“You’re much prettier here than you were before,” he told her with all that stout, four-year-old certainty. “It’s much better.”
Shona wanted to correct him, but she couldn’t, because much as it shamed her to think such a thing, he was probably right.
Miles had bloomed here. He was happier than he’d ever been. He laughed more. He was joyful and playful and bright. She couldn’t let herself dwell on it too closely or she was afraid she might lapse into some kind of retroactive depression...because the truth was, she’d thought they were fine in New Orleans. She’d thought Miles was fine. She’d thought they were absolutely doing their best—and they’d certainly been doing better than she ever had when she’d been his age.
Maybe all of that was true. But maybe her measure of these things was off. And more than a little sad. Because there was no getting past the fact that Miles was far better off here. He slept well, ate well and never acted out in the ways he had back home. If Shona was honest with herself, she had always felt so guilty she couldn’t spend the kind of time with him she had wanted to because she’d had to work so hard to pay their bills.
Here, if she wanted, she could spend whole days exploring the extensive palace gardens with her son if that took his fancy. They could spend hours watching movies in the middle of a Wednesday morning if they chose. She could do whatever she wanted with him. They could play, or if he caught a cold, he could snuggle up at her side and sleep it away. She never had to worry about picking up an extra shift. Or how she was going to make rent if she called in sick—or whether she dared do such a thing at all, no matter how sick Miles was, because she’d lose her job if she tried.
It shocked her how much happier Miles was here, without the weight of all that forever pressing down on them.
But she was equally shocked by how much happier she was.
For all of those reasons and more.
It was as if she’d had no idea how heavy all that weight was until she’d put it down. And now she couldn’t understand how she’d carried any of it in the first place.
“You look like a queen should,” Miles told her another morning when she came out of her dressing room to find that he was still sitting there, cross-legged on her bed, instead of off with his nannies the way he normally was after breakfast.
She still didn’t like that word. Queen. She still had to fight to pretend she thought it could apply to her. It still ate at her in ways she didn’t like, and it shocked her how deep that went. How dark it made her feel to look at herself dressed up like a stranger.
When all she wanted was to belong. In her own reflection. In these absurd clothes she wore now. In this fairy-tale palace she’d never dared let herself dream about.
Somewhere, the foster kid inside of her whispered. I just want to belong somewhere.
She wanted to growl something dismissive at Miles to make sure he never said anything like that again, but she didn’t. Because there was something about seeing pure love and pride on her baby’s face that kept her usual disparaging remarks inside her own mouth.
“Do you think?” she asked him.
Miles nodded enthusiastically. “You’re queen and Papa is king. And I’m the prince.”
“You’re the crown prince,” she said, agreeing with him.
“And you have to marry Papa,” Miles continued, matter-of-factly. “Or it won’t work.”
“What won’t work?” She had to fight to keep her emotions out of her voice. After all, Miles was only four. He didn’t necessarily know what he was saying. For all she knew he was just parroting one of his nannies.
“The king and the queen have to be married, Mama,” Miles replied, looking at her as if she was crazy. “Everybody knows that.”
“Sometimes mamas and papas don’t get married,” she told him, ignoring the instant cluck of disapproval from Yadira, who was still bustling around inside the dressing room and could hear every word. Shona still wasn’t used to that—to never being truly alone. But this wasn’t the time to worry about that. “That’s perfectly okay, you know. Marriage isn’t for everyone.”
“Maybe for mamas and papas who aren’t kings and queens,” Miles said, rolling his eyes. “But you’re a queen, Mama.”
As if it was something that went without saying. And so obvious that only a fool could possibly think otherwise.
And Shona didn’t know why, but there was something about Miles’s easy acceptance of her as a queen that...eased its way inside her.
Or maybe, if she was honest, it had more to do with Miles’s father. The demanding, focused and inventive Malak, who never stopped playing games with Shona—especially because now, they both won.
Sometimes he would insist that she stand through part of dinner, so he could make good on his threat and eat her alive as his dessert. He took her to his bed every night, and Shona kept waiting for the things they did there to grow old. Familiar.
Because all she’d known of sex and men was that one night long ago. Until another night five years later.
But it turned out that nights with Malak grew better the more of them there were. Deeper. Darker.
More and more magical the more time she had to learn him.
It turned out that Shona was a much better student than she’d ever imagined, back when she’d struggled to make it through this or that high school. Always the new girl. Always temporary. Always behind or ahead of the rest of the class. Always out of sync.
But not here.
She made progress with her Arabic. She learned how to walk like a queen. How to sit like a queen. How to handle herself when faced with the sorts of world leaders who would inevitably find their way to Malak’s side and who would hope to weasel their way closer to him through her.
All day she studied how best to become a queen while at night she learned more and more ways to come alive beneath the hands of the only man who had ever touched her. The only man she wanted to touch.
As far as she was concerned, Malak was the only man in the world. And he made her feel as if she was the only woman he’d ever laid eyes on.
Shona wasn’t sure she had ever felt so alive in her life.
So alive. And so in love with him, despite herself. When she’d always thought she was immune to such things—that love was a failing, not a joy. It was as if every hour was electric now. As if everything was new, even if she’d done it time and time again.
And that was why, the next time Malak called her his queen, she nodded.
She was stretched over him in his bed, her heart still thundering inside her chest. And better yet, she could feel his beating hard, too.
She had ridden him until they both tipped over into bliss, and then she’d collapsed against him the way she always did. His hands still held her bottom, his thumbs moving in rhythmic little circles. This way, then that.
But he went very still when she nodded, moving her head against his chest.
“I beg your pardon? Are you trying to tell me something?”
Because this was Malak. He would not accept a quiet surrender when a loud one would do.
Shona pushed herself up into a sitting position again, sucking in a breath when she felt him, still deep inside her. She felt boneless and wrung out, but all he needed to do was shift his hips and that changed in an instant. She could feel that glorious fire turn over deep inside her, as if she had an ignition switch that only he knew. She could feel the flames begin to lick against her. Everywhere they touched.
The way they always did.
She braced her hands against his chest and gazed down at him, unable, still, to make sense of all of this. Because it felt too good. It felt too...right. Malak hardened again deep inside of her as if he, too, could never get enough. His beautiful body, hers to touch like this.
To claim, something whispered inside of her.
As if he was hers.
She, who had never had anything.
“I will be your queen, Malak,” she told him.
She had me
ant to sound funny. Or wry, anyway. Light and airy and offhand.
But there in the dark of his bedroom it sounded a great deal more like a solemn vow.
And she could see the way his dark eyes gleamed. “Will you indeed.”
“I will,” she said again.
And she moved her hips then, smiling when he responded instantly and surged against her. It was a flame that would never, ever go out, because it lived between them. It was theirs.
She let her smile turned wicked. “For Miles, of course.”
“Of course,” Malak replied, his voice little more than a growl. “I commend your maternal instinct.”
And then Shona was laughing because Malak flipped them over in the bed, coming over her to drive himself deeper inside of her, taking complete control.
And she surrendered.
Her heart was too full. She wanted too much. She had never imagined that she could risk herself this way—
But how could that matter? He was a king. He called her his queen. And better still, her son looked at them both as if they had never been anything but.
Mostly, she thought as Malak surged inside of her, it was him.
It was Malak.
And maybe that was why, when he drove her over the side of the world this time, she tipped her head back and cried out the one thing she had never said to another man. Or any other person alive, besides her son.
“I love you, Malak,” she sobbed, because she had to say it out loud or burst with the force of it. “I love you.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FIRST TIME Shona told him she loved him, Malak did her the great courtesy of ignoring the outburst.
He assumed it was the heat of the moment. The fact they were in bed had obviously confused her and made her lose all sense and reason. After all, he reminded himself, this was all very new to her. He chose to take it as a compliment, nothing more.
Because Malak told himself she could not possibly realize what it was she had said. Or if she did, she would likely be so embarrassed by blurting out something like that, something that was mad and impetuous and plainly absurd, that she would never let that sort of thing fall from her lips again.
But the strangest thing happened in the days that followed: Shona didn’t stop. She wasn’t embarrassed at all, or if she was, she certainly didn’t show it in any way Malak could understand.
On the contrary, it seemed that once Shona had accepted her role as his queen and the more she readied herself to take her place at his side, the more...reckless she grew.
There was no other word for it.
The word love fell from her lips with alarming regularity. And every time she said that damn word—or sobbed it, or moaned it, or whispered it as she slid off into sleep—it was as if she’d picked up a hammer and wielded it directly against his flesh.
Again and again and again, leaving nothing but wounds and bruises behind.
Still, Malak forced himself to remain quiet. To pretend none of that was happening. He kept hoping that if he continued to ignore it, if he acted as if she’d said nothing at all, Shona would stop letting that poisoned word escape her lips.
After all, there was a wedding to plan, one that befit Malak’s new station and allowed his people to properly celebrate all the changes in the kingdom. There were delicate negotiations to pick his way through, inside his family and out. He had to invite his half brother, Adir, who ruled a desert tribe—and more importantly, had helped himself to Zufar’s original betrothed after an unfortunate confrontation at the palace. He had to invite his brother, Zufar, of course, who had abdicated the Khalian throne to rule with his new bride in remote Rumadah. And he had to invite his sister, Galila, and her husband, King Karim of Zyria, who happened to be the son of the man who had been Malak’s mother’s lover all those years ago. The royal diplomacy would have been headache enough. The seething family drama beneath all that diplomacy, though significantly calmer of late, made it all that much more of a minefield.
Because they were all coming, not only to celebrate Malak’s wedding, but to show that the royal family of Khalia, though rocked by all that had happened since Queen Namani had died, stood proud and solid, together.
Malak told himself it was that alone that ate at him, dripping like acid into his heart. His gut. He told himself it was nothing but the same old family nonsense that had nearly destroyed them all already, a hundred times over. All those old secrets and new bonds that had caused so much upheaval, and had ended with Malak on the Khalian throne.
But it wasn’t his family who haunted him. It wasn’t their voices he heard in his head when he was trying to concentrate on his responsibilities.
It was Shona. It was always Shona. It was the way she said “I love you,” over and over, and never seemed the least bit concerned that he failed to respond. Or even to acknowledge that she’d spoken at all.
And yet she slept so easily, sprawled over him or cuddled beside him in his bed. She slept the deep and restorative sleep of the righteous while Malak was the one left wide-awake and staring into nothing, those damn words going round and round inside of him.
Leaving marks wherever they touched.
One day, not long after Shona had started this campaign of hers to ruin what they had between them and drive him fully mad, Malak found himself up in the old family wing of the palace. He had been on his way to a stuffy meeting with his financial advisors and had taken a wrong turn. Then kept right on going.
His mother was gone now. His brother and sister had married and moved away. Malak himself had moved from the family wing to take his place in the monarch’s traditional suite. Now the only inhabitant of these rooms Malak knew so well was his father.
His poor, lonely, broken father, whom Malak had always seen as a victim of love. Even when Tariq had still been king and Namani had still been alive and they’d both continued to put a happy face on their wretched marriage.
Today Malak found the old man in what had once been a playroom but was now the abdicated king’s personal library. And as he stood in the doorway, Malak remembered finding his father exactly like this, across all the years of his childhood. When he wasn’t off ruling the kingdom, Tariq had found an armchair in the family wing and had sat as he did now, a book open in his lap but his gaze fixed somewhere on the other side of the nearest window.
As a child, Malak had imagined his father had been consumed with weighty ruminations regarding the kingdom, the future, his role as king. He’d imagined his father had stared out and seen his own consequence, his own power—both of which Malak had found fascinating as none of that had ever been meant to be his.
He knew now that it was far more likely that the old man had been brooding over the unfaithful wife who had never loved him.
All that power and consequence was Malak’s after all, for his sins. And it didn’t escape him that all he seemed to think about was the woman he was about to marry who couldn’t stop telling him she loved him, when he knew exactly where that led.
Here, he thought darkly. It leads right here.
To a lonely old man in a chair, hidden away in a room filled with memories, ghosts and grief.
Malak stayed where he was in the doorway rather than walking in, as too many competing emotions were roaring through him at once. None he particularly liked. He loved his father. There could be no argument on that score, but it was also true that when he looked at the old man—particularly locked away up here, where nothing could distract him from his endless focus on Namani—he felt a kind of sorrow that knew no name.
A sort of grief, perhaps, for what might have been.
Had his father been a different man. Had his mother been a woman worthy of the kind of devotion the old king had lavished upon her no matter the cost to him, his kingdom or their children. Had either one of his parents thought less about themselves and the tangle of their personal lives and a little bit more about the children they should have been attempting to raise.
Malak had always talke
d himself out of that kind of harsh judgment in the past. Yes, his parents had ignored their children, but it was not as if they had been run-of-the-mill, suburban parents somewhere. They had been King Tariq and Queen Namani of Khalia. They could hardly have been expected to spend the kind of time with their offspring that others with fewer responsibilities did.
They had always had to think of Khalia first.
He had long assured himself that he was being unfair to imagine he should hold his parents to any kind of selfish, imaginary standard, simply because he might have liked some more attention. All the kingdoms of the world were littered with the ignored offspring of royal parents and yet, somehow, the kingdoms carried on.
Besides, Malak had always flourished in all that space he’d been given, with no one to pay the slightest attention to anything he did.
Except now Malak had Miles. He doubted very much that he was any less busy than his father had been, especially as his father had not inherited a throne in the midst of such turmoil with successive abdications. And still, Malak somehow managed to spend time every day with his son. His child, who had spent four years of his young life apart from his father already—something Malak had no intention of repeating as long as he drew breath.
It turned out he was less sympathetic to Tariq than he had been when he’d been single and carefree and hadn’t known what it was like to feel such a fierce love inside of him, to feel the kind of madness that told him he would do anything at all for his own child—except pretend Miles didn’t exist.
“Will you enter the room? Or stand there in the doorway forever?” his father asked mildly, his gaze still directed out the window where, Malak knew, the desert rolled and beckoned.
There was a time when it would have filled Malak with awe that his father knew he had approached when he’d made no sound. He had believed that his father was some sort of god who could see through walls. Clay feet were far less appealing than godlike powers and he thought, all things considered, he would have preferred the magic.
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