The Last Prince of Dahaar(15)
She swallowed and turned away from the screen. There it was—all the proof she had needed so desperately.
The truth of what he had said to her—that this wedding was solely for the benefit of his people, for his parents, was all laid out on the screen to see. Nothing but his sense of duty was forcing him to stand there, as it was forcing him to marry her.
The realization, instead of appeasing her, gave way to a strange heaviness that pervaded through her limbs.
She turned around, just as her father stepped into the room, dressed in the dark green military uniform of Siyaad.
She had done everything she could to avoid him once they had left for Dahaara. Busy as he had been in negotiations with King Malik and Prince Ayaan, it had been easy enough.
But, suddenly facing him in her bridal attire, the knot of anger she kept a tight hold on threatened to unravel. “Have you come to make sure I have not run away?”
Saira’s gasp next to her checked the flow of bitterness that pounded through her veins. Passing a worried look between them, Saira excused herself, having never understood Zohra’s antipathy toward their father.
“I know you’re not happy with this alliance, Zohra. But I never doubted that you would do your duty.”
There it was, that word again. It had broken her family apart, it had thrust her into an unknown world, and it had taken the life of her mother, who had done nothing but pine after the man she had loved.
She stood up from the divan and met his gaze. “I’m doing this for Saira and Wasim. I don’t want Saira to be sacrificed in the name of duty, too.”
He ventured into the room, and she braced herself for the impact of his presence. In the eleven years that she had lived in Siyaad, she had always stayed out of his way, made sure she spent the least amount of time with him.
“Is that what this marriage is to you? Can you not view it as anything else but sacrifice?”
“What else could it be? You didn’t ask me if I wanted this. That man,” she said, pointing her finger toward the screen, “didn’t ask me if I wanted to be his wife. You have reduced my life to an addendum clause on a treaty.”
His jaw tightened. “You will be the future queen of Dahaar, a woman who can have just as much power as she wants in the tri-nation region. Your education, your intelligence, they can be used to do good in Dahaar, Zuran and Siyaad, to pave way for new things, to change old ways, ways you have always called archaic. No one will ever dare question your right to rule along with Prince Ayaan. You will live the rest of your life with the utmost—”
“This alliance is nothing but a way to secure Siyaad’s future.”
He nodded, sudden exhaustion seeping into his face. “I am glad that Saira and Wasim mean something to you.” Unlike me, the words hovered in the air between them. “That means you will at least keep an eye on them.”
Zohra refused to feel guilty, refused to let him put her in the wrong when he had made an irrevocable decision all those years ago, when he continued to show again and again that Siyaad would always come first with him. “They are my family. I will do anything for them,” she said, forcing herself to speak the words. “They are the only reason I’ve stayed—”
“In Siyaad all these years, I know.”
The knot in her throat cut off her breath. She held herself absolutely still as he neared her, her gut twisting on itself. The sandalwood scent of him knocked her sideways, unlocking memories she had forcibly buried. Maybe if he had always been an absentee father, maybe if she didn’t remember her mother’s desolation, her own aching grief when she had been told one fine morning that her father was dead...