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“Your mother’s been dead for eighteen years, Nikhat. You cannot save her or the child she died giving birth to.”
It took everything in her for Nikhat to stay standing.
“Do I need to have your case history checked?”
“What do you mean?”
“Princess Zohra is valuable to Ayaan and Dahaar.” This time, Dahaar was the afterthought to his brother. “Will you be able to keep your objectivity when the time comes? Or are you fighting a never-ending battle with yourself and trying to save your mother again and again?”
She flinched, his words finding their mark. She could feel the blood leaving her face, but in this, she would not keep quiet. In this, she would not let him find fault.
“Hate me all you want, Azeez, but don’t you dare insult my ability as a doctor or my reasons for it. I chose obstetrics because, with all the progress your family has made for Dahaar, there are so many things in women’s health that are still backward, so many antiquated notions that dictate a woman’s life.
“My profession has nothing to do with the past. It’s my life, my future.”
“As long as you are remember that, Dr. Zakhari. Because you paid a high price for that, didn’t you?”
Nikhat sank back to the seat, her own lie coming back to haunt her.
He still thought she had left him because her love for her dream had been more than her love for him. And crushed under the weight of the truth, she had let him believe the lie.
She had paid a high price. She had paid with her heart, with her love. She had paid for something she couldn’t change. And she had meticulously built her life from all the broken pieces to let even the Prince of Dahaar shatter it.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_0173ea27-c09e-5baf-ae8e-7c7b96fea8f8)
AZEEZ LEANED AGAINST the wall outside Ayaan’s office and sucked in a harsh breath. Sweat trickled down his shoulder blades after the long walk from his wing to this side of the palace. Closing his eyes, he rubbed his palm over the right hip, willing the shooting pain to relent.
But of course it didn’t. He’d spent the past four months drinking himself into oblivion, uncaring of if he ate or moved. His negligence was coming back to him in the form of excruciating pain. His hip was sore from months of inactivity, from lack of exercise. Breathing in and out through the dots dancing in front of him, he slowly sank to the floor.
His brother had been right. There had been more than one occasion when he had wished himself dead. But he hadn’t actually indulged the thought of killing himself.
His list of sins was already long enough without committing one against God, too. So he had carried on, uncaring of anything, uncaring of what a wasteland his life had become.
But his self-loathing, his lack of interest in his life, his lack of respect for his own body—as long as it had been only him who faced the consequences, he had been fine with it. But now…
Now it was beginning to fester into his brother and his wife.
After everything he had gone through, after recovering from the blood loss because of the bullet wound he had taken during the terrorist attack, waking up amidst strangers with a useless leg, realizing what he had become, after the excruciating pain of keeping himself away from his family, he could not allow this.
Whatever rot was in him couldn’t be allowed to spread, couldn’t be allowed to contaminate the good that was finally happening in his family. He couldn’t be allowed to take more from them, from Dahaar.
And if the price was that he give up the last ounce of his self-respect, if the price was that he stop hiding and face his demons, face the reality of everything he had ruined with his reckless actions, then so be it. He couldn’t have escaped the consequences of his actions forever anyway.
“Azeez?” Ayaan’s question reached his ears, unspoken, guarded, with a wealth of pain in it.
Azeez licked his lips and cleared his throat. The words stuck to his tongue. He forced himself to speak them. “Help me up, Ayaan.”
For a few seconds, his brother didn’t move. His shock pinged against the corridor walls in the deafening silence. Gritting his teeth, Azeez strove to keep his bitterness out of his words. “Do you want to exact revenge for that punch I threw three days ago?” he mocked. “Will you help me if I beg, Your Highness?”
A curse flying from his mouth, Ayaan spurred into action. Shaking his head, he tucked his hands under Azeez’s shoulders. “On three.”
Azeez nodded, and took a deep breath. He gripped Ayaan’s wrists and pulled himself up.
Ayaan leaned against the opposite wall and folded his arms. “Is it always like this?” There was anger in his brother’s words and beneath it, a sliver of pain.
Curbing the stinging response that rose to his lips, Azeez shook his head. “It’s my own fault. The less mobile I’m, the worse the hip gets.”
“Why didn’t you just summon me then?”
“I never did that. You are the one forever coming into my suite for one of your bonding sessions.”
Frowning, Ayaan opened the door behind him and held it for Azeez. Azeez stepped inside and froze.
Smells and sensations, echoes of laughter and joy, they assaulted him from all sides, poking holes in his deceptively thin armor.
A chill broke out over his skin as his gaze fell on the majestic desk at the far corner. A wooden, handmade box that had been in the Al Sharif dynasty for more than two centuries. The gold-embossed fountain pen that had passed on through generations, from father to son, from king to king. And the sword on display in a glass case to the right.
The sword he had been presented in the ceremony when his father had announced him the Crown Prince and future King, the sword that had represented everything he had been. Now, it was his brother’s, and Azeez didn’t doubt for a minute that it was where it belonged.
A portrait of their family hung behind the leather chair.
The smiling face of his sister, Amira, punched him in the gut. He had killed her as simply as if he had done it with both his hands.
Enough.
He hadn’t come here to revisit his mistakes. He’d come to stop more from happening.
Shying his gaze away from the portrait, he walked toward the sitting area on the right and slid into a chaise longue. Ayaan followed him and took the opposite seat.
“Nikhat says it’s because of me,” he said without preamble. He needed to say his piece and get out. He needed to be out of this room, needed to be back in the cavern of self-loathing that his suite had become. Before the very breath was stifled out of him by broken expectations, by excruciating guilt.
Ayaan frowned. “What is because of you?”
“Zohra’s complications with the pregnancy.”
His mouth tight, a mask fell over his brother’s usually expressive face. Cursing himself for how self-absorbed he had been, Azeez studied him, noticing for the first time the stress on Ayaan’s face.
Dark blue shadows hung under his brother’s eyes. His skin was drawn tight over his gaunt features.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Ayaan spoke finally, with a sigh. “For reasons the doctors say they can’t speculate over, it’s been a high-risk pregnancy from the beginning.”
“Then what did Nikhat mean by saying it was because of me? I know she didn’t say that to manipulate me.”
“I thought you didn’t want to see her or hear a word from her mouth. Now you trust her opinion?”
“Nikhat wanted to be a doctor since she was ten years old. If there’s one thing that she would never betray, it’s her profession. So if she says I’m the reason for Zohra’s stress, then I am. What I don’t understand is why. I might be a cripple but I have a working mind.”
“Do you? Because, so far, I haven’t seen evidence of it.”
Azeez continued as though his usually even-tempered brother hadn’t just snarled at him. “I have watched your wife growl at me like a lioness, as if she needs to shield you from me. I don’t think she would crumble because her husband is dealing with his difficult brother. So what is it, Ayaan?”
A flash of utter desolation came alive in his brother’s gaze. Azeez stared, shock waves shivering through him. Ever since he had learned that Ayaan had returned after six years, Azeez had known that his brother would do his duty, no matter what. And Ayaan had risen to every challenge.
Only now did Azeez realize what he had overlooked. His brother had fought his own demons for so long and Azeez had not given a passing thought to it until this moment.
“She’s worried about what this—” he moved his hand between Azeez and him “—is doing to me.”
A chilly finger raked its nail over Azeez’s spine. “What do you mean?”
“I have nightmares, vicious ones. I have had them every night ever since I… since I became lucid. Sometimes, they are minimal. Sometimes, I get violent. And…”
Azeez held his head in his hands, feeling his breath leave him. Guilt infused his blood, turning him cold from inside out. Looking up, he forced himself to speak the words. “They have become worse since you found me.”
Ayaan shrugged.
There was no shame or hesitation in his brother’s gaze. Only resigned acceptance. And in that minute, Azeez realized what he had been too blind to see until now.
His brother had lived through his own version of hell and had come out of it alive and honorable. And Dahaar was blessed to have him.
Unless he, Azeez, ruined it all again.
“I keep reliving that night and every time I see all that blood in the stable, your blood, I wake up screaming. And Zohra is right there with me, suffering through them, right by me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“When would I have told you? In between the punches you threw at Khaleef and me? When you refused point-blank to see Mother even though you could hear her heartbreaking cries on the other side of the door and informed Father to assume that his firstborn is still dead? Or in the few hours that you have been sober in the last four months?”
Azeez shifted in the seat restlessly. He wanted to run away from here. “Be rid of me,” he growled, his powerlessness eating through his insides. “All this will be solved in a minute.”
Ayaan rocked forward onto his knees, a fierce scowl on his face. “You think I can just wish away your existence as you have been doing?”
“Then send your wife away. Protect her.”
“I can’t,” Ayaan said, a sarcastic chuckle accompanying his words. “I am to be crowned king in two months, but I can’t dictate my wife’s behavior. I have ordered her to sleep in a separate wing, to go back to Siyaad for a few days. But, like you cleverly noticed, my wife has a will of her own. She won’t leave my side.”
From the moment he had met her steady gaze, Azeez had realized how much Princess Zohra loved his brother. Something he had wanted once, something he had thought he had once.
He swallowed back the surge of envy that gripped him. He would not envy the little happiness that Ayaan had. This had to stop today, now. “Fine. What is it you want from me?”
“What?”
“Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me what I can do to make this…make you better and take this stress off Zohra.”
“Why now, when you have all but thrown back my requests in my face?”
“Because there’s already too much blood on my hands and I don’t want more.”
Ayaan’s face tightened, his gaze filled with pity that Azeez didn’t want. “Azeez, that’s not—”
“This is your chance to protect your wife, Ayaan. Don’t waste it on useless matters.”
“Fine,” his brother said, standing up. “I want you to take care of yourself. I want you to have physiotherapy, I want you to see a psychiatrist, and I want you to see Mother and I want you at my coronation in a—”
“Don’t push it,” Azeez said, feeling the shackles of his brother’s demands binding him to Dahaar. Just the word coronation was like sticking a steel spike into his heart.
With his hand on the armrest, he pushed himself off the chaise. There was only one choice left to him, only one solution to stop the ruin he had begun again. And everything within him revolted at it. “I will do this, but I will do it my own way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t see a team of doctors. Nikhat can attend to me in between attending to Zohra.”
“Azeez,” his brother’s voice rang with warning as Azeez walked toward the exit, keeping his gaze away from everything in the room. “Whatever you are planning to do, don’t. She is here by my request.”
“Exactly. You brought her into this, Ayaan. Now that I’m following your orders, don’t complain about it.”
Stepping outside his brother’s office, Azeez slowly made his way back to his own quarters. He still planned to leave Dahaar. For his own sanity, he had to.
But he would postpone it until things were right with Princess Zohra. And he couldn’t live the rest of his life the way he had been doing, either.
He would do what his brother asked him to do because nothing else would be enough for Ayaan. However, there was no point in a team of doctors poking through his head. There was nothing anyone could do to fix him.
But Dr. Zakhari, he had been mistaken to dismiss her so quickly. She owed him. And she would become his route to freedom from this palace, from a life that would slowly but surely do what a bullet hadn’t been able to do— kill him.
* * *
Nikhat finished her dinner and dismissed the maid from her quarters. Ten seconds later, she couldn’t remember what it was that had been served to her in the glittering silverware.
She only remembered looking at her reflection in the plate, rushing to the long, oval mirror in her bedroom and redoing her unruly hair.
She stood before it again now, going over herself with a critical eye. Her long-sleeved, high-collared caftan in unrelenting black was made of a stiff silk that instead of clinging to her breasts sat on her shoulders like a tent. Small diamond studs, a gift she had given herself for her thirtieth birthday, were her only jewelry.
Sighing loudly, she grabbed another pin and slapped it over one strand of hair that refused to sit back in her braid. Satisfied with how she looked, she pressed her temples with her fingers and massaged.
She was used to braiding her hair back tight for the operating room. But this time, she had done it so tight that her head ached.
She checked the pile of gifts she had spent hours wrapping, unable to sit still. Had she known that Princess Zohra would allow her father to come straight into Nikhat’s suite in the far-off wing of the palace that housed her, she would have straightened a little more. As it was, she had made the maid nervous with her own twitching and needed to dismiss her.
Pulling her sleeve back, she checked her watch again. Her father was due any minute.
She was pacing the floor, wearing out the ancient, priceless rug when a knock sounded. Her feet flying on the floor, she opened the door.
And froze.
Azeez stood on the other side of the threshold. His jaw was clean-shaven, his gaze steady, a glimpse of the old him peeking out of it. She had forgotten the compelling effect his very presence held.
Her already strung-out nerves stretched a little more.
The fact that he was a few doors away in the same wing as her, night and day, rang like an unrelenting bell in the back of her head however busy she was. Seeing him outside her suite, in the palace of all the places, was a shock that needed its own category.
