Raffa wanted to growl, he wanted to shout until the palace shook. He wanted to shake someone, something, punch a wall, anything! How could she possibly be thinking these things? Let alone saying them? “Do you think you are so easily replaced?”
Her sharp intake of breath was another torture. How desperate he was to hold her in his arms, to say all of the things he’d been thinking for months. To ask her the questions that had begun to fire inside of him, to stare at the stars with their timelessness and admit to the confusions that were tearing him apart.
“I think,” she said unevenly, “that you will replace me soon enough.”
Her words were like a whip lashing at the base of his spine. He blinked his eyes open, focusing on the vista below, but saw nothing of the day’s warmth.
“None of this makes sense.”
Except it did, didn’t it?
He’d known it was coming; he’d sensed he’d ruined everything beyond repair, and he hadn’t known how to fix that. He’d controlled every aspect of what they were, and now, she was responding in the only way she could.
She’d run away from him.
She’d run away and she wasn’t coming back.
Emptiness spread before him like a receding wave. “Chloe,” he said with all the desperation that was drowning his being. “Listen to me.”
“No.” The word was stern, growing in strength, but he heard her vulnerabilities. He understood. “It’s enough. It’s done.”
“How can it be?”
“Goodbye, Raffa.” She whispered, disconnecting the call.
There was silence on the other end. He wrapped his fingers around the phone and he pitched it at the wall opposite. It crashed to the ground, shards of black on the ancient tiles.
His eyes lifted to Fahir’s and his servant had the sense to look concerned. “Find her,” Raffa said, the words choked from deep within him. “Find her at all costs.”
But Chloe, it seemed, was determined not to be found.
At first, he thought she would change her mind; at least that she would make contact with him in some way, and if not him, Malik or Amit. He brooded for days, he went to her room and stared at her empty bed, he rode out across the desert to the ruins of Shakam al abut, and remembered the way she’d looked with wonderment at everything there. He fingered the objects she’d touched, as though in doing so he might be able to tether himself to a fragment of her in the present, rather than the ghost of her past. He held the jewels she’d marveled at, he ran his fingers over the ancient walls, he stared across the desert and wondered how things might have been different if Goran hadn’t come to the palace.
If Raffa hadn’t fallen on his wife the second they’d gone to the tent and been alone. Yet again, he’d behaved like an animal, ripping her dress, desperate to be with her. Desperate to have her.
He’d planned to make their time in the desert different. To forge a connection with her beyond the physical, and instead, he’d reduced what they were to sex – yet again.
And yet, now that she was gone, it wasn’t her body he was missing. Oh, he was, but more than that, he was missing her. Her smile, her eyes, her laugh, the way she stood up to him even when he was being a monumental bastard. He missed her. He missed knowing she was in the palace and he missed knowing he would see her every evening. He missed sharing dinners with her and the way she’d tilt her head to the side when she had a question.
He missed the way she cared for his father and Amit.
He missed her. Every damned thing about her.
Out in the desert, he roared like the animal he had morphed into around his wife. He pummeled his fists into the side of the ancient ruins they’d explored together until his fists were scraped and bleeding.
He rode harder and faster than any man should.
And it didn’t bring her back; it didn’t help.
Nothing did.
Where was she?
And more importantly: was she okay?
*
Chloe lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. Weak morning sunshine pushed into the room, creating a kaleidoscope of pink and yellows across her ceiling. She watched the patterns made by the shuffling of clouds, and wondered when she would start to think of American sun light as normal? When she would remember that these were the skies under which she’d been raised, this was the sun she’d grown up warming herself beneath. When would she stop thinking of Ras el Kida with a sense of longing that defied explanation?