confidence, that deceptively graceful strength of his. “I am the King.”
The shockingly luxurious private jet hovered somewhere high in the night sky above the Atlantic Ocean, the world shrouded in black on all sides, but Lara could not sleep as she knew she should. She stared blindly out the window as the plane cut through the dark clouds, shivering slightly as reality sank into her like a great weight.
What had she done? How could she possibly have agreed to this?
She had spent her whole life avoiding exactly this—her return to Alakkul. Marlena had spoken of it as if it was the worst possible scenario, the ultimate pit of doom and despair. As if they would die should it happen—or, worse, wish to die. “Azat will hunt us down and drag us back there,” she had told the young Lara again and again. “He will make you one more of his little puppets, who live only to serve him!”
They had taken Marlena’s mother’s maiden name as their surname. No more Princess Lara. No more Your Highness. Marlena had moved them whenever she felt threatened, whenever she had reason to think the King’s goons were drawing near. Always, King Azat was the boogeyman, the monster they sought to avoid. Lara wasn’t sure when the crushing fear had started to recede—or why Marlena had finally permitted them to settle down in Denver. She only knew that once she’d finished college, Marlena had seemed far less worried than she’d been before, and far happier to make herself a home in nearby Aspen.
Lara wasn’t sure when she’d first started to wonder if, perhaps, Marlena had simply been overreacting. Perhaps there had never been any goons—any escape. Perhaps Marlena had simply wanted a divorce. But thinking such things had always felt deeply disloyal to the only parent she had access to, and felt doubly so now. Lara pushed the thoughts away.
Adel sat not far away, frowning down at the documents before him, a soft reading light surrounding him in a warm halo. Lara could not help but watch him. He was so much more than the cascade of her teenage memories, her teenage feelings, and the simple fact of his commanding presence. He was everything she had been taught to fear about Alakkul—and Alakkulian men in particular. Autocratic bullies, Marlena had said—content to use their power to crush, maim, destroy.
Wasn’t that what he’d done today? Wasn’t that what she’d let him do? Emotion rose like bile in her throat, and she had to struggle to keep from crying out. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe.
She did not know this man. She had only the memories she’d held on to for years, and her own sense that she owed Marlena this—that she could not let her mother pay such a high price for their escape. That was all. And yet she had agreed to marry him? To be the queen of a country she hardly remembered—had gone out of her way, in fact, to forget? Lara shifted in her seat and wondered if she would wake up and find herself in her bed at home in Denver—if this was one more of those dreams she’d used to have, all desperate and yearning and dark until she woke, gasping for breath, her heart pounding in her chest.
But when she looked up, she was still on the plane. It was all too real. And Adel was watching her from his place across the cabin, as if he’d heard her very thoughts.
“You should rest,” he said. His gray eyes were shadowed now, storm-colored and stern, not silver at all. She did not know why she should feel that as a loss—why she should want to change them back. “You will need your strength, I think, for what lies ahead.”
“Thank you,” she said past the dryness in her throat and the clutch of panic that still gripped her. “That is very comforting.”
“Your father lies in state in the palace,” Adel said, his voice giving her no quarter, his hard eyes allowing her no mercy. “He must be buried as his legacy and consequence demand. As his country demands.”
Lara opened her mouth to make a wry comment on that— to mention, perhaps, what sort of legacy he’d always held in her mind—but swiftly thought better of it. Adel Qaderi, handpicked by King Azat to succeed him, always the son to her father that she could never be, was unlikely to find Marlena Canon’s stories of the cruelties visited upon