Azeez shifted in the seat restlessly. He wanted to run away from here. “Be rid of me,” he growled, his powerlessness eating through his insides. “All this will be solved in a minute.”
Ayaan rocked forward onto his knees, a fierce scowl on his face. “You think I can just wish away your existence as you have been doing?”
“Then send your wife away. Protect her.”
“I can’t,” Ayaan said, a sarcastic chuckle accompanying his words. “I am to be crowned king in two months, but I can’t dictate my wife’s behavior. I have ordered her to sleep in a separate wing, to go back to Siyaad for a few days. But, like you cleverly noticed, my wife has a will of her own. She won’t leave my side.”
From the moment he had met her steady gaze, Azeez had realized how much Princess Zohra loved his brother. Something he had wanted once, something he had thought he had once.
He swallowed back the surge of envy that gripped him. He would not envy the little happiness that Ayaan had. This had to stop today, now. “Fine. What is it you want from me?”
“What?”
“Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me what I can do to make this…make you better and take this stress off Zohra.”
“Why now, when you have all but thrown back my requests in my face?”
“Because there’s already too much blood on my hands and I don’t want more.”
Ayaan’s face tightened, his gaze filled with pity that Azeez didn’t want. “Azeez, that’s not—”
“This is your chance to protect your wife, Ayaan. Don’t waste it on useless matters.”
“Fine,” his brother said, standing up. “I want you to take care of yourself. I want you to have physiotherapy, I want you to see a psychiatrist, and I want you to see Mother and I want you at my coronation in a—”
“Don’t push it,” Azeez said, feeling the shackles of his brother’s demands binding him to Dahaar. Just the word coronation was like sticking a steel spike into his heart.
With his hand on the armrest, he pushed himself off the chaise. There was only one choice left to him, only one solution to stop the ruin he had begun again. And everything within him revolted at it. “I will do this, but I will do it my own way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t see a team of doctors. Nikhat can attend to me in between attending to Zohra.”
“Azeez,” his brother’s voice rang with warning as Azeez walked toward the exit, keeping his gaze away from everything in the room. “Whatever you are planning to do, don’t. She is here by my request.”
“Exactly. You brought her into this, Ayaan. Now that I’m following your orders, don’t complain about it.”
Stepping outside his brother’s office, Azeez slowly made his way back to his own quarters. He still planned to leave Dahaar. For his own sanity, he had to.
But he would postpone it until things were right with Princess Zohra. And he couldn’t live the rest of his life the way he had been doing, either.
He would do what his brother asked him to do because nothing else would be enough for Ayaan. However, there was no point in a team of doctors poking through his head. There was nothing anyone could do to fix him.