The Last Prince of Dahaar

CHAPTER FIVE


AYAAN ENTERED THE vast hall and took his seat opposite his mother while his father sat at the head of the centuries-old dinner table. And just as it did for the past few months, instantly his throat closed up, an unbearable stiffness setting into his shoulders.

The ancient, handcrafted table that probably weighed a ton, the colorful walls hanging with handmade Dahaaran rugs that showcased historical Al-Sharif events, the high circular ceilings... Every time he entered the hall, he felt as if he entered a tomb, as if he was being slowly but surely smothered by every inanimate object in the room.

Not to mention the fact he couldn’t even look at his parents. Nodding at them, he settled into his chair. The weight of their attention was like a heavy chain on his shoulders.

Shying his gaze away from her, he answered his mother’s inquiries about his day with single word answers, wondering why today felt even more painful than the past week.

The whole family together for dinner. Even before their family had been broken by tragedy, it had been a tradition his mother had enforced as much as possible. But never had it been such an exercise in pain as it had become since his return.

“Where is Princess Zohra?” his father asked, and Ayaan frowned.

Two weeks since their marriage, two weeks of countless political dinners and public appearances, and Zohra had somehow become the buffer between him and the outside world, even between him and his parents. Because whatever else his wife was, she was not a silent creature.

Listening to either her questions about the various ceremonies or her perceptive inquiries about state affairs and watching her struggle to curb her temper and her tongue—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—had become a daily ritual in itself. And looking at his father, Ayaan realized it was not just him that had become used to the princess’s presence.

“Princess Zohra is completing the final wedding ritual and should be joining us any minute,” his mother announced.

The uncomfortable silence descending again, Ayaan fidgeted in his seat, restless to leave. “Can we begin dinner?”

“No.” An implacable answer from his mother which meant she was in full queen mode. It was a term his siblings and he had coined together.

His chest tightened at the recollection as Ayaan turned to the side and froze. One by one, the entire palace staff was entering the hall. The senior ones took their seats on low-slung divans along the perimeter of the wall while the rest of them stood in between. Almost a hundred of them and they were all dressed in their best, their pride and joy at being included shining in their gazes.

Another group of servants laid down numerous empty glass bowls with tiny spoons all over the huge table.

Straightening in his chair, Ayaan turned back to his mother. The restlessness in his limbs shifted, curiosity now rooting him to his seat. “What is the ritual, mother?”

“Every new Al-Sharif bride has to cook dessert for the family,” his mother said, a hint of complaint in her tone. “Zohra somehow managed to postpone it until now.”

Ayaan smiled. He could very well imagine Princess Zohra stomping with frustration somewhere. “But why is the entire palace staff here?”

His mother glanced in the direction of the entrance, the lines of her mouth tight. “They are all here to taste the dessert she cooks along with us, Prince Ayaan. It is a centuries-old tradition to give the staff a way to welcome the new bride, to give them a chance to feel that they are an integral part of the royal family.”

Blinking, Ayaan leaned back against the chair. He had no idea if the Siyaadi princess could cook. For the first time in months, a strange anticipation filled him. But no matter what, he knew he was in for an interesting couple of hours.

Not just today, any time spent with his unconventional wife was always interesting. At the least.

He looked over to his right just as Zohra arrived at the entrance to the hall accompanied by fanfare and an army of excited servants.

Spying the anxiety in her gaze, the slight sheen of sweat on her forehead, Ayaan felt the most uncharacteristic surge of concern. From the corner of his eye, he could see Zohra approach the table with dragging footsteps that clearly said she wanted to be anywhere but here. In her hands was the centuries-old, gleaming silver bowl he remembered seeing long ago. Behind her, similar bowls were being carried by the kitchen staff and laid beside the low-slung divans where the palace staff were seated.

“Place the bowl on the table by Prince Ayaan’s side, Princess Zohra.” His mother’s voice rang clearly in the deafening silence of a hundred and more curiously waiting gazes.

Her reluctance a tangible thing in the air around them, Zohra placed the bowl on the table next to Ayaan. A distinctive smell, sweet and...burned, wafted into the air around them.

His nostrils flaring, Ayaan glanced into the silver bowl. He gasped when he saw the contents, hearing the same sound fall from his mother’s mouth and his father’s cough. The dark brown, charred substance in the bowl looked like no dessert he knew.

His mouth twitched, and a sudden lightness filled his chest. Raising his head, he chanced a look at his mother. Her forehead tied into a frown, she was looking at the bowl with a shocked expression that had him clamping his mouth tight.

Whispers emerged from the staff around them, the more senior members even slanting a quick puzzled look at the bowl, but Ayaan couldn’t help himself. Clearing his throat, which felt really hard, he looked up and met Zohra’s gaze. “What is this, Princess?”

Her dark gaze fiery enough to burn him, she answered from tightly clamped lips, “Halwa, Prince Ayaan.”

He didn’t heed the warning in her voice. “You mean this is carrots and nuts?”

“Yes.”

Fidgeting in his seat, he met his father’s eyes at the head of table. Seeing the twinkle in his aged eyes, the tight set of his twitching mouth made Ayaan lose the tenuous hold on himself.

He laughed, the very act of it shaking his body from head to toe. And heard his father’s peal of laughter alongside his own. His throat raw, Ayaan covered his face with his fingers but to no avail. His jaw and stomach hurt, but in the best way.

His body had no memory of what it felt like to laugh. Every face around them, including his mother’s, watched him and the princess alternately, torn between the desire to laugh and bone-deep propriety.

Every time he looked at his father, it started again. He had no idea how long they laughed, but soon, he had tears in his eyes. “This is...” he choked, “Ya Allah, exactly like...”

His lean frame shaking with laughter, his father nodded, his mouth curled into a wide smile. “When Amira made—”

“When Amira made Awwameh on her twenty-first birthday,” his mother finished, tears in her own eyes. Swallowing at the sight, Ayaan nodded, glad that her eyes were full of remembered laughter rather than the familiar shadows of grief.

“She hated every moment of it, too,” his father said, looking at Zohra with a fond smile. “And Azeez and Ayaan teased her mercilessly for months.”

A smile still curving his mouth, Ayaan met Zohra’s gaze.

“Queen Fatima,” Zohra’s crystal clear tones rang through their laughter, laden with the promise of retribution, “who did you say tastes the new bride’s dessert first?”

His laughter cut short, Ayaan shook his head and met his mother’s gaze. “No.”

Her mouth was still compressed but a spark of something wicked lit up his mother’s gaze. “The husband, Princess Zohra,” she said, studying him with an intensity that twisted his gut.

Zohra reached for a silver spoon, and scooped up a little of the charred halwa with it. “Traditions, of course, have to be followed. Do they not, King Malik?” she said, throwing the challenge at his father across the table.


Chuckles and approvals rang around the huge room, followed by his father’s comment, “Of course, Princess Zohra,” laden with laughter.

Knowing that he was well and truly caught, Ayaan looked up at Zohra. And opened his mouth when she brought the spoon to his mouth, victory dancing in her beautiful gaze.

* * *

When was the last time the palace walls had heard laughter like that? The last time his mother had smiled even if it had been buried under affected displeasure? The last time they had remembered the past with a smile?

With his chest feeling amazingly light, Ayaan reached Zohra’s suite. The scent of scorched carrots and burned pistachios lingered in the air, bringing a smile to his mouth. He closed the huge doors behind him, suddenly craving the very privacy he usually avoided with her.

Leaning against the closed doors, he lost himself to the sheer pleasure of watching her. Cinched tight at her rib cage with a jeweled belt, the copper-sulfate-colored silk caftan she wore billowed from her tiny waist, highlighting the long line of her legs. The puckered sleeves showed off slender arms, the intricately designed diamond bracelets on her wrists twinkling in the light thrown by the lamps around the room.

She turned around, her hennaed hands tugging at the pearls threaded into her hair. The silky material cupped her breasts like a lover’s hands, her stark sensuality robbing his breath.

Feeling like a teenager getting his first sight of a beautiful woman, he pushed away from the door.

He would ensure she was all right—a small courtesy after the past two weeks—summon a maid, and leave. “Do you require help?”

She threw a quick look at the closed doors behind him and the slender line of her shoulders tensed up. “Have you not had enough fun at my expense, Prince Ayaan?”

He crossed the room and took her hands in his as she went to pull another pearl from her hair. Sensation skittered up his fingers, like a spark of fire. She wrenched them back right as he dropped them. “You do that a lot,” he said, before he could think better of it.

“What?”

“Take your temper out on your beautiful hair.”

It was a personal comment that shocked them both, instantly filling the air around them with tension. He had not intended to touch her, either.

“Why are you here?”

She had every right to question him and yet he couldn’t turn around and leave. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“I am fine.” Struggling with the clasp of the necklace at her nape, she glared at him. “Except for the small fact that I am now the laughingstock of the Dahaaran palace.”

“I will pass a law that enforces the strictest punishment on anyone who dares laughs at you,” he said, surprising himself again.

“Will it apply to the king and the crown prince?” she challenged. “Because as much as I would like to forget that image, it was your father and you that were laughing.” Her gaze stayed on him, surprise in it, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had seen. “That sound is still ringing in my ears.”

She dropped onto a divan with her feet stretched in front of her. Scrunching her nose, she grabbed the sleeve of her caftan, sniffed it and made a face. Ayaan clamped his mouth shut and rocked on his heels. She looked up at him, her mouth turned down. “Oh please, go ahead and laugh. I know you are dying to.”

Ayaan laughed, the sound barreling out of him again. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been sitting there. You should have seen my mother’s face when you put that silver bowl on the dining table. Centuries old, studded with intricate handwork, encrusted with rare gems and inside...” He hummed a dramatic tune.

Hunched over with her head in her hands, she groaned. “It was not that bad.”

He dropped down onto the divan, still smiling at the expression on his mother’s face, the twitch of his father’s mouth. Silence in the grand hall had never held that much repressed laughter. “It was black and it tasted like soot, Princess.”

She swatted him, her lower lip caught between her teeth, her beautiful brown eyes glimmering with laughter. “Have you seen the size of that palatial kitchen? How can anyone be expected to cook dessert for a hundred people? Of all the things I thought would make me unsuitable to be your wife...” Her eyes glittered like precious stones. “I...I thought I would be reduced to ash by Queen Fatima’s glare.”

“Even she cracked a smile at the end,” he said, and Zohra doubled over laughing.

“For thirteen years, the palace staff at Siyaad were shocked by what I did but I think the faces of the staff here today...this is what they are going to remember for the rest of my life, aren’t they?”

“I think it will be recorded as one of the most significant events in the history of Al-Sharifs.” He stretched his hands wide, announcing the title. “Princess Zohra and the Tale of the Burned Halwa.”

“As if this was the first humiliating ritual I have been forced to endure.” She slid lower on the couch. “Even the ritual where I have to spend a week with you in the desert is—”

Cold skittered down his spine and Ayaan looked away. He had lost everything in the desert the night they had been attacked. He couldn’t bear to go there again, not even for his mother and one of her rituals. “We are not going.”

Noticing the shadows that entered his gaze, Zohra wondered what it was that she had said. Standing up from the divan, she tugged the pearls again, cursing the elaborate hairstyle.

“Stop that,” came Prince Ayaan’s voice closer than she had expected.

“I need to—”

His hands were suddenly in her hair, and Zohra’s breath caught. The companionship of their shared laughter left the air around them and was replaced by something else. Her scalp prickled as Ayaan’s long fingers untangled her hair with sure movements. She held herself rigid, so rigid that her back ached. The heat of his body behind her became a beckoning caress.

Closing her eyes, she took a bracing breath. How was she going to spend the next few years with this man when his simplest touch provoked this kind of reaction in her?

She was about to move away when his hands landed on her shoulders and pressed her toward him. Her pulse drummed in her ears, her skin shivering with a new awareness. Zohra gasped and turned around. His touch had been there one minute and gone the next, the pressure infinitesimal. But in that second, she had felt the shudder that had passed through his lean, hard body, heard the long inhale of his breath, as if...

“Forgive me, Princess,” he said stepping back, color riding those sharp cheekbones. “I shouldn’t have touched you.”

She clutched her arms against her body, frowning. His beautiful eyes were darkened like she had never seen before, his jaw tight. “Why did you?” she blurted out.

“You have known a man’s touch, understand a man’s hunger. Do you not know what a temptation you present, especially to one who hasn’t been near a woman in six years?”

He muttered the last part softly, almost to himself. Yet the words landed in Zohra’s ears with the same force of an earthquake. He was attracted to her and she’d had no idea.

“Six years?” she said, still reeling at the impact of his words.

There was a banked fire in his gaze, but the heat of it was still enough to send a delicious, feverish tremble into every muscle in her body. No wonder she felt so drawn to him, no wonder the air charged the moment they laid eyes on each other. “I never had a chance to fully explore what life had to offer a prince seeing that I was captured just before my twenty-first birthday.”

Fierce heat tightened her cheeks. “Does that mean you’ve never...”

He frowned. “I was twenty-one when I was captured, not sixteen. I was never the one that women flocked to, like Azeez had been, but I have vague memories. The first time, it was...”

She slapped her palm over his mouth, loath to hear all the details. Desire bloomed at the sensitive skin of her palm, spreading through her entire body. “I don’t want to know,” she whispered, past a dry throat.

He pulled her hand off his mouth. “I didn’t realize what else my madness had robbed from me until you showed up, Princess.” He slowly peeled his fingers off her skin. And Zohra realized with a thudding heart how much he didn’t want to, what it cost him to let go of her.

A shiver shook her from within. For the first time a tendril of fear uncurled itself. A fear of the tightly leashed desire in him, and worst of all, her own reaction to that all encompassing hunger.

Tugging her hand back, she stepped away from him. And his unblinking gaze took in everything.

He moved toward the door, coming to a stop and turned back. The right corner of his mouth tilted up into a lopsided smile that wound itself around her. “I recommend a bath to get rid of that burned smell, Princess. Probably a rose-scented one.” He looked gorgeous, the ever-present shadows of pain and grief temporarily gone. The tension in the room broke even as her body still remembered the imprint of his fingers on her. “As for all the rituals you have to suffer through, I appreciate you humoring my mother. The last few months...have not been easy on her.”


Zohra had to grip the bed behind her to steady her legs. “I must admit, it’s worth smelling like burned carrots to see you smile, Prince Ayaan. I see why the queen mentions it so much.”

“Does she?”

There was such naked hope, such a hunger for more, in his gaze that Zohra couldn’t draw breath for a second. It was a glimpse into the boy he must have been, the one his mother couldn’t stop talking about. “Why do you sound so surprised? You are all she talks about.”

He gave a tight nod, and leaned against the closed door, the levity gone from his face.

Hundreds of questions pummeled through her head. “Did she not know you were alive?”

The look he shot her was scorching.

She pushed off the bed.

The quiet swirled and snarled around them. His jaw tightened; his hands turned into white-knuckled fists. The silence went on for so long that she wondered if he would answer. It felt as if she was standing on the shifting, sinking floor of a desert. The more she tried to hold herself at a distance, the more Prince Ayaan and Dahaar wove into the fabric of her very life.

“Only my old bodyguard, who found me, and my father knew that I was alive. Khaleef roamed the desert for months without giving up. Even after the rescue efforts had been called off. I think he wanted to find our bodies for my parents.”

The image those words conjured twisted her gut. “Did he?”

“No, but he did find me.” He met her gaze then and Zohra heard the thread of anger in his. “Is this just puerile curiosity, Princess, or is there a point to this conversation?”

Her breath hovered in her throat, an intense tightness in her chest. She could give the easy answer—lie and face his scorn at what he termed curiosity. But she couldn’t be a coward while facing the truth of her own feelings or fear.

Maybe if she heard what had happened to him from his own mouth, if she knew what tormented him, she could stop speculating. Maybe she would fear him and this...rampant, unwise curiosity about him would die away. Still, it was the hardest truth she had ever given voice to. “I think, as your wife, irrespective of our...true relationship, I have a right to know what I’m dealing with,” she replied, not holding her punches back. “That sounds like I’m hinting something like the rest of the world is, but I would rather know the truth.”

A flash of something lit up his eyes. She released the breath she was holding. “Hint, Princess? I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”

He smiled, a genuine curve of his mouth, a banked firework in his eyes. It cut grooves in his hollowed-out cheeks and sent a pang through her gut. “I—”

“It’s the first sensible thing you have said since you stormed into my suite.” He turned away from her. “Khaleef found me in the desert, a couple of months after the attack. According to him, I...” She saw him swallow with great effort. “I was incoherent and violent when he approached me. He didn’t let me out of his sight until he could personally alert my father. My father took one look at me and sent me off to a castle in the heart of the Alps, where I was conveniently and blissfully mad for five years.”

His words were so matter-of-fact, even when they held so much pain, that Zohra couldn’t even speak for a few minutes. “Mad?”

He stared at her, as if suddenly realizing that she was there. “Mentally ill, violent, incoherent.”

“Do you...remember what happened after you were captured?”

This time, there was no hiding the pain even in his stark face. “Most of it has come back to me.”

“In your nightmares?”

He nodded, a flash of surprise in his gaze.

“So your mother had no idea that you were alive all these years or what...you have been through?”

He shook his head.

What had happened to him in the desert? What horrors did his mind revisit in those terrible nightmares?

Zohra hugged the strange fear that gripped her gut. She didn’t want to know, not because the truth of what had been done to him would scare her. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But she was terrified of her own reaction, of crossing over a threshold and stepping into a path from which there was no return. Instead, she asked him something that had been bothering her, something that needed to be said even if it meant incurring his wrath.

“You said you were doing this—” she moved her hands to encompass them “—for your parents. But what’s the point if your behavior is hurting your mother?”

He looked genuinely shocked, his frown deepening. Pure anger flattened his mouth and he took a step toward her. “You are lecturing me about duty toward one’s parents? You’ve got a nerve.”

Zohra refused to back down, even though his words hit her hard. “I’ve spent the better part of two weeks humoring your mother, seeing everything she hides from you and your father. Do you know that she hasn’t spoken to him since you....returned? She feels so...”

Every time she looked at Queen Fatima, at the repressed pain in her eyes, Zohra’s own pain, her mother’s desolation after her father had left, it all rose to the surface. Lies, even told with the best intentions, caused pain much more terrible than truth itself. “I have seen the tears she hides from you and your father.”

His skin lost pallor as though she had delivered him a physical blow.

“And yet you...avoid her. You barely exchange two words with her. She is standing on the outside, looking at you, wondering what she has done that you won’t even—”

“How can she think she has done anything wrong?”

“Then why won’t you speak with her, why won’t you even meet her gaze?”

“Because I’m not my brother.”

It was a low growl that made the hairs on her neck stand up. His lean frame trembled as though he struggled to contain his emotions within. “I can’t bear to look at her because when she sees me, she’s looking for Azeez. She’s remembering him, searching for something of him in me.”

Zohra swallowed at the anguish in his words. “She thought all three of you were dead. She made peace with it until...suddenly five years later, she’s told you’re alive and...”

“Half-mad and haunted?”

“Your father had no right to lie to her.”

His gaze flashed at her daring. “My father was protecting her. For all intents and purposes, I was dead.”

“He lied because it would not serve Dahaar’s interests. This is what I hate about this life...about...” She had to stop to breathe through the tightness in her chest, to swallow the rage sputtering through her. This was not about her. “Resenting her for remembering your brother only makes you human. It doesn’t mean she—”

“You think I resent her for remembering her firstborn? My brother was the golden prince, the perfect heir. Passionate about Dahaar, smart, courageous, a man who was everything the future king needed to be.

“I’m not him. He should have been the one that survived. That’s what my parents think when they see me, that’s what the cabinet, the high council think when they see me.”

It was what he thought, why he was so isolated from everything and everyone, Zohra realized, shaking. How could anyone live with so much self-loathing, with so much pain tied into their very existence?

“Who gets to decide who should survive—”

He clasped her cheek, his hand gentle in contrast to his face, a stony mask. “You think I should be grateful that I’m alive? A broken man, a coward afraid of the dark? If it had been Azeez who had survived, he wouldn’t have lost his mind for five years and hid in some Swiss castle, leaving my father to deal with the catastrophe. He wouldn’t have regained his lucidity only to be haunted by memories.”

The bitterness in his words leeched every ounce of heat from the room. The hairs on her neck stood up, her gut gripped by the tight fist of pain.

His pain. She could feel it seep into her, enveloping her.

“My brother would have taken up the mantle of Dahaar instead of still hiding behind our father. He would have chosen a woman like you for his queen instead of being forced into it by duty.” His gaze swept over her mouth with a hunger that shocked her. “He would have been man enough to make you his wife in every way instead of hiding under a sham.

“Do you understand why I can’t bear to look at her, Princess, why I can’t bear to be near you? Because I’m not fit to be a son, or a husband, much less a prince.”

Pushing away from her, he left the suite, leaving the echoes of his anger and pain swirling around her.

With her knees buckling under the weight of his confession, Zohra slid to the seat behind her. He was like a tornado, and as much as she wished to stay out of his path, she had a feeling he would suck her into him.

His laughter and pain carved places inside her. The truth of his desire that she hadn’t been able to see until now thrummed through her. How could she have when she had been mourning Faisal’s loss, when she was nothing but a figurehead in Prince Ayaan’s life?

She needed to escape from him, from everything he unraveled within her by his mere presence.