The Last Prince of Dahaar(37)
“Does he know how they speak to you?”
“What would he do even if he did? Go back in time and stop having an eight-year-long affair with my mother? Change his mind about walking out on her when it was time to be king? Change his mind about taking custody of his bastard?”
His fingers tightened over her arms. “Stop referring to yourself as that.”
She felt a hot sting at the back of her eyes. She was not going to cry just because someone finally had a glimpse into what eleven years of her life had been. She didn’t need his pity. It only weakened her. “Powerful as you are, you cannot change the truth.”
“What about the threat that Karim made? This man you were involved with...do I need to find Faisal? Is he the kind to—”
Foreboding inched tight across her skin. “How do you know his name?”
“You are my wife. Knowing everything about you, especially—”
“Especially what?” she said, swallowing the distaste his words brought back.
His expression intractable, his aristocratic features reminiscent of centuries of powerful lineage, he was every inch the arrogant prince in that moment. “Especially anything that could come back and cast a bad light on you and Dahaar, I have to know about it. I have to be prepared.”
The same past that she had shamelessly used to try and get out of this marriage to him now curdled in her stomach. “Are you regretting your decision to not listen to me when I warned you? Wondering if you should sever all ties with me and leave me here in Siyaad?”
“I made my vows. Nothing will make me turn my back on them.”
His words cut through her sharper than if he had said he had regrets. “Of course, your blasted word. Nothing in the world is allowed to interfere with it. How much detail do you want? How I met Faisal? Why I fell for him? How many times he—”
He thrust his face closer, bracing his hands on the wall on either side of her. His breath fanned against her skin. “My lucidity is nothing but the barest veil over my madness as you very well know, Princess.” His words were low, gravelly, and instead of scaring her, they incited the most dangerous tingle in her blood. “Do not provoke me. You don’t want to see what an animal I can become.” He pushed back from the wall, as though he found her nearness suddenly distasteful. “All I need to know is if he is a threat.”
She laughed, bitterness tinged into the sound. “He is not. I’m not the woman he wanted me to be.”
His frown deepened. “You’re pining after a man who cared about the circumstances of your birth? I’m disappointed in you, Princess.”
She shook her head. It was tragic how she was surrounded by men with highest codes of honor and yet they inevitably hurt her. “He didn’t. As luck would have it, Faisal was nothing if not full of honor. When he learned who I was, he thought I should be grateful that my father acknowledged me as his daughter. He thought I should become this paragon of virtue and spend the rest of my life proving to Siyaad and its people that I was worthy of being a princess.
“He thought I should embrace my duty. He wanted to live in Siyaad, wanted to earn a place by my father....the list was endless. When I suggested we leave Siyaad as he had been planning before he met me, he looked at me as though I had committed the greatest sin. He left without saying goodbye.”
The corridor echoed with the bitterness in her words, the silence filling up with her anger.