Black Keys (The Colorblind Trilogy #1) - Rose B. Mashal Page 0,89

but it was even easier to be pulled back to him. It was such a war.

Before I could tell him about my obsession with reading that I barely had the time to fulfill, a gasp left my mouth at the sound of loud voices.

The sound wasn’t annoying, not at all. It was just surprising. And loud. And I didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from. I looked around me in search of the source, but found none, so I asked the prince, “What is this?”

“It’s the azan,” he answered.

“The what?”

“Azan. It’s the call to prayer. You hear it five times a day, once for each prayer,” he explained.

Huh!

“Why have I never heard it before?”

“Our wing has soundproof walls. Nobody can hear anything from the outside of it or from the inside, only between rooms and when a window is open.”

I nodded my understanding, then stood still as I listened to the sound of it; it was surprisingly nice, peaceful and strong. What I felt was curiosity mixed with hints of that feeling you get when you learn about a new thing–you’re silent as you take things in and observe and then you’re wondering about new questions you never knew you would ask at all.

The prince was looking at me all the while I listened to it with a small smile on his lips, and when the call to the prayer was finished, I gasped again at the sight of a huge guy in a uniform nearing us as we stood on the roof.

Fright hit me hard, I felt it in my stomach before it made its way to my chest, as I watched the guy as he took one step after another toward us, a big gun in his hands just to add to the mix of his thick, black beard and scary, hard features.

“Hey, it’s okay, he’s just one of the guards,” the prince’s voice was nearer to me than before. The arm that he threw around me with his hand holding the space between my shoulder and elbow, and the squeeze he gave it, blew a wave of security and safety right into me and reached my every sense as he hugged me close to his body.

The guard said some words in Arabic that sounded like a greeting and nodded his head once to the prince then to me without making any eye contact with me.

“If you’ll excuse me for not using English right now, Princess, I promise to translate later,” the prince asked and I nodded quickly a few times.

Their conversation went on for only a minute. All the while the prince was holding me to him in reassurance rather than protection, since there was no harmful threat anywhere close. It was all in my head, and I knew in my heart that the prince wouldn’t let him hurt me if it ever came to that. He’d promised.

The guard didn’t glance my way even once, completely ignoring me. His head was bent down all the while he talked to the prince except for a few times that he looked him in the eye. I despised the fact that it was surely because they weren’t allowed to look at any of the royal family in the eye or with such humbleness, because that huge guy looked like a slave to me, with no power whatsoever, just by the pose he was taking as he stood in front of the prince.

When the guard was dismissed, he left with another nod to the prince and a nod to me, and then the prince explained that he was changing shifts with another guard and was only checking if everything was okay or if we needed something.

When it got dark, it was our cue to go back to the wing, because despite the lights that lit up the whole place, there were mosquitoes up there which I definitely didn’t want to be friends with or get to know any better–because if they were in any way related to the ones in New York, then I was better off away from them.

Once we got back, the prince went to offer his prayer in one of the rooms and I followed him. I watched him pray once again and I still felt the same as I’d felt the first time I saw him praying yesterday.

I didn’t know if it was the form of the prayer itself that pulled me to it, or the fact that he was the one who