The aide, Marina, tried to reason with the Shiekh’s bride, but it was useless. “You are hurt, though, Your Highness. I need to get you to a doctor.”
“Look at this girl!” Julia said, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to stand and she had to press her hand against the wall behind her for support. “She is skin and bone. She is terrified. I am not leaving her. Bring her home with me, and have a doctor come to her.”
Marina pulled her satellite phone from her belt and began to dial. With a sinking heart, she could just imagine what the Sheikh would say when he saw the state of his wife.
“Please, ma’am, I promise, I’ll keep her safe. But you must sit down.”
The little girl lifted a finger and pressed it to Julia’s head. Julia smile at her reassuringly, but the action hurt her cheeks. She refused to give in to the wave of nausea that was clinging to her. But she knew that she wasn’t in a good way, and she silently uttered a prayer for help to come quickly.
And it did. The Al-melara name was all-powerful, and it was only a matter of minutes before an ambulance was screaming through the narrow markets. Julia was loaded into the back with great care, but she shot Marina one look that spoke volumes, and the aide hastily ushered the little girl into the van with her.
“Will you translate for me?” Julia asked Marina. And it was a matter of great importance now, for Julia suspected that if she didn’t keep speaking, she might fall into a faint. A medic was checking her vitals, and another inspecting her head, but Marina nodded, manoeuvring herself so that she could see the princess.
“What is her name?”
Marina said something to the young girl. Her voice, when it emerged, was dry and husky. “Maysan,” Marina relayed automatically to Julia, though Julia had heard it for herself.
“Why was that man about to beat her?”
Marina and the young girl had an exchange that ended with Marina looking disapprovingly at the girl. “She stole from him.”
Julia winced as the paramedic applied an ointment to her head. “Ask her what she stole.”
And after a few more minutes of the strange and beautiful language, Marina responded, “Fruit.”
Julia smiled reassuringly at the child, though the pain was now too much to bear.
The paramedic interrupted, speaking directly to Marina. The aide leaned forwards. “He says you must stop talking.”
“I’m almost done,” Julia responded, inserting as much authority into her voice as possible. “Ask her why she did it.”
The young girl listened to Marina’s question and then responded with a short admission. “She was hungry.”
Julia closed her eyes, the sadness of this child’s life making her ache. “Her parents?”
A few moments later, “They’re dead.”
As the ambulance squealed around a corner and then stopped, Julia knew she had to speak to Zayn. But everything was becoming jumbled, and her head was aching in a horrifying way. The doors were ripped open and four people in white hospital suits appeared to slide her bed out of the van and take her into the building.
“Maysan,” she said, reaching a hand out and taking the little girl’s in her own. “She stays with you, until I come for her,” she ordered Marina.
And there was no way Marina was going to say no.
Zayn waited in the foyer of the hospital, his heart hammering hard against his rib cage. Two ambulances had arrived since he’d got the call – one housed a pregnant woman clearly in the last stages of labor, and the second a man who looked to have broken his leg in several places.
The third contained his wife, and he went from feeling like he was about to shout at her for having gone out without him, to feeling like his whole world had tilted strangely on its edge, when he saw the way blood was splattered down her clothes, and the way her face was drained of any color.
He swore as he ran towards her, being wheeled through the hospital. “Julia,” he said, pushing aside a doctor, and taking her hand in his. “What happened?”
“I’m so sorry about my outfit. It was so beautiful and now it’s ruined,” she blurted out as soon as she saw him. And then frowned, because it wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all. But her head was thick with confusion. “Zayn,” she mumbled slowly, “Zayn, Maysan needs help. Please feed her. And call Adina. She will know what to do.”
He lifted his eyes to the tiny little figure huddling beside one of his longest-standing members of staff. “Of course, Julia.”
“Sir, we must work,” one of the doctors said to him in his own tongue, and reluctantly he released her hand.
“Why Adina?” He asked impatiently, following the bed as she was wheeled along the linoleum covered hallway.
“Just call her,” Julia said weakly, so he nodded, then turned back to the doctor.