she fought to hold herself together, to fight the urge to flee the palace and never look back.
How many times was she going to flee?
She had worked so hard to realize her dream, had waited all these years to see her family again and she couldn’t let anyone stop her now. Not even the man she had once loved with every breath in her body.
Letting herself breathe through the panic in her head, she forced calm into her voice. “I haven’t heard a word about this.”
“Because no one other than a few trusted servants and my parents know. Until I can be sure that revealing that he’s alive doesn’t have a negative effect on Dahaar, I have to contain it.” His voice shook and Nikhat reached for his hand this time, even as she fought her own alarm.
How could he be alive after all these years? How was he now?
“I found him four months ago in the desert and I still have no idea how he survived or what he did these past six years. He refuses to see our parents, he barely tolerates my visits. The true prince of Dahaar is now my prisoner.” Utter desolation spewed into his words. “I have managed to keep it a secret until now. It would crush the people of Dahaar to see him like this. They…”
“They worshipped him, I know.” He’d been their golden prince, arrogant but charming, courageous, born to rule his country. And he had loved Dahaar with a passion that had colored everything he had done.
His love, his passion…they were like a desert storm, consuming you, changing you if you came out alive.
“I’d hoped that he would get better, that sooner or later, he would decide to rejoin the living.” Powerlessness colored his gaze, his words raw and jittery. “But with each passing day, he…”
Azeez is alive.
The words rang round and round in her head. But with the dizzying of her emotions also came the control she had developed in order to flourish in her career. “Ayaan? What’s wrong with him?” she demanded, forgetting propriety.
“He is little more than a breathing corpse. He refuses to talk, he refuses to see a doctor. He’s refusing to live…Nikhat, and I can’t lose him all over again.”
A knot of fear unraveled in her stomach now. “What exactly is this favor that you want to ask me?”
“Spend some time with him.”
No. The word rang through her. Shaking her head, she stepped away from Ayaan. “I’m an obstetrician, Ayaan. Not a psychiatrist. There’s nothing I can do for him that all your specialists can’t.”
“He won’t let anyone see him. You…you he won’t refuse.”
She felt brittle now, as if her calm was nothing but a facade, as if she would fracture under it. But she couldn’t fall apart, she refused to let pain and powerlessness wreak havoc on her again. “You don’t know what your brother will do if he sees me.”
“Anything is better than what he is now.”
“And what about the price I’ll have to pay?” The question escaped her before she knew she had said it.
His head jerking up, he studied her. Nikhat looked away. The air between with them reverberated with questions he didn’t ask and she didn’t answer.
Ayaan reached her, his jaw tight with determination. There was no grief or comforting familiarity in his face now. He was the man who had come back to life against all odds, the man who fought his demons every day to do his duty by Dahaar.
“Would it be such a high price? All I’m asking for is a few months. I’m running out of options. I have to find something that will pull him from this spiral. Spend some time with him alone in the palace. Talk to him, try anything that might—”
“If word of this gets out, I’ll be damned for the rest of my life in Dahaara,” she said, only realizing after she spoke that she was even considering the proposition. “That clinic you are baiting me with will be nothing but a sand castle.”
“The Crown Princess Zohra is pregnant. She needs someone who will stay in the palace, a dedicated ob-gyn. And as to any time you spend with Azeez, no one will know you are with him. I give you my word, Nikhat. I will protect your reputation with everything I have. My coronation is in two months. At that time, whatever state he is in, you can walk away from him. No one will stop you.”
Two months with a man who would once again plunge her into her darkest fear. Two months revisiting everything she couldn’t have, couldn’t be. Ya Allah, no. “You’ve no idea what you’re asking me to do.”
“I was hoping that you would accept my proposition, but I cannot give you a choice, Nikhat. Desperation never leaves you with one. As of this moment, you’re either the Crown Prince’s guest or prisoner. If I have to lock you with him, I’ll…” His words reverberated with a pain she herself was very familiar with. “He’s my brother. He was once your friend. We owe it to him.”
Her friend? Hysterical laughter bubbled up inside her.
Azeez bin Rashid Al Sharif had never been just her friend. He had been her champion, he had been her prince, and he had been the man who had promised to make her every dream come true.
And he had kept each and every one of his promises.
Nikhat sprang to her feet and straightened her shoulders. She met Ayaan’s gaze and nodded before she could refuse, before ghosts of the past crippled her courage, before her bitterest fear trampled her sense of duty.
She would do it because she owed it to King Malik for turning a middle-class girl’s fantastic dream to be a doctor into reality; she would do it for a childhood friend who had been through hell and survived; but more than anything, she would do it for the man who had once loved her more than anything in the world.
It was not his fault that she wasn’t the woman he had thought her. “I will do it,” she whispered, the true consequences of what she had accepted weighing her down.
Strong arms embraced her tightly. “I have to warn you, Nikhat. He’s not the man you or I knew. I’m not even sure that man exists anymore.”
* * *
There she was again, tall, beautiful, graceful.
Like a mirage in the desert, she appeared every day during this time to taunt him, to remind him of everything he was not.
The darkest time of the day when dawn was a mere hour away, when he found himself staring at the rise of another day with nothing but self-loathing to greet it with.
However drunk he got, it was the time the reality of everything he had become, everything he had done, pressed upon Azeez.
He had been the Crown Prince once. Now he was the Crown Prince’s prisoner, a fitting punishment for the man responsible for his sister’s death, his brother’s suffering and so much more.
Just the passing thought was enough to feel the palace walls close around him.
A cold breeze flew in through the wide-open doors to his right. The cold nipped at his bare
