“They both paid the price, Ayaan. It was a decision they made together.” She straightened herself, striving to fight the cold chill that was seeping into her. Every word felt like an effort. “You don’t agree with me?”
“No. But what I think does not matter, does it, Zohra? What matters is what you think.” His voice roughened in texture, as though he had to catch a breath to continue. His fingers caressed her face, desperate, fierce. “What matters is, apparently, you are exactly like your mother. You have the brightest spirit, the biggest heart I have ever seen.”
His words should have elevated her to a higher place, should have filled her with happiness, but they didn’t. The hard edge to his words only heightened her sense of something being very wrong.
“But I am not like King Salim. I will not damn you to a life filled with unhappiness.”
His words knocked the breath out of her, tilted the very axis of her life. And Zohra forced herself to ask the question that was quietly gouging a hole inside her. “What are you saying?”
Ayaan fisted his hands behind him.
She took another step in. “Answer my question.”
“You deserve a better man, Zohra. You need a man who will love you, who will cherish you, not use you at night and then expose you to his insecurities the next day.” It was the hardest words he had ever spoken. “I do nothing but take from you, I have nothing to give you.”
Her anger pulsed between them, just as sharp as the desire that suffused the very air around them. “Why do you not see what you have already given me? Honor, respect. You are my strength, Ayaan. I wasted thirteen years of a good life, lived it as if in a cloud, lived it with so much anger and hurt inside. I see you and I am ashamed of myself. I see your strength, your sense of duty, your honor, and I think this is what I want to be. You have not complained once at what you suffered. You push yourself every day to rise above yourself, physically and mentally.
“I do not care that you froze in a fight when you were barely a man. You have proven yourself to the world a thousand times over. Do these not count toward something?”
“It is not my strength or my lucidity that I doubt anymore, Zohra,” he said, once again struck aghast by how perceptive she was. He had pushed himself in so many ways with a raging need to prove his worth to himself. He had pushed himself to the breaking point, to the last frayed edge of his mental and physical strength.
And he had emerged the victor but the hollowness in his gut had not faded. In the face of Zohra’s strength, in the face of his own guilt and recriminations, they counted to nothing. “It is what I cannot give you, ya habibati.”
“You have no right to call me that.”
“The sounds you make when you come are still ringing inside my ears. I will call you whatever I please.”
She shook from head to toe, her fury a palpable thing. Her mouth curved into a sneer even as tears shone in her eyes. “Not if you break the vows you made to me, not if you banish me from your life. You will not touch me, you will not even utter my name on your lips, Ayaan. Are you ready for that?”
He could not bear to see her like this—hurting, breaking. “I do this for you, Zohra.”
“Don’t you dare tell yourself that. You do this for yourself, to satisfy the guilt beneath which you have decided to live. So what happens now?”
“You will stay in Siyaad for an indefinite time. Your family needs you, Siyaad needs you. No one will wonder at your absence in Dahaar. And when the right time comes, I will let it be known that we have separated, that it is I who is lacking as a husband.”