“It was just all those questions,” her stepmother said airily. “He would have appreciated it if you’d given him a little warning, maybe.”
Anya’s good intentions deserted her. “Funnily enough, they didn’t offer me the opportunity to make a lot of phone calls,” she said, and her voice was not even. It was inarguably sharp. “I was thrown in a dungeon. And then kept there, without any contact with the outside world, for the better part of the year.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell himthat.” Charisma laughed. “You know how he gets. You can tell him that if you want.”
“I’ll go ahead and do that,” Anya said, already furious at herself for showing emotion. When she knew Charisma would report it back to her father and it would only give him more ammunition to disdain her. “The next time he calls.”
Which would be never.
After she ended the call she stayed where she was, standing still in the bright glare of the desert sun, trying to make sense of all the competing feelings that stormed around inside her.
She could feel that sharp pain in her chest, that knotted thing pulling tight again. Anya rubbed at it with the heel of her hand, then wheeled around, heading toward that bright, happy room Tarek had showed her that first day. She liked how dizzy the light made her, still. She liked that if it became too much, she could go out and dunk herself in that infinity pool. It soothed her to float there, folding her arms over the lip of it while she gazed out across the city to the desert, always waiting beyond.
Before now, Anya had always considered herself an ocean sort of person. She’d always love the sea, its immensity and pull. She’d grown up in a city surrounded by water, and had imagined she would always live where she could see it, or access it, because it was what she knew. But she hadn’t.
And something about the desert stirred her, deep inside. It was like the ocean inside out. It was a reminder, always, that no matter what was happening to her, something far greater and more powerful than petty human concerns stood just there. Watching. Waiting. And perfectly capable of wiping it all away.
She supposed other people might not find that comforting.
But then, when had Anya ever been like other people? If she was anything like other people, she might have remained a doctor in the emergency room of her busy hospital in Houston, Texas. She might have felt called to medicine like so many of her fellow doctors. Or even called to money and prestige, like her father.
Instead, she found as the days passed that becoming a queen gave her far more opportunities to truly help people. Without having to run triage, check vitals, or desperately operate a crash cart.
Even thinking about those things made her blood pressure rise.
She sat down with her own aides, who showed up one day at Tarek’s order. They discussed different sorts of charity work. Initiatives Anya could undertake. Both the traditional province of Alzalam queens, and new ideas about the sorts of things she, as the most untraditional Queen in the kingdom’s long history, could attempt.
A month after Tarek had appeared at the door of her cell, they announced their engagement.
But they did it in the traditional Alzalam fashion.
Meaning, the announcement was made and the nation launched itself into a week-long celebration that would culminate in the wedding itself.
“Your people do not waste any time,” Anya said, standing out on a balcony Tarek had told her was built for precisely this purpose. The King and his chosen bride together, waving at the cheering crowd gathered below. “What’s the rush? Are you afraid the bride will change her mind?”
“Historically yes.” He shot her a narrow look, laced with that amusement she had come to crave. Because she knew it was only hers. “Many brides were kidnapped from an enemy tribe, and it was always best not to leave too much time between taking her and claiming her, in case the warriors from her tribe came to collect her.”
“Romantic,” Anya murmured. “Practically to Western levels, really.”
She was rewarded for that with the bark of his laughter.
And she was starting to get used to how deeply she craved such things. His touch. His laughter.Him.
Not that she dared say such things to Tarek.
It wouldn’t do to throw too much emotion into their very practical arrangement. She knew that. And no matter that she found it harder and harder to pretend her feelings weren’t involved.
Anya sobbed out his name regularly, but kept her feelings to herself.
Just as she decided it was best not to tell this man of stone that sometimes, her own panic dropped her to the floor. Because that might not only involve emotions—Tarek’s response to such a weakness might spark an attack.
She had spent hours in fittings over the past month, as packs of the kingdom’s finest seamstresses descended upon her, determined to make sure that everything she wore—whether traditional or Western, depending on which day of the wedding week it was—reflected the glory of the King.
“And accents your own beauty of course, my lady,” the head seamstress had murmured at one point, after there had been quite a lot of carrying on about Tarek and the honor due him from the women assembled in the room.
With more than a few speculative looks thrown her way, not all of them as friendly as they could have been.
But she understood.