Kate Hewitt - The Royal House of Karedes - Two Crowns

‘I was responsible,’ Aarif insisted in a low voice. ‘I should have stopped, turned away—’ He shook his head. ‘I accused you of being selfish, Kalila, but it is I who have been the most selfish of all.’ He muttered something under his breath and stalked away, his body so taut his muscles almost seemed to be vibrating with a seething self-loathing.

Kalila took a few tentative steps towards him. She wanted to touch him, to reach him, yet every instinct told her she couldn’t. He had shut himself off completely, walled himself with his own sense of responsibility and guilt.

Still, she tried.

‘Aarif, I could have protested. I could have stopped. We are both to blame.’ His back was to her, and he said nothing. Dragging a breath into her lungs, she forced herself to continue, to lay her heart open to him as her body had been. ‘The truth is, I didn’t want to. I wanted to be with you, Aarif, from the moment you touched me. The moment I touched you, for if we are going to apportion blame, then I was the one who first—’

‘Don’t,’ he cut her off, ‘romanticise what was nothing more than a bout of lust.’

Kalila blinked. She felt as if she had been slapped. Worse, she felt as if he’d taken the handful of memories they’d just created and crumpled them into a ball and spat on them. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘it wasn’t.’ Aarif was silent, and she spoke again, her voice wavering and then finally breaking, ‘Aarif, don’t make this into something sordid—’

‘It is sordid!’ he snapped. ‘Everything about it is sordid, Kalila, can’t you see that? My brother trusted me, trusted me, with your care. He asked me to come fetch you because he believed he could depend on me, and I did the worst thing—the only thing—that would betray him utterly.’ He swivelled to face her, his face pitilessly blank. ‘There is nothing good about what happened, Kalila. Not one thing. You might have felt a brief pleasure in my arms, but it was cheap and worthless, and if you had any sense of honour or duty, you would know it.’

Kalila opened her mouth but she couldn’t think of a single thing she could say. Tears rolled slowly, coldly, down her cheeks. Aarif watched her with such an obvious lack of sympathy that she felt as vulnerable and exposed as she had underneath him, her body open to his caress.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, his voice as sharp and cutting as a razor. ‘You’re thinking you’ve fallen in love with me.’ He spoke the word—love—with such contempt that Kalila could only blink. ‘You told me you wanted love. Not an arranged marriage, you said. And so now you think this is it. Love.’ He shook his head, holding up one hand to stop her from speaking, although Kalila’s mind was too shocked and numb to frame even a syllable. ‘Oh, I don’t think you realised what you were doing. You were caught up in the moment as much as I was, but now you’re desperate to make it into something, to believe we have something.’ He spoke with a sneer that reverberated through her. ‘Well, we don’t, Princess. All we have is a mistake, and it is my duty to rectify it. As for your marriage—Zakari is a kind man. He can forgive.’ He paused, his lip curling. ‘He’ll have to.’ He turned to walk away, to leave her alone with his harsh words, his cold condemnation.

Kalila’s head was bowed under the weight of his judgment, and she spoke through stiff lips. ‘You are saying this because it’s the only way you can accept what happened.’

Aarif stilled, stiffened. ‘Still clinging to fairy tales?’ he mocked, but she heard—hoped she heard—a current of deeper hurt and even need beneath his sneering tone.

‘This doesn’t feel like much of a fairy tale to me,’ Kalila replied, lifting her head, her chin tilted at a proud, defiant angle. ‘I’m not going to cheapen what happened between us, Aarif, simply because it was wrong. And, yes, I know it was wrong. I accept that, but I also accept that for a few moments you clung to me, you needed me, and I needed you. And we found something together that I can’t believe everyone finds.’ Tears sparkled on her lashes, she felt another one drip onto her cheek, but she kept his gaze. ‘Believe what you want, if it makes you feel better,’ she said. ‘Believe your own version of the fairy tale, Aarif, but I know the truth.’

Aarif’s mouth tightened in a hard line, his eyes dark and angry. Kalila looked up and saw the stars were fading into an eerie grey dawn, the first pale pink finger of daybreak lighting the flat horizon. ‘It’s morning,’ she said. ‘Time to go.’

They packed up in stiff silence. Kalila wrapped herself in numbness; the pain and the realisation, the repercussions and the bittersweet memories, could all come later. They would come, she knew; she wouldn’t be able to stop them.

For now, she busied herself with mundane tasks of rolling blankets and folding the tent, feeding the animals and making herself as presentable as she could given their limited resources.

She had no mirror, but she didn’t need one to know her hair was in a wild tangle, her eyes dry and gritty, her face wind-reddened, her hands rough and chapped.

Would Zakari be waiting at the Calistan airport? Would he see her like this?

Would he know?

For the first time she hoped he was still seeking after his precious diamonds. The longer he stayed away, the longer the reprieve she had. The longer until the reckoning.

And yet it would come. She knew it would come, and the thought had the power to dry the breath in her lungs and cause her heart to pound with relentless anxiety until she surrounded herself in numbness once more.

It took them three hours to ride to the airport. Kalila was weary and saddle sore, conscious of the new tenderness between her thighs, the utter, aching weariness in every muscle, sinew and bone.

She followed behind Aarif as the sun rose higher in the sky, its rays merciless and punishing. Aarif did not falter once as they made their way through the shifted sand, a landscape utterly changed from yesterday, and yet he rode with an unerring sense of direction, of rightness.

Of course, Kalila thought with a weary wryness, of course he would know just how to get to the airport, an airport he’d never even been to. A man like Aarif never strayed off the path, never made a wrong turn—

Except once. Last night he had.

What had caused him to stumble? To reach out for someone, for her? Kalila’s heart ached as she thought of it, remembered how it felt to hold Aarif, to be held by him. To be needed, touched, loved.

You’re thinking you’ve fallen in love with me .

Her mouth compressing into a grim line, Kalila lowered her head and focused on the rough trail, her mare plodding wearily after Aarif’s mount.

When the airport, a low, humble building of tin and concrete, came into view, Kalila almost felt relieved. She was tired of the waiting, the tension. She wanted to get it over with, the explanations, the lies. Then she wanted a hot bath.

Juhanah came running out first, her face grey with anxiety. ‘Oh, ya daanaya! My child! We feared you were dead, both of you!’ Even as Juhanah wrapped her in an embrace the old nurse’s eyes slid speculatively to Aarif and Kalila saw it.

So it begins , she thought, closing her eyes and letting herself be comforted. The whispers, the rumours. Her reputation couldn’t be protected, not from imaginations, minds.

And it didn’t even deserve to be.

‘I found Princess Kalila a few hours ago,’ Aarif said. He’d slid off the horse and handed the reins to an aide, giving terse instructions for both horses to be returned. ‘She’d taken shelter in the storm, as I had, and when the winds died down I came upon where she had been waiting out the storm.’ He spoke coolly, impersonally, his gaze flicking not even once to her. And stupidly, irrationally, Kalila felt hurt.