This was their only option.
Rita claimed to understand the risk she was in, but she didn’t truly. She thought Jag was overreacting, because she had never truly had to deal with a man as ruthless and distanced from healthy bonds of love as his father was.
That was what made everything that his father had done to him so particularly twisted. His father had undertaken everything that he’d done to Jag and his mother in the name of love.
From the day of his birth, Jag had been his father’s pride and joy. Unfortunately, his father had long ago confused love with control.
He loved his perfect son; he just happened to see no problem in using psychological warfare to ensure that perfection.
He never beat his son—he’d simply played a lifetime of mind games, surveilling him and monitoring all of his relationships in order to influence his behavior.
When bribery didn’t work, he resorted to more menacing and long-term solutions, such as separating him from his mother and sending him to boarding school.
Nothing like that would ever happen to either of his children.
He would get his family to safety and then he would return and deal with his father once and for all.
Now that he knew he was becoming the father of not one but two souls, that he would be beholden to two beings who could run in opposite directions while he struggled to keep them safe, one thing was absolutely clear to him: the time for subtlety had ended.
Hayat had a room for only one ruler, and his name was Jahangir Hassan Umar Al Hayat.
The moment of his ascendancy had arrived—Rita’s life and his children’s lives depended on it.
All hail King Jag.
He’d given her less than an hour, which was hardly enough time to carefully pack the drapey new wardrobe pieces that Jameel had created for her under the guise of making her loungewear.
Without time for even a lingering goodbye to her fleet, she rushed through the palace garage that was now home to her fleet on the way to the Mercedes touring van that would take them to their mystery destination.
The vehicle suggested it might be a long drive.
Under normal circumstances, Rita would be looking forward to it. But newly aware that she carried twins and was saddled with a paranoid husband, the whole thing lacked adventurous appeal.
It seemed there was a limit even to her patented brand of recklessness.
And yet here she was, following the lead of her husband.
The father of her children.
Notchild, as she’d spent the past weeks cooing, butchildren.
Had one of them been feeling left out this whole time?
Suddenly, she felt as paranoid as her husband, but for fear that she had already begun failing as a mother and had not yet even met her children.
But beyond protective, how didhefeel about the news? Was he happy?
She didn’t know. She knew only that he was resolute and certain of a next move that he still hadn’t let her in on.
It was, indeed, a long trip—long enough that she was grateful that the tour van had a bathroom. She hadn’t known it was possible for a human to need to use the restroom so many times in one day.
Jag had been silent and broody as he drove through the first still-dark hours of their journey, and while she had had every intention of forcing him to talk, the combination of the late hour and the smooth motion of the van and her pregnant state made her fall asleep.
When she woke, the sun was close to setting and they were driving on an otherwise empty road in a stretch of bleached-out desert without a thing in sight.
Her husband’s aura appeared no less inclined to talk, but now she had daylight and alertness on her side.
“Where are we going?” she asked, for not the first time.