to find her in pieces and already kicking himself for breaking her, no matter how necessary.
But his heart did the kicking, hard against his ribs, because this was Anya. She did not look broken in the least.
“I did not expect you to come after me,” he said.
When he could.
“Why?” Her tone was arch, and she did nothing to conceal the evidence that she’d been crying from him. She stood beside him as if it was her place, her right, and made him wonder why he thought she should conceal anything. “Because women of your acquaintance are more likely to fling themselves on the mercy of foreign countries than confront you personally? I apologize. I never did learn how to cower.”
He admired her, and that was only one of the problems. That was only one of the ways she was tearing him apart, and all she was doing was standing there, watching him calmly.
As if she could see straight through him.
And had every intention of doing it forever.
Something in Tarek...broke.
It was not the duties and responsibilities that marked his life. It had not been the losses he suffered. His mother when he was twelve. His father last year. Worse still, the brother he had loved unconditionally, until the night he’d come to kill Tarek. And had laughed while he’d tried, betraying not only Tarek in that moment, but all of Tarek’s memories of their childhood.
As if Rafiq had died that night and killed Tarek, too. Yet both of them had to live with it.
He had survived all of those things, if perhaps more scarred and furious than the cheerful boy he’d been once. He’d had no choice but to survive.
But he didn’t know how he was meant to survive this.
It was this. It was her.
It was this woman he never should have met in the first place.
And it was something about being here, far away from the civilization of the city, the dampening influence of the palace, where he could never forget for a moment that he was the King. And what, therefore, he owed everyone around him, all the time.
But out here in the desert, he was only...a man.
With her he became the things he should not whether he wished it or did not.
With her he broke into pieces when he could not break. He tore open, when he needed to remain contained. Himself above all.
“A broken man can rule, but only ever badly,” his mother had always told him. Well did Tarek know it. The history of the world was littered with broken men who ruled their countries straight into the dark.
He had always intended to find the light. Always.
“You knew the rules going in,” he heard himself say, louder than he could recall ever speaking before. As if he howled to the moon and stars above. “You knew what this was.”
“But rules are not who we are,” Anya replied, with that impenetrable calm he found a challenge. More than a challenge—it bordered on an assault.
“Rules are what separate us from the beasts,” he thundered at her. “And emotions are what separate kings from mere men. I have a country I must think of, Anya. Do you not understand this? I cannot have feelings.”
Because that was what this was. He understood that now.
He had become the thing he’d sworn he never would.
All because of her. The woman who stood beside him, when he had never wanted that. He thought of that soft, inconsequential girl he had been betrothed to and knew full well that none of this would have happened, had she done her duty. He would have felt nothing. He would have married her, even bedded her, with courtesy and distance. He would have treated her with respect.
He never would have felt a thing.
And now, instead, Tarek felt everything.
Every star in the sky above him was bright and hot and still dull compared to what shined in him now, all because of this woman.
Anya turned to him then, looking at him straight on the way she always did. Direct, to the point.
Honest, something in him whispered.
Neither hiding the emotion he could see on her face nor flinging it at him.
And a great deal as if she was daring him to do the same.
Daring him, when no one else would brave such an endeavor.
“I understand,” she said, so evenly he had the mad urge to force her to sound as uneven as he felt. As messy. As ruined. “If it was easy to fall in love, Tarek, we wouldn’t