Shaheen’s face relaxed. “Phew. What a close call, eh? Now that that’s settled, please tell me when are you going to take my job off my hands? In the past five months since I offered you the minister of economy job, juggling it with everything else—” he tossed a worried gesture in Johara’s direction “—has become untenable. I really need you on it right away.”
“So this is why you have to become Zohaydan.”
Kanza’s muffled voice startled Aram so much he staggered around. He found her a dozen feet away at the entrance to their private quarters. Her look of pained realization felt like a bullet through his heart.
Her gaze left his, darting around restlessly as if chasing chilling deductions. “Not just to make Zohayd your home, but you need to be Zohaydan to take on such a vital position. But as only members of the ruling house have ever held it, you have to become royalty, through a royal wife.”
“Kanza…”
“Kanza…”
Both he and Shaheen started to talk at once.
Her subdued voice droned on, silencing them both more effectively than if she’d shouted. “Since there are no high-ranking princesses available, you had to choose from lower-ranking ones. And in those, I was your only viable possibility. The spinster who never got a proposal, who’d have no expectations, make no demands and pose no challenge or danger. I was your only safe, convenient choice.”
He pounced on her, trembling with anxiety and dismay, squeezed her shoulders, trying to jog her out of her surrender to macabre projections. “No, Kanza, hell, no. You were the most challenging, inconvenient person I’ve ever had the incredible fortune to find.”
She raised that blank gaze to his. “But you didn’t find me, Aram. You were pushed in my direction. And as a businessman, you gauged me as your best option. Now I know what you meant when you said I ‘work best.’ For I do. I’m the best possible piece that worked to make everything fall into place without resistance or potential for trouble.”
He could swear he could see his sanity deserting him in thick, black fumes. “How can you think, let alone say, any of this? After all we’ve shared?”
Ignoring him, she looked over at Shaheen. “Didn’t you rationalize proposing me to him with everything I just said?”
He swung around to order Shaheen to shut up. Every time he or Johara opened their mouths they made things worse.
But Shaheen was already answering her. “What I said was along those lines, but not at all—”
“Why didn’t you all just tell me?” Kanza’s butchered cry not only silenced Shaheen but stopped Aram’s heart. And that was before her agonized gaze turned on him. “I would have given you the marriage of convenience you needed if just for Johara and Shaheen’s sake, for Zohayd’s. I would have recognized that you’d make the best minister of economy possible, would have done what I could to make it happen without asking for anything more. But now…now that you made me hope for more, made me believe I had more—all of you—I can’t go back…and I can’t go on.”
“Kanza.”
His roar did nothing to slow her dash back to the bedroom. It only woke Johara up with a cry of alarm.
Reading the situation at a glance, Johara struggled up off the couch, gasping, “I’ll talk to her.”
Unable to hold back anymore, dread racking him, he shouted, “No. You’ve talked enough for a lifetime, Johara. I was getting through to her, and you came here to help me some more and spoiled everything.”
Shaheen’s hand gripped his arm tight, admonishing him for talking to his sister this way for any reason, and in her condition. “Aram, get hold of yourself—”
He turned on him. “I begged you never to interfere between me and Kanza. Now she might never listen to me, never believe me again. So please, just leave. Leave me to try to salvage what I can of my wife’s heart and her faith in me. Let me try to save what I can of our marriage, and our very lives.”
Forgetting them as he turned away, he rushed into the bedroom. He came to a jarring halt when he found Kanza standing by the bed where they’d lost themselves in each other’s arms so recently, looking smaller than he’d ever seen her, sobs racking her, tears pouring in sheets down her suffering face.
He flew to her side, tried to sna
tch her into his arms. Her feeble resistance, the tears that fell on his hands, corroded through to his soul.
Shaking as hard as she was, he tried to hold the hands that warded him off, moist agony filling his own eyes. “Oh, God, don’t, Kanza…don’t push me away, I beg you.”
She shook like a leaf in his arms, sobs fracturing her words. “With everything in me…I do…I do want you to have everything you deserve. I was the happiest person on earth when I thought that I was a big part of what you need…to thrive, to be happy….”
“You are everything I need.”
She shook her head, pushed against him again. “But I’ll always wonder…always doubt. Every second from now on, I’ll look at you and remember every moment we had together and…see it all differently with what I know now. It will…abort my spontaneity, my fantasies…twist my every thought…poison my every breath. And I can’t live like this.”
Even in prison, during those endless, hopeless nights when he’d thought he’d be maimed or murdered, he’d never known terror.
But now…seeing and hearing Kanza’s faith, in him—in herself—bleed out, he knew it.