by Olivia Gates
Saeed obsidian eyes only hardened. “King Malek is convinced that he has your pledge to remain by his side until he reaches a solution that will allow him to take you, and only you, as his wife. You want to break your pledge?”
“I must.” It was a cry so shrill it made him wince. She panted, continued, her voice wobbling. “There is no solution and he knows it. But right now he’s willing to risk anything to keep his pledge to me. I can’t let him do this to Damhoor, to himself. Without me in the picture, he’ll be the most powerful, most benevolent king who ever lived. With me he’ll be a ruler at war with his own country, finding no peace, ending up with strife on his conscience, even blood on his hands, and I’m—I’m not w-worth that, n-nothing is…”
She wept. Until she felt she’d dissolve and solve everyone’s problems. Saeed watched her break down in utter helplessness.
A long time later, still quaking, she struggled to talk through the hacking sobs. “By leaving I’ll remove the one reason this prosperous land might find itself in the throes of a civil war—like those tearing so many neighboring nations apart.”
Saeed shook his salt-and-pepper head. “King Malek said he’ll find a way. And he will. Don’t you have faith in him?”
“I have every faith in him,” she cried. “But he’s not thinking clearly now. Malek…his fortitude staggers me but even he has limits and he’s taken more blows in the last year than anyone should endure in ten lifetimes. Majd, his father, finding himself crowned king, being forced to relinquish his vocation, his freedom. And he’d already demanded too much of himself, drawing on his reserves constantly, pouring himself into his work. I hoped to be his biggest support but I’m now his greatest burden and I’ll remain that and I can’t…”
“You can’t?” Saeed barked. “What about King Malek? I thought no man could love a woman like I loved my late wife. But his love for you makes what drove me to despair for years, what makes me unable to feel anything for another woman ever again, seem like nothing. Your desertion will kill him!”
“No!” The paroxysm drove her to her knees, raining tears on the very ground Malek walked on. “Please—don’t. I’m leaving so he can live, be in peace, be happy—eventually. He’ll forget me. It’ll be difficult at first, but time and distance will—”
“Nothing will make him forget.” Saeed’s harsh growl interrupted her torn words. “King Malek was born on my hands, as we say here. I never knew anyone more steadfast. He’s fastidious with his trust but, once won, his trust is for life, he’s wary to commit, but once he commits only death can make him break his commitments. With you he’s compounded total trust and commitment with what he’ll never give another woman—love.”
“Don’t—I can’t take this…” she almost screamed. “If I stay, and all hell breaks loose, he’ll end up hating me. Or he’ll be forced to take a wife to stem the conflicts and I—I…”
“You’re really thinking of yourself here, aren’t you?” Saeed lashed out. “You’re afraid he’ll come to hate you, so you want to save yourself possible future discomfort by breaking his heart now. You can’t bear the idea of sharing him with another woman even for the cause you claim to find so much bigger than yourself because you’re afraid he’ll find you wanting in contrast to his imposed wife. You want to save yourself the humiliation of a comparison you believe you’ll lose.”
His words fell on her like scythes. But it wasn’t their mercilessness that she felt—it was the razor sharpness of the images they evoked.
Malek, in a royal ceremony, god-like, exchanging vows with the woman he’d settle on to appease his kingdom. Malek, running to her to make good on his pledge.
Then time passed and the pressure for an heir grew, and he went to his first wife, a woman to fit a king, raised from birth to be a queen, favored by all, the instrument of peace and prosperity, his equal in beauty and refinement, sharing his background and culture, versed in all the nuances Jay could never learn, and in the arts of seducing and servicing her man.
And he joined his body to hers, took his pleasure inside her, spilled his seed and came to covet her, even love her, with the bond of children cementing her hold over him.
While Jay became the woman he looked on in disappointment and confusion, wondering how he’d once contemplated risking so much for her, concluding that his emotional turmoil at the time and the ordeals they’d shared had deluded him, had coated her blandness with magic, a magic that drained away with each layer of stability his new family brought to his life, every encounter of true passion he shared with his rightful wife.
But though he no longer felt anything for her but pity for her dependence, regret for his unintentional exploitation, even revulsion for her continued hunger, he’d show her mercy.
And she finally understood what her mother had suffered. How she’d come to end her own life.
Not that she ever would. But she felt them now. The depths of desperation that could make a slow, painful death a release.
She rose to suddenly steady feet, her voice unwavering as she heard herself say, “You’re right.”
Saeed jerked as if she’d slapped him. He’d been goading her to rage against his accusations, to prove their falseness by staying near his master and forgetting her moment of weakness.
For a long moment he searched her now dry eyes. She knew he’d find nothing there. He’d shown her the future and everything she was had died just getting a glimpse at it.
“I always believed my master’s judgment unerring,” he finally drawled. “His belief in your worth formed a great part of my regard for you. But if you won’t lay down your life for a man of his greatness, let alone weather some hardships and uncertainties, it seems both of us have been wrong this time.”
It was another attempt to rouse her to self-defense. It had no effect. Neither did the contemptuous if still pleading accusation in his eyes.
So this was what her mother had sought in death. The anesthesia. The cessation. The nothingness.
She wiped the last of the wetness from her cheeks. “Then you should be glad that your master will be rid of such a fickle weakling so unfit of his passion and faith. Will you help me get out of Damhoor now? He assigned a dozen of his best men to my protection and service now he’s scared for my safety. I won’t be able to go anywhere without him knowing about it. And as he’s still under the spell of his misguided affections, he’ll come after me.”
Saeed still hesitated, unable to shake his own affection and faith that easily. Any minute now he’d conclude she was in the grip of understandable turmoil, would do her the merciful courtesy of forgetting her temporary lapse. Then she’d be trapped here. She’d end up destroying Malek, and Damhoor.
She lashed out in a last desperate attempt with the most vicious thing she could think of. “If you don’t help me out of here, I’ll call the American embassy and accuse Malek of holding me here against my will.”
And if she still had a life, she would have feared for it at that moment.
As it was, the flare of murderous fury in Saeed’s eyes only told her she’d be out of there before she knew what hit her.
She’d won.
And she’d lost. Everything.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I’M LOSING HER!” Jay shouted at her scrabbling team in the chaotic ER as she checked their car-crash casualty’s plummeting vitals. She turned to one of her three nurses. “Heather, get me an echocardiogram. Then I’m going for a pericardiocentesis under echocardiographic guidance.”
Mrs. Dobbs had all signs of cardiac tamponade. Engorged neck veins, absent heart sounds, plummeting blood pressure not responsive to treatment. Blood was pumping out of a tear in one of the heart’s chambers, filling the pericardium, compressing the ventricles to a standstill.
Jay had to introduce a needle through the chest, enter the pericardial sac and drain all she could of the blood.
“Sally, 20-gauge cardiac needle,” Jay ordered. “Fifty-mil syringe. Josh, ready the defibrillator. Then el
evate bed to 45 degrees.”
She snatched the echocardiogram from Heather, found the tamponade. Massive. Rapidly fatal if left to accumulate further.
She dragged the echocardiogram machine nearer, looked at the images on the monitor, advanced the needle towards the shoulder, injected air. She detected the bubbles on the monitor within the pericardial sac. She was in!
She aspirated and blood gushed, filling the syringe.
After a drastic improvement in blood pressure and pulse, blood re-accumulated, and they aspirated again. On the fourth aspiration the woman fibrillated.
She snatched the charged defibrillator from Josh, shouted, “Clear.”
The woman responded with the first jolt, sinus rhythm resuming. But in minutes she fibrillated again.
After the second defibrillation, Jay knew what had to do done. Something she’d only done once. The patient had died then.
“She needs an emergency thoracotomy.”
It was Jay’s heart that stopped this time. And wouldn’t start again.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Not here. Not him.
Malek.
She swung around, breathless, mindless, found him a foot behind her, his eyes flaring amber even in the ER’s fluorescent light.
Malek. Her soul made flesh, made man, the man who’d once been hers, the soul she’d resigned herself to existing without.
His hand took her arm and she almost wailed with the wrench of longing.
“Let’s do this,” he whispered as he snapped on gloves, turned to the nurses who were gaping at him, knowing they were in the presence of a higher medical authority. “We’ll need a scalpel with a 10 blade, curved scissors, rib spreader, Gigli saw. And a full hemostatic set.”
Everyone turned to Jay, asking her permission to follow this unknown person’s orders. Jay only nodded, not knowing what she was nodding for, and stared up at him. Malek, Malek, Malek, here, here, here were the only things she heard, saw, knew. He pressed her arm again and it was only her paralysis that stopped her from launching herself into his arms.
“I’m really here, so make use of me, hmm?” He gave her a strange smile, tight and unnatural then turned to the nurses. “Prep the field.” He looked down at her. “Shall I do it?”
She nodded again, and he immediately made an incision from the sternum to the mid-axillary line then murmured, “Rib spreader.” She automatically handed it to him. He inserted it between the ribs, opened them. “Gigli saw.” She handed it to him too. He divided the sternum, moved the rib spreader to the midline. He made a small incision in the pericardium then tore it open with a finger, evacuating blood and clots.
The sight of the cardiac wounds oozing blood brought her out of her stupor. She jumped forward, provided hemorrhage control to the largest one with direct finger pressure while he sutured lesser wounds. In under two minutes he’d performed a meticulous repair of two wounds in the ascending aorta and one in the left atrium. And the woman arrested again.
“You do internal cardiac massage,” he murmured. “Your hands are the perfect size for it.”
She nodded, did a two-handed technique for a better cardiac output and to avoid the risk of cardiac perforation. The heart restarted, and this time didn’t stop again.
It was a blur as they concluded the procedure.
As orderlies took their patient to IC, all she wanted to do was collapse. To weep her heart out at the shock and disbelief of his sudden reappearance.
Malek, here in Seattle, after six months of self-imposed exile in the hell of a life without him, working with her like they’d done before, more needed than her hands and eyes, saving the patient she would have lost on her own or with lesser help.
She staggered to the doctors’ room, not looking back, praying he was a figment of her tortured imagination. Once inside, hands grabbed her shoulders. They were his.
He turned her, and she almost doubled over at the sight of the silver that had invaded his temples, at the reflection of her own unremitting longing on his haggard face.
She’d give anything to always see him whole and happy, not with the signs of aging anguish robbing his hair of its raven vividness, his eyes and face of their indomitable vitality.
Those signs said he was real. Real. And he was there to plunge himself into more torment, unable to let her go, as she hadn’t been able to let him go.
But nothing had changed, as he’d once told her before she’d done him the ultimate injury and dragged him deeper into their addiction. Yet no one but her paid the price of hers. A whole country paid for his. She didn’t matter. He did.
And she had to help him let go.
Mustering the last of her will, she stepped out of his almost-embrace, feigned lightness as she said, “This is one hell of a surprise, Malek. And one hell of a favor. I would have lost Mrs. Dobbs without your help.”
He only nodded, his eyes darkening, wary, watching her every breath, as if he was trying to read her thoughts and feelings.
She went to the dressing room, put on her summer coat. Her personal thermostat had been shot to hell of late. She was freezing now.
She came out, found him standing in the same spot where she’d left him, a stoop to his wide shoulders, and her heart almost knocked her off her feet. She’d seen him exhausted, agitated, uncertain, but seeing him defeated, lost…
Oh, Malek, my love, not on my account, I beg you.
Determined more than ever to end this, to send him back to his life, and out of hers, forever this time, she forced a brittle smile. “So how did you find me?”
“You’re asking because you hoped I wouldn’t, right?” This was said with such pain she almost fell to her knees to beg his forgiveness. “You hid well. It took my intelligence machine, aided by the American one, all this time to find you.”
She attempted a smile. “Hope the CIA and FBI didn’t think you wanted me for some crime committed on Damhoorian soil.”
His only answer was a grimace before he bent his head, examined his feet in utter bleakness for a moment.
Then he straightened, like someone bracing himself for a fatal blow. “I guess as you didn’t want me to find you, you’re not exactly happy I’m here.” He stopped, a vulnerability she’d never seen entering his eyes, his posture, as if he was begging her to contradict him. She managed not to at the price of years off her life. He went on, his jaw muscles working, the rest of his face barely under control, “Happy or not, I don’t think it’s too much to ask to talk. If you’ll, please, come with me, where we can be alone.”
Alone. Didn’t he know she’d always remain so without him? He should never know. But to be alone with him again…
The decision overtook her, left her lips. “OK.”
His tension deflated as if with a gut punch. Then he strode towards her, his intention to take her in his arms explicit in every ravenous line and move. She pretended to spin around to fetch her bag. She straightened to find him two steps away, bewilderment and hurt coming off of him in waves.
And she made a second mistake. “Would you like to come to my place?”
He staggered a step backward, confusion twisting his beloved face. Then determination hardened it and he took her arm, gripped it harder than necessary as he guided her out of the hospital, as if afraid she’d dissolve if he loosened his hold.
People turned to gape at him. Not only was he the most magnificent male on earth, they must recognize him, too, must be wondering what a king was doing there, and with her to boot.
Outside, the limo awaiting them wasn’t a diplomatic one. Saeed was the driver. She met his eyes as he opened the door for them, saw that the accusation and the fury of their last encounter had turned into something akin to hatred.
She faltered. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all…”
Malek’s hand tightened. “No, Janaan. You’re not running out on me again. Not before we talk. Get in, please.”
He’d said “please”, but she knew he’d haul her over his shoulder all t
he way to her condo if she refused. She got in.
She kept her eyes averted, looking into nothingness as Seattle zoomed by.
She didn’t need to give her address. He already knew it. She wondered how much more he knew. Wondered what would happen once they were alone.
Nothing, she railed at herself. Nothing would happen, then he’d be the one to walk out on her this time. This time forever.
In thirty minutes he was taking her key from her, unlocking her door and pushing it open for her.
She walked into her utilitarian space on rigid, numb legs and her bag dropped out of her nerveless fingers. It fell on the couch she passed by, didn’t betray her collapsing condition.
She leaned on the first wall she reached, asked with forced brightness, “Would you like something to drink?”
“I would like you to stop behaving as if we’re strangers,” he grated, waited for a reaction. When there was none, he prowled into her reception area, shrinking it, making everything look drab and insignificant in comparison, her neat place, herself—life. Then his gaze suddenly slammed into her, pinned her to the wall like a butterfly on a board.
Then he finally rasped, “Did you see the ceremony?”
And Jay felt her world ending all over again.
She’d been waiting for the guillotine blade to fall, but it still hacked her to pieces when it did. She’d been avoiding all media—and people—like the plague. Anyone who’d known she’d been to Damhoor had wanted to relate news of the country and its exciting new hunk of a king. She’d shut herself out, unable to bear hearing any mention of him or his country.
And here he was, forcing the news on her.
So he’d had a ceremony. Had chosen a wife. The wife considered suitable, the wife he’d now take to bed, or might have already taken to bed, the one who’d bear him heirs, or might already be bearing the first of many.
But it seemed his new wife’s charms hadn’t worked yet. Or was he not giving the woman a chance, because he was still pining for her? Or maybe he was there to appease his honor, fulfill his pledge, offer her the best he could provide, a position as his second wife. And he was waiting for an answer.
