe you want another payment for Todd’s freedom? On board your jet? I can give you one last go if you want to cross another fantasy off your list, with a reluctant woman this time.”
For an eternity, it seemed, horror froze his features. Then his phone rang. He lurched, looked down as if not understanding where the sound was coming from, or its significance.
She broke away from his now loose hold, ran up the stairs. She wanted to keep running, out of her very skin.
Then she had to stop, heaped on the farthest seat in the jet. She begged the first person who came offering her services to please, leave her alone. She wanted nothing.
She only wanted to let the pain eat her up.
And for the duration of the flight toward a home she’d forgotten, a home no longer for now she’d remain forever homeless, she let it.
“Talia! You did it!”
Talia slumped against the door she’d just closed.
Todd.
She swung around, and there he was zooming toward her, his eyes filled with tears as he pounced on her and snatched her into a crushing embrace.
&
nbsp; She shook, her battered mind unable to grasp the reality of his presence, here, so soon. How…?
She must have voiced her shock. He pulled back, held her at arm’s length, his eyes, so much like hers, unsteady and avid over her face. “How did you do it? Mark told me you were trying to get me out, but I didn’t dare hope that you would actually do it.”
She almost told him, I sold my soul to the devil for your freedom. But that wouldn’t be accurate. She’d given her soul of her own free will to said devil. And she’d asked for nothing in return. Todd’s freedom hadn’t been the price of her soul, just another strand in a convoluted, undetectable web of manipulation.
Yet to see him, free, here, was worth anything.
Not that she could bear more turmoil now, or contact, with even the brother who’d always felt like a physical part of her. Every nerve in her body felt exposed.
She pushed away, shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I did. What’s important is that you’re free and exonerated.”
“How can you say that? I need to know if you got yourself in trouble for me.”
“What’s important is you’re out and can resume your life.”
“Oh, God, you did do something terrible, didn’t you?” He caught her by the shoulders, his agitation mounting, shaking his whole slight frame. “Whatever you did, undo it. I’ll go back to prison, serve the rest of my sentence.”
“Don’t worry, Todd. I’ll deal.”
But the lie must have been blatant on her face. Todd’s tears flowed down his shuddering, flushed face. “Please, Talia, take it back. I’m not worth it.”
“Of course you are. You’re my brother, my twin. And the most important thing is that you’re innocent.”
“But I’m not.”
She’d thought she’d depleted her reserves for shock, that all that was left in her was oceans of grief and agony.
She stared at Todd, denial still fighting to ward off comprehension. His next words ended its struggle.
