The Last Prince of Dahaar

CHAPTER SIX


ZOHRA TOOK A sip of the sherbet and forced herself to savor the cool slide of the liquid.


It was hard with a dozen pairs of eyes trained on her from every corner of the vast hall, each speculating why she was attending the first gathering in Siyaad after her wedding alone. If it had been up to her, she would have canceled it. But of course, the traditional Al-Akhtum gathering was even more important this year as her family needed to meet the crown prince of Dahaar and understand that he was now an integral part of Siyaad’s politics.

Only she had left Dahaara without waiting to know if Prince Ayaan could fit it into his busy schedule or not.

There was something about being near him, even for a limited time, that unsettled her. Something that had burrowed beneath her skin and refused to dislodge. And it wasn’t just the explosive desire that he had let her see.

By sheer force of will, she forced a smile as another of her father’s cousins took in her attire from top to toe and made his displeasure the known. Although she wore a designer pantsuit with a long-sleeved jacket that covered up every inch of skin, it was still not the traditional caftan that Siyaadi women wore.

She’d heard the whispers behind her father’s back, seen the sneers beneath the smiles, felt their snubs for eleven years. But her wedding the future king of Dahaar and the absence of her father today meant the claws that were usually sheathed were now out.

She could just imagine the whispers if Ayaan let her go in a few years. Whether her father was alive or not, whether Wasim was crowned the prince or not, her life would not change.

Would she resent Wasim and Saira as the years went on because her love for them held her back? Shuttling between Siyaad and Dahaar, a daughter but not a true one, a wife but not a true one. Nothing in her life held any significance, not to her, not to anyone else.

She was so tired of having no one to laugh with, no one she could even call a friend, of living each day with no sense of purpose or hope for a fleck of future happiness.

The depth of her loneliness choked her.

Zohra stiffened as the son of her father’s cousin, Karim, came to a stop beside her. He was the most vicious of them all, hungry for the power of the throne, unhappy that her father had formed an alliance with Dahaar.

He blocked her against the table and leaned in a little too close.

“My sympathies, Zohra.” The false sympathy in Karim’s words coupled with that ever-present seediness made the hairs on her neck stand to attention. She knew what he thought of her. Easy. Whether it was the accident of her birth or the fact that she didn’t simper and bow like a traditional Siyaadi woman didn’t matter.

“I knew this would happen,” Karim said, standing scandalously close. “I warned Uncle Salim that no one could be expected to accept you as his wife, even the Mad Prince.”

Her stomach churned just hearing Ayaan spoken of like that. “You’re not fit to utter his name.”

Shaking his head, he smiled. “Tell me, Zohra. Why did he parcel you back to Siyaad after only three weeks of marriage? Has he already figured out you are...unfit to be even a madman’s wife?” He made a tsk-tsk sound that scraped her nerves. A deathly silence fell around her. Could everyone hear the filthy words that fell from his mouth? “Is this because he discovered you are the result of your mother’s affair with a married man or because he has discovered your own...adventures into love?”

The not-so-veiled threat in his gaze curled into dread she couldn’t shake. That her past could sully Prince Ayaan’s family’s name sent feral fear pulsing through her. Not when he had been nothing but honorable toward her, offered her nothing but respect. Ayaan had challenged her, pushed her buttons, surprised her with his sense of humor, but not once had he treated her with anything but honor. The realization stupefied her even as Karim leaned in closer.

“All I ask is that we be mutually beneficial to each other.” Bile scratched her throat. “And remember, Zohra, I am always here when you need comfort, comfort that the Mad Prince should be—”

Long fingers that looked extremely familiar curled around Karim’s shoulder, cutting off his words. Zohra turned so hard that she had to grab the table behind her to keep her balance.

Ayaan stood next to her, cold fury stamped over his features. He bent his head toward Karim, but his gaze collided with her own, unasked questions in its golden depths. “Stand within a mile radius of my wife again and you will regret it. Deeply.”

He hadn’t spoken loudly yet his voice carried around the room. The color fled from Karim’s face, leaving pasty whiteness beneath the dark skin. “Prince Ayaan, allow me to welcome—”

“Run as fast as you can, Karim.”

The older man cast one last look at her and left the hall. Prickly silence shrouded the hall. Zohra breathed hard, her gut twisting and untwisting.

When had she become everything she detested? A useless princess waiting for her prince to do the saving?

She had known there was a chance Ayaan would be here. But she had been so caught up in her own misery to answer Karim back.

And now she was beholden a little more to the man she wanted to maintain distance from.

Standing so close that she could smell the scent of his skin beneath his faint cologne, Ayaan clasped her wrist gently. Their gazes met and held, the ever-present currents of desire arching into life. She could see the puckered scar over his eyebrow, hear the slightly altered tempo of his breathing.

His gaze missed nothing, the banked need in it reaching out to her. “Are you okay, Princess?”

This isn’t about you, Zohra reminded herself sternly. If she had learned one thing in three weeks of marriage, it was that Ayaan bin Riyaaz Al-Sharif would have come to any woman’s aid in the same situation. Honor was in his blood.

“I am fine,” she finally managed to mumble. “And please, will you stop calling me that?”

He bent closer to her, the whole room watching them with bated breath. His brows pulled together, his gaze held a question.

“If you are waiting for me to thank you for coming to my aid so heroically,” she said jerkily, hating that the crushing loneliness she had felt mere minutes ago disappeared in his presence, “you will be waiting for a while.”

Leaning against the table by her side, he folded his hands. “Would you like to leave?”

She blinked. He was smiling. It was a wacky, coconspirators kind of smile that barely curved his mouth. And yet it was there. The beauty of it was enough to scramble her already frazzled wits. “I...You are here to bestow all these people with the gloriousness of your exalted presence.” She looked around the hall. “Leaving now would hardly accomplish that goal.”

He turned away from her and she took the chance to study him greedily.

He wore black jeans and a white, long-sleeved tunic with a Nehru collar, handspun with the utmost care by the craftswomen in a small village near Dahaara specifically for their prince. The sleeves were folded to just below his elbows, a gold-plated watch adorning his wrist.

The collar was open at the neck, giving her a view of a strip of golden bronze skin. Feeling a flush creep up her neck, she turned away.

He was the most casually dressed man in the hall and yet a thrumming energy vibrated around him. It was a cruel joke indeed that he didn’t realize the sense of power he wielded with his very presence. And it had nothing to do with being a prince either. From all the stories she had heard from his mother, Zohra knew he had once been laid-back, the one who had made everyone laugh, the one who had been the palace staff’s favorite.

But he was more than that boy had ever been. Whether it was the torture he had been through or the responsibilities that lay on his shoulders now, Prince Ayaan was a formidable force in his own right.

He extended his hand toward her, palm up, cutting through her thoughts. She stared at the long fingers that always felt sinfully abrasive against her skin. “Princess?”

She raised her head and his gaze drank her in hungrily, as though he had been just as starved for the sight of her as she had been of him. “What is the point of being the Mad Prince if you can’t at least postpone meeting the people you dislike?”

She laughed. The exaggerated arrogance in his gaze, the to-hell-with-it attitude of his words, it was knee-buckling. This was how he must have been before he had been captured.

A cocky, fun-loving prince who had been loved by everyone.

He straightened, his gaze unmoving from her face. “Why didn’t you shut his filthy mouth?”

What could she say? That being amid her father’s family made her feel like a lost and heartbroken thirteen-year-old girl again? That they had a way of punching her in the gut with the saddest truth of her life?

She didn’t belong anywhere.

“You’re the daughter of a king, wife to a crown prince. And more than that, you are...” Her heart crawled into her throat as he raked his gaze over her, “...you, Zohra.”

You are...you, Zohra.

He hadn’t mocked her or called her princess.

His words washed over years of hurt, warming the cold, hard pain that had become a part of her. Her heart swelled, even the shadow of Karim’s words, the bitterness of being here couldn’t dilute what Ayaan’s simple words meant to her.

Blinking back tears, she placed her hand in his. Her steps faltered, the strong clasp of his fingers around hers felt incredibly good, in more than one way.


She held her head high. It was borrowed courage, she knew that. But in that moment, she took everything the man next to her lent her.

The aunts and uncles and cousins were people who were related to her by blood, who should have been a source of comfort to a grieving girl but saw nothing past the circumstances of her birth. She finally had a chance to turn her back on them.

The moment they entered the corridor, the walls lined with portraits of the esteemed ancestors of the Al-Akhtum family, he stopped her. “I want an answer to my question, which you very cleverly evaded.”

She shrugged. “They have called me names for eleven years, much nastier than today. Nothing I say or do today is going to change that. My stepmother’s family hates me because I represent the pain my father caused her. And now they think I have stolen Saira’s chance to be the queen of Dahaar. To my father’s family...I am nothing but a taint on their lineage, a taint he dared bring to Siyaad. My father is responsible for whatever I face today.”

“Does he know how they speak to you?”

“What would he do even if he did? Go back in time and stop having an eight-year-long affair with my mother? Change his mind about walking out on her when it was time to be king? Change his mind about taking custody of his bastard?”

His fingers tightened over her arms. “Stop referring to yourself as that.”

She felt a hot sting at the back of her eyes. She was not going to cry just because someone finally had a glimpse into what eleven years of her life had been. She didn’t need his pity. It only weakened her. “Powerful as you are, you cannot change the truth.”

“What about the threat that Karim made? This man you were involved with...do I need to find Faisal? Is he the kind to—”

Foreboding inched tight across her skin. “How do you know his name?”

“You are my wife. Knowing everything about you, especially—”

“Especially what?” she said, swallowing the distaste his words brought back.

His expression intractable, his aristocratic features reminiscent of centuries of powerful lineage, he was every inch the arrogant prince in that moment. “Especially anything that could come back and cast a bad light on you and Dahaar, I have to know about it. I have to be prepared.”

The same past that she had shamelessly used to try and get out of this marriage to him now curdled in her stomach. “Are you regretting your decision to not listen to me when I warned you? Wondering if you should sever all ties with me and leave me here in Siyaad?”

“I made my vows. Nothing will make me turn my back on them.”

His words cut through her sharper than if he had said he had regrets. “Of course, your blasted word. Nothing in the world is allowed to interfere with it. How much detail do you want? How I met Faisal? Why I fell for him? How many times he—”

He thrust his face closer, bracing his hands on the wall on either side of her. His breath fanned against her skin. “My lucidity is nothing but the barest veil over my madness as you very well know, Princess.” His words were low, gravelly, and instead of scaring her, they incited the most dangerous tingle in her blood. “Do not provoke me. You don’t want to see what an animal I can become.” He pushed back from the wall, as though he found her nearness suddenly distasteful. “All I need to know is if he is a threat.”

She laughed, bitterness tinged into the sound. “He is not. I’m not the woman he wanted me to be.”

His frown deepened. “You’re pining after a man who cared about the circumstances of your birth? I’m disappointed in you, Princess.”

She shook her head. It was tragic how she was surrounded by men with highest codes of honor and yet they inevitably hurt her. “He didn’t. As luck would have it, Faisal was nothing if not full of honor. When he learned who I was, he thought I should be grateful that my father acknowledged me as his daughter. He thought I should become this paragon of virtue and spend the rest of my life proving to Siyaad and its people that I was worthy of being a princess.

“He thought I should embrace my duty. He wanted to live in Siyaad, wanted to earn a place by my father....the list was endless. When I suggested we leave Siyaad as he had been planning before he met me, he looked at me as though I had committed the greatest sin. He left without saying goodbye.”

The corridor echoed with the bitterness in her words, the silence filling up with her anger.

“Then you’re the one responsible, aren’t you?” he said, a hard edge to his words. “Not your father, or anyone else. You ruined your happiness.”

A dark fear inched its fingers around her heart. “All I wanted was to leave this place,” she said, speaking past the thick lump in her throat. “I would have gone anywhere with him.”

“Maybe he realized your hatred for this life was more than your love for him? That he was just the excuse you needed to finally leave?” Ayaan delivered the words with a quiet ruthlessness, leaving her with nothing to hide under.

“Why are you being deliberately cruel?” she said, tears coating her throat.

His mouth curved, a bitter mockery of a smile. “I am returning a favor. Truth. It is the only real thing between us, isn’t it? You tell me the truth that everyone else around me is too scared to voice for fear of making me mad again, and I do the same.

“If you had truly loved him, Princess, would it have been such a hardship to live with him in Siyaad?”

She shook where she stood, everything inside her balling up into an unbearable knot in her stomach. Ayaan became a blurry form as he turned away.

She had been so angry with Faisal for not taking her away, so heartbroken that he would put her status in Siyaad, and all it entailed, before her.

I won’t be the one who will steal you away from your fate, Zohra. Those had been Faisal’s words.

She grabbed the wall behind her, knees shaking under her.

Can you not view it as anything but a sacrifice?

Her father’s words pricked her. Was she, once again, clinging to her stubborn anger and letting life pass her by? Was she going to spend the rest of her life waiting for someone to save her, as Ayaan had done just now, instead of saving herself?