stood squared off against a small, toad-like creature Sterling recognized as one of the paparazzi who had followed her every move in New York. She had no doubt that he was responsible for a great many of the horrible narratives that circulated about her to this day, as he’d taken after her as if Sterling was his pet project. He’d always looked at her as if he could see that truth buried deep inside of her. As if he knew how flawed and unwanted and ruined she truly was.
Part of her wanted nothing more than to leave him to Rihad’s scant and rapidly eroding mercy, but she didn’t dare. Not now, after all the recent bad press and a museum filled with more reporters. She was already enough of a stone draped around Rihad’s neck, dragging him down. There was no need to add an assault-and-battery charge on her behalf to the list of her sins against this man.
“Sterling,” the awful little man oozed at her. “We were just talking about you.”
She didn’t know which part of that offended her more—the way the man looked at her, the way he spoke to her with such unearned familiarity or the way he sidled closer to her with his hand extended as if he planned to put it on—
“Ancient Bakrian law states that if another man touches my queen without my permission I am not only permitted to rend him limb from limb with my own hands, but must do so to protect the honor of the crown,” Rihad said conversationally, and the reporter froze. Rihad’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Barbaric, is it not? And yet so many of my subjects find comfort in the old ways.”
He did not say, myself included, but Sterling felt certain she was not the only one who felt as if he’d shouted it from the rooftops.
The little man’s eyes glittered with a sort of impotent fury that Sterling knew—she knew—would translate into yet another revolting piece about her in the morning papers. She could practically read the article now as it scrolled across the man’s dirty mind.
To this man I will never be anything but a woman like that, Sterling thought miserably, but she only smiled at the reporter as she moved past him to take Rihad’s arm. The Queen Whore herself, parading around like so much pollution.
“You shouldn’t antagonize him,” she said softly as Rihad drew her out onto the dance floor, the elegant crowd parting all around them to let them take its center, as if the tense exchange had never happened. “Not him or any of his little cronies.”
“Must I introduce myself to you all over again?” Rihad’s voice was arrogant, and his dark gold eyes still glittered furiously. “I am the King of Bakri. He should not antagonize me.”
“You are the king, yes,” she agreed, trying to keep her smile in place and her voice low, as befitted such genteel and public a place. “And you should not condescend to notice a man like him. That you do at all is my fault.”
Sterling felt one of his hands tighten against the small of her back, and the other where his larger one gripped hers, and her curse was that she felt all of this like light. It was as if he poured straight into her, banishing all the darkness.
But she knew that wasn’t true. She knew nothing could.
“Do not start this again,” he warned her, his voice harsh despite his placid expression. “Not here.”
“As you wish, Your Majesty,” she murmured, so submissively that it startled a laugh out of him. Which in turn made her laugh, too, when she’d have said that was impossible under the circumstances. And still he spun her around and around that dance floor, as if they were nothing but beautiful. As if all of this was.
And some of the papers the next morning thought so, it was true.
But the others were vile.
There was a list of Sterling’s supposed conquests, spanning the globe and including some countries she’d never visited and many men she’d never met. Another featured a list of her “raciest moments,” which mostly involved skimpy outfits from her more outrageous modeling shoots held up as if she’d paraded around the streets of Manhattan wearing so little.
They didn’t actually call her a whore. But then, they didn’t have to call her anything. The comments section did that for them.
Sterling didn’t mention the articles. Still, she could see the temper crack across Rihad’s face and thought he tried to conceal it from her. Because that was Rihad, she understood now. Duty before all else. And he’d decided she was one of his duties. She cuddled Leyla on her lap and pressed kisses into the sweet crown of her head, and she only smiled when Rihad excused himself.
Because she knew what he refused to accept: this was never going to get better. She was never going to get better, or any less the subject of the repulsive speculation of the public.
And if she stayed here, Rihad and Leyla would rot right along with her.
Sterling might not have known a lot about love, but she knew—deep down she knew—that if she really, truly loved them, she wouldn’t condemn them to that kind of life. Not when it took so little to save them.
So very little.
All she had to do was leave.
* * *
When his chief of security strode into Rihad’s private conference room, scattering the gathered aides and the handful of ambassadors Rihad had been sitting with, he assumed it was about Amaya, at last.
“Has she been found?” he asked when the room was clear.
He thought the feeling that moved in him then was something far closer to regret than relief. But that made no sense. Amaya needed to be found and should have been found months ago. She needed to do her duty, no matter how Rihad might have come to sympathize with her plight. He hadn’t lied to her when he’d told her there were no other options available to them.
But he couldn’t deny the part of him that admired his younger sister for having stayed out of Kavian’s reach all this time. Rihad liked the other man well enough. Respected him, even. But he doubted very much that any other creature on earth had led him on such a merry chase.
“We are tracking her, Your Majesty,” his security chief said, standing at rigid attention, quite as if he expected a reprimand. “We have video of her leaving the palace an hour ago. It looks as if she’s headed for the city limits.”
Rihad digested that statement, and it took him longer than it should have to comprehend that the man was not talking about his sister.
But he couldn’t make sense of what he was hearing.
He was aware that he’d frozen solid where he stood. He heard what his security chief was saying, but he couldn’t seem to move. To react.
She had charmed her way into one of the palace’s fleet of armored vehicles, because she was nothing if not persuasive when she wished. And because she was his queen. Instead of heading for the royal enclosure near the sea, a perfectly reasonable place for her to go without any guards because it was manned with its own, she’d had the driver change direction once they’d left the palace grounds and she’d headed for the far reaches of Bakri City.
There was nothing there, Rihad knew. Nothing save the border.
“My daughter,” he managed to say, over the
