Loyalty he understood. Honor. The need to protect others at the expense of yourself. He saw it all in that moment, etched across her face.
“Six months,” he said.
She looked up at him, her expression cautious. “Six months of what?”
“You may come back to Attar, to the palace, for six months and serve as his nanny for the purposes of maintaining the fiction of his birth for the public eye. It’s a reasonable step. Logical to believe we secured a woman who is able to nurse the child, as he’s lost his mother.”
“I… oh… I…”
“I will make the announcement to the press that Aden was born just before Tamara’s death and that until we knew his health was stable we wanted no intrusion.”
“What will people think… that you kept something like that from them?”
“They will understand,” he said, his voice, his certainty, echoing in the room. “There is no other option. Rashid wished to keep it a secret, and so it will be kept secret.”
“Tamara said… she said if people knew they might think that it was down to some sort of faithlessness on her part.”
He shook his head once. “Not everyone. Anyone who knew her would never have thought so. But certainly yes, you have factions of the population who regard infertility as a link to some sort of sin on the woman’s part.”
“They wanted to avoid that,” she said. “And now… now it’s even more important, isn’t it? Now that he’s the only one left.”
She looked down at the top of Aden’s fuzzy head, her expression dazed.
“Yes,” he said. The helplessness of the child, his tiny size, delicate body, filled him with a sense of unease. He had the sense of fingers being curled around his neck, cutting off his air. He had felt ill at ease ever since assuming the throne. He was not a diplomat, not a man to sit and do paperwork or make polite conversation with visiting dignitaries.
The press knew it. Took every chance to compare him with the sheikh they had lost. The sheikh that had been born to rule with the one that had only been bred to fight.
And now there was this. This baby. This woman. The child might very well be his salvation, the one that would take his place on the throne. But right now… now he was a baby. Small. Helpless.
It made him think of another helpless life, one he had been powerless to save. And it added another brick to the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. He shook the feeling off. Emotion, regret, the pain of the past, had no place in his life, not even in such a small capacity.
He had learned that lesson early, and he had learned it well. When a man felt much, he could lose much. And so he had been shaped into a man who had nothing left to lose. A man who could act decisively, quickly. He couldn’t worry about his own safety. Could worry about being good. He had to find lighter shades of gray in the darkness. Do what was the most right, and the least wrong. Without regret.
Looking at Aden, his nephew, the last piece of his brother’s legacy, tested him. But he could not afford to break now, couldn’t afford a crack in his defenses. So he crushed it tight inside of him, buried it deep, beneath the rock and stone walls he had built up around his heart.
“Six months?” she asked, raising blue eyes to meet his.
“Six months. And after that you will carry on as you intended to. That is what you want ultimately, isn’t it?”
She nodded slowly, her fingers drifting idly over Aden’s back. “Yes. That’s what I want.”
“And that’s what you will have. Now pack your things, we need to leave.”
“But… I have midterms… I…”
“I can call your professors and arrange to have you take the tests remotely.”
“I don’t know if they’ll let me.”
That made him laugh. “They will not tell me no.”
“You don’t have to fight my battles for me,” she said.
“I fight everyone’s battles for them,” he said. “It’s who I am. As you will soon discover.”
Sayid’s parting words rang in her ears as she packed, her fingers numb while she folded her clothes and stuffed them into her suitcase. She still felt that same numbness as she boarded the private plane that was sitting on the tarmac at Portland International Airport. It had spread to her face, her lips. And she felt cold.
Shock, maybe. Or, judging by the sharp stab of pain that assaulted her when the door to the plush, private airplane closed, maybe the shock from the past six weeks was finally wearing off. She wanted it back. Wanted to be wrapped up in the fuzzy cocoon she’d been living in, where she hadn’t been able to see more than an hour ahead. One foot in front of the other, just trying to survive. Trying to look at the future as a whole was too demanding.
Six months.
She held Aden a little bit closer and leaned back in the plush, roomy seat, examining the cabin of the plane. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen before. Being in Attar would feel like being in another world, and she’d expected that. She hadn’t expected everything to feel so different the moment she stepped into Sayid’s domain, even on American soil.
Sayid sat across from the seat she sat in with Aden. His arms were resting on the back of the couch, his body in a pose that she imagined was meant to mimic relaxation. She wasn’t fooled, even for a moment. Sayid wasn’t a man who relaxed easily, if ever. His eyes were sharp, his body clearly on alert.
He looked as though he could spring into deadly, efficient action at any moment. Like a panther preparing for a strike.
“Handy that you had a passport ready, expediting Aden’s was much easier than having to do it for the both of you. Have you done a lot of traveling?” he asked.
She knew these weren’t idle questions. He still didn’t trust her, not really. Which was fine since she certainly didn’t trust him.
“I went to see the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland a couple of years ago. It was a brilliant opportunity.”
The left side of his mouth lifted upward in a poor imitation of a smile. “Most women I’ve known would consider a sale on a designer handbag a brilliant opportunity.”
She could tell he was trying to make her angry. She wasn’t sure why he was trying to make her angry, only that he was. “I like a good handbag as much as the next woman. But if you really want to watch my eyes light up talk string theory to me.”
“I am afraid I would be outmatched,” he said, inclining his head. She’d earned some respect with that response.
He was testing her. Jackass. Nothing she wasn’t used to. Men didn’t like being shown up by women. The men in her academic circle were threatened by her mind, by her successes. So they were always looking for a weakness. Good thing she didn’t have one. Not when it came to her mind, at least.
“You ought to be,” she said. “But if you wanted to talk… I don’t know, Arabian stallions I might be outmatched.”
He laughed. “You think my expertise lies in stallions?”
“A guess. A stereotypical guess, I confess.”
He shrugged. “I’m not one for horses myself. Military vehicles are more my domain. Weapons. Artillery. How to stage an ambush in the dunes. Things like that.”
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