He shook his head at that as if he could ward it off—push her away—but even as he did, he held her close.
“I couldn’t admit it to myself,” she told him. “I didn’t have the words. But I knew, Tarek. And I think that every choice I made that day was in service to this.Us.To building the family we were always meant to be.”
“Anya.Habibti.”
But she didn’t stop. “I don’t want a family like the one I already have, Tarek. I don’t want the coldness, the contempt. I think it’s possible that my father knew how to love a long time ago, but I don’t think it’s in him any longer. I don’t ever want a child of mine to feel the way that I have, all these years. And I don’t believe that the man you are—the King you are—would tolerate treating his own child the way you saw my father treat me. You leaped to my defense. How could you visit that upon your own?”
He didn’t understand what was happening in him. The earthquake that was ripping him open when he could see that the palms behind her stood tall.
“My mother warned against this,” he managed to get out. “She was never involved in the harem’s squabbles, because she wasn’t emotional. She thought that it made her a better queen that she did not love my father and I have always agreed. The less emotion, the better. But I neglected to guard against other kinds of love. I was reckless enough to love my brother so blindly I overlooked his flaws, and nearly died for that folly. I want no more emotion in my life, Anya. None.”
“Your brother is a coward and a snake. He’s precisely where he belongs, and you put him there. And loved him enough to let him live.”
“It was an act of mercy, nothing more.”
“Tarek. What is mercy if not love?”
He wanted to shout at her. He wanted to shout down the trees. He wanted to wrestle the stars, and beat them into darkness—but all he could do was stand there as this woman tore him apart.
“And maybe not loving her husband did make your mother a better queen.” Anya held his gaze. “Maybe that was exactly what your father needed. But Tarek. Do you think I don’t know whoyouare?”
And Tarek was a man who had always known who he was. From the day of his birth, his destiny was secure. He had never had a moment’s doubt, never suffered from the trials of insecurity. How could he?
He knew who he was. What he was. What he would do, how he would do it, and how history would record him.
He had always known.
Now he gazed down at this woman, his wife and his Queen, who made his heart beat. Who made him want things he’d never considered possible or even desirable before.
And it suddenly became critical to him that he know whoshethought he was.
“You don’t need a cold queen, or a harem filled with women, none of whom love you so much as they love power,” she told him when he didn’t answer her question. Because he couldn’t. “You need me and you know it.”
And for perhaps the first time in his life, Tarek found himself appreciating the power of pure confidence in another. Because Anya wasn’t asking him or begging him, she was telling him.
She kept going. “You would never have chosen a prisoner and elevated her as you did otherwise. You would never have defended me against my own father, in public. Or left me with your own family the way you did, with no worries whatever that I might embarrass you or act against you in some way. You need me, Tarek. The woman who loves you. The Queen who will defend you.”
“Anya.” And her name was that drumming thing, and that drumming was a song. He could hear it in the night all around them. In the wind and the sand. In him and between them. And, at last, Tarek stopped fighting it. “I fear...that want to though I might, I do not know how to love.”
And her smile then was so bright it made the heavens dim.
“Then I will love you enough that you are forced to learn,” she whispered.
This time, when Tarek broke, he understood it was nothing to fight. It was no surrender. It was no rebellion he needed to quell.
Unless he was very much mistaken...this was falling.
And she was right. It hurt.
But that hardly mattered. What was one more scar to add to his collection?
“And if I already love you,” he managed to ask, though his heart ached. His temples were spikes of pain. He fell and he fell. “What then?”
Anya slid her arms around his waist, and tilted her head back to look him full in the face. “We will make our own rules, here and now. You and I. We can do as we like, Tarek. This is ours.”
And he thought, then, of possibilities instead of problems. Of hope instead of tradition.
Of love—not instead of duty, but laced through it, making it glow.