The Last Prince of Dahaar(76)

                She kept her arms around his waist, and found comfort in the fact that he hadn’t pushed her away.

                “I am sorry you didn’t get a chance to speak to him, Zohra,” he said, piercing the heavy silence, his embrace a safe haven of warmth.

                The storm of regrets and grief she had kept at bay while shouldering her responsibilities for the first time in her life broke through at the tender concern in his words. He held her as she cried softly, for her, for her father and for her mother, for everything she had lost through sheer pigheadedness.

                She met his gaze, and smiled through the tears. “He left me a sheaf of letters that told me everything I wanted to know.”

                “Letters?”

                She nodded. The truth had hurt, but it had also freed something inside her. “Letters from my mother to him, even after he had left us for Siyaad. With pictures of me. Letters she wrote him until the day she died.”

                Ayaan frowned. “Are you saying she knew?”

                Zohra nodded again, seeing the same confusion she had felt mirrored in his gaze. “She knew everything about him. She knew that there might come a day when he would have to leave her for Siyaad, to do his duty. And he did, just as they had known he would have to. He left us but they kept in touch. They argued, even in the letters. He asked to see me, and she refused, again and again. Said she didn’t want me to pay the price for the happiness she found with him, didn’t want me to be caught between them. I guess I was never supposed to know that he was alive. Except something happened that neither of them foresaw. She died. And....”

                Her throat seized as Zohra realized once again what it must have cost her father to learn of her mother’s death and to bring her to Siyaad.

                “I can’t believe King Salim could have been so selfish, so reckless,” Ayaan said, pulling her out of the pit of regrets.

                Zohra frowned at the anger that simmered in his words. “I was angry when I read those letters, angry that neither of them told me the truth. Even after I was old enough to understand. But not anymore.

                “They took a chance on love, Ayaan, they grabbed their happiness while they could, decided whatever short time they had was still worth it. Knowing that they had loved each other, knowing that my father had never deceived her, knowing that he loved me enough to bring me here—” Tears ran over her cheeks again. “—it fills me with joy. How can I hold the fact that they loved each other so much that they risked such unhappiness for the rest of their lives against them?”

                Her body stilled as Zohra waited for his answer. Her heart pounded as his silence gave the answer his lips didn’t, and one she didn’t want to hear at that.

                She ran her fingers over his jaw, over his cheekbones, traced the scar above his eye, as fear held a visceral grip inside her chest.

                “You told me your mother never really smiled again after he was gone, that she wouldn’t even look at another man. That to the day she died, something in her was forever broken while he...he moved on with his life. Had a wife and started a family.”

                Looking up at him, Zohra braced herself, knowing that the very ground that she was standing on was going to be pulled out from under her. “Weren’t you the one who understood the need to sacrifice your own child in the name of duty? My father did his duty but he also let himself love. He took a chance and found happiness even if it was for a limited time.”

                “He damned the rest of her life in the name of love. He made you pay the price.”