The Last Prince of Dahaar(32)
He smiled, a genuine curve of his mouth, a banked firework in his eyes. It cut grooves in his hollowed-out cheeks and sent a pang through her gut. “I—”
“It’s the first sensible thing you have said since you stormed into my suite.” He turned away from her. “Khaleef found me in the desert, a couple of months after the attack. According to him, I...” She saw him swallow with great effort. “I was incoherent and violent when he approached me. He didn’t let me out of his sight until he could personally alert my father. My father took one look at me and sent me off to a castle in the heart of the Alps, where I was conveniently and blissfully mad for five years.”
His words were so matter-of-fact, even when they held so much pain, that Zohra couldn’t even speak for a few minutes. “Mad?”
He stared at her, as if suddenly realizing that she was there. “Mentally ill, violent, incoherent.”
“Do you...remember what happened after you were captured?”
This time, there was no hiding the pain even in his stark face. “Most of it has come back to me.”
“In your nightmares?”
He nodded, a flash of surprise in his gaze.
“So your mother had no idea that you were alive all these years or what...you have been through?”
He shook his head.
What had happened to him in the desert? What horrors did his mind revisit in those terrible nightmares?
Zohra hugged the strange fear that gripped her gut. She didn’t want to know, not because the truth of what had been done to him would scare her. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But she was terrified of her own reaction, of crossing over a threshold and stepping into a path from which there was no return. Instead, she asked him something that had been bothering her, something that needed to be said even if it meant incurring his wrath.
“You said you were doing this—” she moved her hands to encompass them “—for your parents. But what’s the point if your behavior is hurting your mother?”
He looked genuinely shocked, his frown deepening. Pure anger flattened his mouth and he took a step toward her. “You are lecturing me about duty toward one’s parents? You’ve got a nerve.”
Zohra refused to back down, even though his words hit her hard. “I’ve spent the better part of two weeks humoring your mother, seeing everything she hides from you and your father. Do you know that she hasn’t spoken to him since you....returned? She feels so...”
Every time she looked at Queen Fatima, at the repressed pain in her eyes, Zohra’s own pain, her mother’s desolation after her father had left, it all rose to the surface. Lies, even told with the best intentions, caused pain much more terrible than truth itself. “I have seen the tears she hides from you and your father.”
His skin lost pallor as though she had delivered him a physical blow.
“And yet you...avoid her. You barely exchange two words with her. She is standing on the outside, looking at you, wondering what she has done that you won’t even—”
“How can she think she has done anything wrong?”
“Then why won’t you speak with her, why won’t you even meet her gaze?”
“Because I’m not my brother.”