She started to move away then, her emotions blinding her and her breath much too ragged, but her mother’s hand on her arm stopped her.
“It’s not forgiveness,” Elizaveta said crisply. “It’s weakness. Haven’t I taught you the difference? Your trouble is, you make yourself a doormat for anyone who happens by and wishes to wipe their feet on you. That’s the difference between us.”
Something cracked then, so loud and so huge that Amaya was surprised she didn’t hear screams from the crowd. It took her a stunned moment to understand that the palace hadn’t crashed down around them—that something had instead toppled over inside her. She could feel the aftershocks, shaking through her.
She reached down and tugged her mother’s elegant hand from her arm.
“I choose how I bend, Mother,” she said. She might have shouted it, though she knew she hadn’t—yet she saw the dazed look in Elizaveta’s eyes as if she had. Amaya could only wonder what expression was on her face. She found she couldn’t bring herself to care. “And to whom. I only kneel when I want to kneel, and that doesn’t make me a doormat. I’ve spent my life catering to you because I love you, not because I’m weaker than you. You’ve spent your life prostrate to your feelings for a man who forgot you the moment you left him, if not long before, because you were never as strong as you pretended to be. That’s the difference between you and me. I’m not pretending.”
“You must be crazy if you think a man like Kavian thinks of you as anything but a conquest,” Elizaveta hissed.
“Don’t mention him again,” Amaya said, with a certain finality that she could see made her unflappable mother blink. “Not ever again. He is off-limits to you. As am I.”
“I am your mother!” Elizaveta huffed at her, as if Amaya had punched her.
“And I love you,” Amaya said with a certain fierce serenity that reminded her of Kavian’s desert. “I always will. But if you can’t treat me with respect, you won’t see me again. It’s that simple.”
For the first time in as long as she could recall, her mother looked old. Something like frail. But Amaya only gazed at her, and ignored the pity that made her heart clench tight.
“Amaya.”
“This isn’t a debate,” she said quietly. “It’s a fact.”
She left her mother standing there, looking lost, for the first time in her memory. It took a few steps to remember herself. To smile. To incline her head as regally as possible as she caught the eye of this or that noble personage. Amaya moved through the crowd as she reached the waiting courtyard, open to the night sky above with a series of decorative pools and fountains marking its center.
Kavian stood on the far side of the pools, that stark, harsh face of his intent as he listened to the two Daar Talaasian generals before him. As if he’d sensed her approach, or her eyes on him, his gaze snapped to hers across the night.
And for a moment there was nothing but that. Nothing but them. No crowd, no guests. No wedding in the morning.
His face was as brutally captivating as ever, and she knew it so much better now. She felt him deep inside her, as if he’d wrapped himself around her bones, taken her air. She felt him as if he was standing beside her instead of across a grand courtyard, as if they were alone instead of surrounded by so many people.
She thought she might feel him like this, as if they’d fused together somehow on some kind of molecular level, all the rest of the days of her life. Amaya told herself that what moved in her then, thick and harsh, was not grief. It couldn’t have been.
“You do not look the part of the blushing bride to be, little sister.”
Amaya started at the familiar voice at her ear, then controlled herself, jerked her attention away from Kavian and aimed her practiced smile at her brother.
But Rihad, king of Bakri, did not smile in return. His dark eyes probed hers, and Amaya had to look away, back to where the man who had scandalously kidnapped her from a café in a Canadian lake town stood there so calmly, as if he’d had every right to do so. Quite as if there weren’t reporters everywhere, recording every moment of this night for posterity and dramatic headline potential, who wouldn’t leap at that story if she’d chosen to share it.
If you marry him, scandals like that will seem like mountains made out of molehills, a small voice within told her. If you do not, they will take over two countries and drown them both...
She knew what she had to do if she wanted to survive. She’d set everything in motion. But that didn’t make any of it easy. She cared a great deal more about what would happen in the wake of this decision than she had half a year ago.
Obviously. Or she wouldn’t still be here.
“You look something very much like happy these days, Rihad,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think I realized that was a possibility.”
For him. For her. For any of them.
He frowned. “Amaya.”
But she refused to do this. She couldn’t do this—and she’d already revealed too much. There was too much at stake.
“Not here, please.” She forced another smile. “I will no doubt burst into tears at all your brotherly concern and it will cause a war, and I’ll forever be known as that selfish, emotionally overwrought princess who caused so much trouble. There’s a reason Helen of Troy doesn’t have the greatest reputation. It’s not worth it.”
“Listen to me,” Rihad commanded her, in that voice of his that reminded her that he was not only her older brother. He was a king. Her king.
Amaya remembered his own wedding to his first wife, which had come at the end of a week of celebrations in Bakri City. That, too, had been arranged. Amaya had been a small girl, in awe. She’d thought the fact of the wedding itself meant the bride and groom had loved each other. And in truth, Rihad had always told her that he and his first wife had gotten along well.
But it was nothing next to what was between him and Sterling, his second wife. That much had been obvious at a glance when they arrived the day before. Their connection crackled from the many tabloid articles that had been written about them, which in turn paled next to the sparks they struck off each other in person. Amaya didn’t pretend to understand how that could be, when Sterling had spent a decade as their late brother, Omar’s, mistress.
She only knew that she and Kavian didn’t have the same thing. What they had was dark and physical. A terrible wanting that she was absolutely certain would destroy them both. It was not the calm affection of Rihad’s first union. Nor was it the obvious intimacy of his second.
It was an agony.
“It will not be pretty if you fail to go through with this wedding,” Rihad said in a gruff sort of voice. “I can’t deny that. But I won’t force you to the altar. I do not care what claim he thinks he has.”
Amaya looked across the great courtyard to find Kavian again, and again his dark gaze met hers, so gray. So knowing. So fierce and hard at once, searing straight into her like a touch of his warrior’s hands.
And she understood then.
It was the night before the wedding she’d been trying to avoid for more than six months. And Amaya was deeply and madly and incontrovertibly in love with the man she was meant to marry in the morning. She thought she had been since the moment they met, when those slate-gray eyes of his, so dark and so patient, had met hers and held.
Shifting everything else.
Changing the whole world.
She loved him. She understood with a certain fatalism, a shuddering slide that seemed to have no end inside her, that she always would.