‘One day not long after, the dog went missing. The whole village looked for it. Until someone found it—or, rather, what was left of it.’
She held her breath. ‘What happened to it?’
‘The dog had been tortured to within an inch of its life before something more horrible happened—something that said the killer had a grudge against not only the dog, but against its owner.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The dog had been blinded. So, even if it had somehow managed to survive the torture, it would have been useless to Saleem.’
She shuddered, feeling sick. ‘How could anyone do such a thing to an animal, a valued pet?’
‘That one could.’
‘You believe it was Mustafa?’
‘I know it was him. I overheard him boasting to a schoolfriend in graphic detail about what he had done. He had always been a bully. He was proud of what he had done to a helpless animal.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’
Her question brought the full pain and the injustice of the past crashing back. He remembered the fury of his father when he had told him what he had heard; fury directed not at Mustafa but at him for daring to speak ill of his favoured child. He remembered the savage beating he had endured for daring to speak the truth.
‘I told someone. For all the good it did me.’
Choose your battles.
His uncle had been so right. There had been no point picking that one. He had never been going to win where Mustafa was concerned. Not back then.
She waited for more but he went quiet then, staring fixedly at the road ahead, so she turned to look out her own window, staring at the passing dunes, wondering what kind of person did something like that for kicks and wondering about all the things Zoltan wasn’t telling her.
He was an enigma, this man she was married to, and, as much as she hated him for who and what he was and what he had forced her into, maybe she should be grateful she had been saved the alternative. Because she would have been Mustafa’s wife if this man had not come for her. She shuddered.
‘Princess?’
She looked around, blinking. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you all right? You missed my question.’
‘Oh.’ She sat up straight and lifted the heavy weight of the ponytail behind her head to cool her neck. ‘I’m sorry. What did you ask?’
He looked at her for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, before looking back at the interminably long, straight road ahead. ‘Seeing as we were talking about Mustafa,’ he started.
‘Yes?’
‘There is something I don’t understand. Something you told me when we rescued you.’
‘Some rescue,’ she said, but her words sounded increasingly hollow in the wake of Zoltan’s revelations about his half-brother’s cruel nature. Maybe he had saved her from a fate worse than death after all. ‘What about it?’ she said before she could explore that revelation any further.
‘How did you convince Mustafa not to take you right then and there, while he had you in the camp? Why was he prepared to wait until the wedding? Because if Mustafa had laid claim to you that first night he held you captive, if he had had witnesses to the act, then no rescue could have prevented you from being his queen and him the new king.’
She swallowed back on a surge of memory-fed bile, not wanting to think back to those poisoned hours. ‘He told me he did not care to wait, you are right.’
‘So why did he? That does not sound like the Mustafa I know.’
She blinked against the sun now dipping low enough to intrude through her window and sat up straighter to avoid it, even if that meant she had to lean closer to him in the process, and closer to that damned evocative scent.
‘Simple, really. I told him that he would be cursed if he took me before our wedding night.’
‘You told him that and he believed you?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘But there must have been more reason than that. Why would he believe that he would be cursed?’
Beside him she swallowed. She didn’t want to have to admit to him the truth, although she rationalised he would find that truth out some time. And maybe he might at least understand her reluctance to jump into bed and spread her legs for him as if the act itself meant nothing.
‘Because I told him that, according to the Jemeyan tenets, if he took me before our wedding night the gods would curse him with a soft and shrivelled penis for evermore.’
‘Because you are a princess?’
‘Because I am a virgin.’
‘And he believed you?’ He laughed then as if it was the biggest joke in the world, and she wasn’t tempted in the least to rake her nails down his laughing face again—this time she wanted to strangle him.