darkness—but all he could do was stand there as this woman tore him apart.
“And maybe not loving her husband did make your mother a better queen.” Anya held his gaze. “Maybe that was exactly what your father needed. But Tarek. Do you think I don’t know who you are?”
And Tarek was a man who had always known who he was. From the day of his birth, his destiny was secure. He had never had a moment’s doubt, never suffered from the trials of insecurity. How could he?
He knew who he was. What he was. What he would do, how he would do it, and how history would record him.
He had always known.
Now he gazed down at this woman, his wife and his Queen, who made his heart beat. Who made him want things he’d never considered possible or even desirable before.
And it suddenly became critical to him that he know who she thought he was.
“You don’t need a cold queen, or a harem filled with women, none of whom love you so much as they love power,” she told him when he didn’t answer her question. Because he couldn’t. “You need me and you know it.”
And for perhaps the first time in his life, Tarek found himself appreciating the power of pure confidence in another. Because Anya wasn’t asking him or begging him, she was telling him.
She kept going. “You would never have chosen a prisoner and elevated her as you did otherwise. You would never have defended me against my own father, in public. Or left me with your own family the way you did, with no worries whatever that I might embarrass you or act against you in some way. You need me, Tarek. The woman who loves you. The Queen who will defend you.”
“Anya.” And her name was that drumming thing, and that drumming was a song. He could hear it in the night all around them. In the wind and the sand. In him and between them. And, at last, Tarek stopped fighting it. “I fear...that want to though I might, I do not know how to love.”
And her smile then was so bright it made the heavens dim.
“Then I will love you enough that you are forced to learn,” she whispered.
This time, when Tarek broke, he understood it was nothing to fight. It was no surrender. It was no rebellion he needed to quell.
Unless he was very much mistaken...this was falling.
And she was right. It hurt.
But that hardly mattered. What was one more scar to add to his collection?
“And if I already love you,” he managed to ask, though his heart ached. His temples were spikes of pain. He fell and he fell. “What then?”
Anya slid her arms around his waist, and tilted her head back to look him full in the face. “We will make our own rules, here and now. You and I. We can do as we like, Tarek. This is ours.”
And he thought, then, of possibilities instead of problems. Of hope instead of tradition.
Of love—not instead of duty, but laced through it, making it glow.
He thought, Have I loved her all along?
And the thought itself seemed to fuse with that smile on her face, the stars all around them, and all the ways he fell. Until he was filled with a wild sense of wonder.
“I think I stuck the landing, habibti,” he told her, and his reward was not only the way her smile widened and took the world with it. But the way it felt inside him, a wild rush that left him smiling, too.
“I love your scars, that you won in defending this kingdom even though it broke your heart,” she said, moving her hands lightly over his chest, tracing one scar. Then the next. He felt it like light, though he still wore his robes. “I love your arrogance and your certainty, because it makes it so evident that you could never be anything but a king. I love my King, Tarek.”
He wanted to speak, then, but he was filled with that wonder and a bright, almost painful thing—
It occurred to him, at last, that it had never been obsession.
This was so much more than that. She was.
“And you deserve to love me back, King and man alike,” she whispered fiercely. “You deserve a place where you can hide, Tarek. Where you can be who you are. No thrones or kingdoms or worries. No people. Just you and me. Just this.”
Tarek felt washed clean. Made new. He held