Najeeb must have realized it was dangerous to continue antagonizing him, and was clearly uncertain if he even should, because with a last glance full of confusion, he turned and walked out.
He fell off Numair’s radar at once as he swooped down to Jenan, wrapping himself around her.
He wasn’t losing her. Najeeb underestimated the power of what they had. She’d listen to him, and she’d understand, and she’d believe him again, trust him again.
Love him again.
* * *
Something hot and hard spread over Jenan, as smothering and inescapable as a shroud of burning steel.
Panic flooded her as she started to struggle, even when she knew there could be no escape. Sobs tore from her depths, gurgled to the surface.
“Shh, shh, ya hayati, calm down, everything is all right, you’re safe. I’m here, and I’m yours.”
That voice... Numair’s voice. It had been the one thing she wanted to hear, the one thing to make her feel invincible. But now it made her suffocate with betrayal and misery.
The surge of memories tore her from the abyss she’d plummeted into and catapulted her into the far more horrible reality.
But she couldn’t hide within oblivion anymore. She had to open her eyes and face him. Face the fact that her life would be nothing like she’d hoped or planned, but rather like everything she’d dreaded in other women’s lives. Having the child of a man who cared nothing for her, suffering the perpetual heartaches and conflicts of being tied to him through that child for life.
But it was even worse in her condition. For even after finding out the truth, she knew she’d never stop yearning for him. For the Numair she’d loved. The Numair who didn’t exist.
She opened her eyes and found him there, like dozens of times before, wrapped around her, looking down at her as if only she mattered to him. When she now knew she never did at all.
“He’s no longer here.”
If desolation had a sound, this had to be it. The bleeding whisper that issued from her.
He blinked. “Yes, Najeeb left...”
“Numair.” When she said his name, he sat up carefully, uncertain what she meant. She
left him in doubt. “He was never here. He was a phantom.”
He started at her description, looked stricken. “Jenan...”
She spoke over his ragged protest. “Everything I shared with him was a lie.” She looked him in the eyes, and it almost ruptured her heart that they still looked like those of the Numair she adored, still uncannily hid the true nature of the malicious manipulator she now knew him to be. “I was a means to your ends. A chess piece you used and would have sacrificed as soon as you achieved your goal. But when you discovered you could do so now rather than later, you just cut me off.”
His fingers sank into her shoulders, his eyes raging like infernos. “Don’t even think that. None of that is true. Let me explain what Najeeb—”
“Najeeb only told me who you really are.” She removed his hands from her flesh and pulled herself away from him. “I worked out the rest. For Najeeb doesn’t know what I do. That you no longer have to marry me, or impregnate me to rule Zafrana, that you do have a direct claim to its throne, just like you do to Saraya’s.”
The need became desperation to escape the distress of his nearness and of being in the bed where he’d given her her life’s only true and total pleasures, and then ruined her for life. She rose as if she’d been smashed and put back together with a precarious glue.
As he rose after her, she went on, “It’s no wonder it took you a while to find out. It was almost four decades ago, and most people in Zafrana don’t know about it. Those who do probably don’t remember it.”
“Remember what? Jenan, habibati, just let me—”
“But I remember.” Her choking whisper again silenced him. “How my father always lamented that he shouldn’t have been king, that if not for a fluke accident, he wouldn’t have been the rightful heir. He told me so many times when I was growing up that the late King Zayd had an heir who was tragically lost as an infant. The son of Princess Safeyah, a distant relative to the king by blood, but his sister in nursing, his mother having nursed her when her mother died in childbirth. This relationship superseded the much closer link of blood between him and my father, making her son his closest male relative, and his heir. You.”
Silence and stillness expanded at her back as his surprise buffeted her. He hadn’t realized that she knew.
But she did. And it explained all her questions about him, her incredulities about his coming into her life and her confusions about his recent turnabout.
Suddenly, his hands fell on her shoulders, feeling like twin bolts of torment that almost reduced her to ashes, his groan ragged. “Jenan, you have to believe me, I didn’t know that.”
She tore his hands off before they burned her through to the bone, then turned on him. “You didn’t know that until you wasted too much time on me. But the moment you did, you tossed me aside.” Another suspicion hit her, becoming a new terrible reality within a heartbeat. “But if you’re trying to coax me again now, it means you know.”