Emotion flashed in his brother’s gaze but Ayaan had no idea which one.
“If your plan is to bring back memories that will suddenly fill me with a love for life, how about some good ones, Ayaan? Why don’t you invite one of the numerous women I slept with six years ago to the palace?” He slanted a wicked glance at Zohra before looking at Ayaan again. “There used to be a particularly sexy stripper in that nightclub in Monaco who could do the wildest things with her tongue. If you want to see me rejoin the living, send the starchy doctor away, build a pole in my wing and have that stripper on a…”
His words tapering off, his brother looked as if he was the one dealt a punch.
Nikhat stood at the entrance to the hall. Against the colorful, blood-red rug on the wall behind her, she looked deathly pale. Their gazes locked on each other, Azeez and Nikhat stood unmoving, as if they were bound to each other.
Tension coiled tighter and tighter in the air around them.
His brother recovered first. And watching him closely, seeing a dark light come to life in his eyes, Ayaan realized that he’d made a terrible mistake.
“I’m regaling my brother and his wife with stories about Monaco. Was it the year right after you left?”
Beneath the humor, something else reverberated in Azeez’s words, filling the vast hall with it.
“Does it matter when it was that you went around seducing the entire female population in Monaco, shaming Dahaar and your father with your wild exploits?” Nikhat delivered with equally lethal smoothness, even as her skin failed to recover its color.
Walking around Ayaan to Zohra’s side, Nikhat whispered something to her. And walked out of the hall without another glance at his brother.
“Enough games, Ayaan. Why is she here?” Azeez roared the moment she left.
“Zohra is pregnant and is having complications. Nikhat is one of the best obstetricians in the country today. I need her to take care of my wife.”
Azeez turned toward Zohra, his gaze assessing. “Congratulations to both of you. If she has to be here, keep her out of my way. Tell her she’s forbidden from seeing me.”
“I won’t tell her any such thing. Nikhat is practically a member of this family. And she’s doing me a favor. So unless you want to be my personal prisoner for the rest of your life, you better behave yourself.”
“You’ve become a damn bastard, brother.”
Ayaan laughed, the first in a long time he had truly done that. “I had to become one for Dahaar, Azeez. See, I wasn’t born one like you are. It’s the reason why you were so good at being the Crown Prince too. The minute you want it back, the crown’s yours.”
“That was a lifetime ago.” Tight lines fanning around his mouth, Azeez stepped back. As if Ayaan had asked him to jump into the fiery pit of hell. “It’s all yours now.”
Azeez left the room, leaving a dark silence in his wake.
Once, his brother would have given his life to Dahaar. Once, a fire had shone in his eyes at the mere mention of it.
“Something’s changed in him,” Zohra said, a hint of warning in her voice. “And…Nikhat looked like she would break apart with one word from him.”
Reaching for her outstretched hand on the table, Ayaan nodded. In four months of banging his head against the intractable wall that his brother had become, this was the first time there was a faint crack. He felt tremulous hope and excruciating guilt.