Numair shook his head, suffocating with urgency. “I haven’t made up my mind. I’ve just called you here to vet things out. I’m just telling you what I’ve come to believe lately.”
“If you’re still revising your stance, I hope you’ll reconsider your belief about my father’s guilt. I know I have no proof. I have nothing but my instincts and my lifelong knowledge of him. But if you’ve come to value me, I hope you’ll value my judgment, too.”
“Any resolution has to wait for another time, Najeeb.”
“Just promise me you won’t take any steps against him before we have unequivocal proof.”
“I will do nothing until I get Jenan back. Only she matters to me now. Only she matters, period.”
Knowing this was the most he’d get from Numair for now, Najeeb nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, he extended his hand. “I’m sorry I made things worse. I hope you forgive me. I will do anything to rectify my mistake.”
Even with a tornado of anxiety tearing everything up inside him, he took the proffered hand. “I was the one who started this, and I’ll be the one to end it. At any price.”
Before Numair withdrew his hand, Najeeb tightened his grip and dragged him closer, his eyes ablaze with sincerity. “I didn’t mean what I said about Jenan earlier. She loves you, and if you love her as much, she’ll believe you and in you again. She will take you back.”
Numair said nothing as Najeeb turned to leave. For he’d felt how hurt Jenan had been, how pregnancy had multiplied her feeling of betrayal by a factor of a thousand. As he’d feared it would. Getting her back now felt like an impossibility.
But if he couldn’t get her back, he would still pay his very life to restore her peace.
* * *
Two hours later, Numair couldn’t wait anymore. One more second of inaction and he would suffer a stroke.
So he rushed to Zafrana’s royal palace, all the way preparing his explanations. But he didn’t find her there. The last time her family had heard from her was when she’d gone to him earlier that day.
Knowing she wouldn’t answer him, he had her sisters try every method of communication. She answered none.
Out of his mind with anxiety, he sounded the general alarm to his brothers as he tore off to the States to search for her. But she seemed to have disappeared the moment she’d landed in New York, where all flights out of Zafrana landed in the States. During his flight, the men he’d sent looking for her couldn’t find her anywhere she used to frequent, or couldn’t even trace her steps after she left the airport.
His desperation burgeoned with every dead end, every second feeling like wading deeper in a waking nightmare.
Somewhere along the way, the nightmare metamorphosed into his old one.
But this time it was different.
Instead of men boarding his father’s boat, it was tossed by waves as tall as skyscrapers. His father wrestled with a huge sail as he shouted for him to get back belowdecks before losing control of the sail that whacked him violently on the head and knocked him overboard. Then the boat capsized, tossing Numair after him.
Wrestling to the surface of the water, of the dream, his whole body discharging with sick electricity, he called Antonio and demanded that his brother meet him as soon as he landed in New York.
Antonio was there as agreed, in the limo that waited for him outside the airport. As soon as Ameen opened the door for him and he got in, Numair began to recount the searingly vivid vision.
Antonio’s cool blue eyes regarded him calmly before the man exhaled. “That’s what I’ve been hoping for, though I didn’t think it a possibility it would happen spontaneously.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I knew it would take an even more profound terror than the one you suffered when you saw your father drown and almost drowned yourself to drag more memories to the surface. When I asked for more sessions, I was going to try plunging you into an artificial panic state to dig deeper into your psyche. But since you fear nothing, I didn’t know if I could even do it. But something did manage to scare you more than all the horrors in your life. Your fear for Jenan’s safety and your dread you might even lose her. Those fears finally managed to jog your memories free.”