He sank to the sofa behind him, his shaking knees refusing to hold him up. The scent of her was etched into him, it surrounded him, intensifying the hollow ache in his gut. He had thought he had known the worst in his life. But he had been wrong.
Nothing could be worse than the aching void in his gut. He would never look into Zohra’s eyes, never see her laugh, never feel her touch again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE DEAFENING QUIET of the desert snarled inside Ayaan’s mind, scratching its fingers up and down his spine. He forced himself to picture Zohra, laughing at him, challenging him, loving him. The fear didn’t recede but the thought of Zohra diluted it enough for him to not fall back into its pit.
He could have left this matter to his security team but something he couldn’t shake had lodged in his mind. Something about this man niggled at him.
It had taken Imran a month to unearth all the hidden sources of the recent terrorist intelligence and of course, it had been traced back to the same man who had fed them information the first two times.
Which meant he had intentionally covered his tracks. And Ayaan had instantly known something was wrong. It had taken his team another two weeks to find his whereabouts, two weeks of hell, in which Ayaan missed Zohra with an ache that had become a constant companion.
The whisper of harsh breathing, the sounds of footsteps, which he wouldn’t have heard on the gravel road except for the fact that the man’s stride was out of step, fell on his ears and Ayaan leaped from his crouching position behind the tent.
He couldn’t have taken a breath before a blow came at him, grazing his jaw. Shaking off the jolt of pain up his jaw, Ayaan returned a blow, and pushed the man to the ground. The man’s leg shot out from under him, and Ayaan tackled him to the ground, his heart leaping into his throat.
Moonlight flickered over features that were as familiar as his own. A deathly chill fell over Ayaan as he collapsed to the desert floor, his muscles quivering with shock.
His throat choked with tears, his chest so tight that he thought he would explode. Shock waves paralyzed his mental processes as he stared at the man he had worshipped his entire life, the man he had held in higher regard than his father, the man who had taught Ayaan everything he knew.
The man who had fallen in front of him five years ago while Ayaan had froze, had stood there like a coward.
The desert wind howled around them as his heart pumped again. Surprise abated and a joy, unlike he had ever known flooded Ayaan.
His brother, the true prince of Dahaar, was alive.
* * *
Ayaan dismissed the security outside his office in the main palace wing, closed the door behind him and ran a hand over his eyes. His head pounded as if someone had hammered away at it relentlessly. He had been awake for forty-eight hours straight, and sometime yesterday, right when his mother had started crying as though her heart was breaking—again, a twitch had begun behind his left eye.
He knew that this was only the beginning of the hardest time of his life. And the fact that he had turned his back on the one woman who would have brought him solace, who would have understood his pain, who was the one shining point of his life, was an acrid taste on his tongue.
Since he had returned to Dahaar two days ago, the hours had seemed endless, each blending into the next, the things he had to take care of unending, until he thought he would break under the weight of it all.