* * *
Abram watched as Tariq drew Paige from the room, eased her around the doors and led her up the hall to his suite. Dark, emerald green eyes stared back at him, defiance and anger reflecting in her gaze before she disappeared.
He turned back to Azir, though God knew he didn’t want to. He could feel the killing rage rising inside him, threatening the control it had taken so many years to develop.
For a moment he wondered if she could be right, if the Mustafa legacy of blood, death, and insanity, wasn’t actually a contagion that infected each generation after the other.
Staring at his father, he felt nothing but the overwhelming hatred that he was in danger of allowing to spill from the depths of his soul.
He stared at his father, and he saw nothing but the ragged, agonizing pain his first wife had felt as she died, the fear of his second wife as she died with their unborn child, and his own fear when he had learned that Paige’s life was in danger.
“She’s the very image of her mother, isn’t she?” Azir stated calmly, as though he hadn’t just been throwing that vision across the room with enough strength to kill her if her head were to strike the floor when she fell.
The calm, almost rational tone of his voice only incited the icy rage burning inside Abram.
“Why is she here?” He could only barely force a semblance of calm in his voice.
Azir smiled. A mocking, triumphant curve of his lips as he stared back at Abram.
“She is my insurance, my son, and the gift I would grant you for your birthday. Tell me, do you think her mother is worried? Perhaps certain who has taken her daughter and imagining the many ways I could make her suffer for her mother’s crimes?”
The pleasure Azir clearly felt at the thought of the pain only a mother could feel filling Marilyn Galbraithe, sickened Abram.
“I will be returning her home—” he began.
“Then she will die.” Azir’s voice hardened, becoming gravely and tinged with anger. “The moment you leave the walls of the fortress with her then the guards will haul her back and I’ll have her stoned for her mother’s crimes. She is no virgin. She was checked for such innocence as she lay unconscious. Convincing the Matawa to order the stoning will be no hardship.”
Abram stared back at his father in shock and disbelief. Surely even Azir wasn’t that insane. To take such an action would only cause the royal family to be forced to take action against them.
“Don’t do this,” he ground out, his fists clenching, adrenaline surging through him and demanding blood. Azir’s blood. And he would be well within his rights to spill it. He should simply do it. How much better the world would be without Azir Mustafa’s presence. “She’s done nothing to deserve this.”
color=" height="0em" width="1em" align="justify">“But her mother has,” Azir snapped back, his grating tone rasping against Abram’s nerve endings. “She committed adultery against me in her false marriage to another man. She stole my son and turned his heart against me even as she and her American courts ripped from me my right to have him returned to me.” Azir’s expression twisted with fanatical fury. “My precious Marilyn. She turned Khalid against me, and because of him, you have turned against me. I blame her for the atrocities Khalid has committed against God in his sexual depravity and I blame her for the deaths of your brothers. And her daughter will now pay the price.” He was screaming. Staring back at Abram, the rage infecting not just his sanity, but also his control over himself.
“They were no brothers of mine!” As far as Abram was concerned, this was the last straw for Azir. He would never again claim blood relation to Azir or to the bastards who nearly killed him and Khalid. The same two men had created the situation Abram now found himself in. “Had they still lived when I claim the province from the King’s emissary, then I would have ordered their death’s myself.”
Azir glared back at him, his expression working furiously, his face brick red with fury. The old bastard had never been rational where Ayid and Aman were concerned, no more than he had been rational where Marilyn was concerned. Rational or sane.
“You and Khalid were responsible for the deaths of their wives and still you would hate them for their retaliation?” Azir questioned him incredulously, as though he himself had had nothing to do with their vocation or their wrath. “They lost what they held dearest. Chaste, faithful wives and you bemoan a whore who willingly shared her body between you and Khalid as though she were no more than a bitch dog in heat? I should have turned the two of you over to the Matawa the moment I discovered your perversion instead of believing that you would learn your lesson with your wife’s death.”
Abram felt the clawing, black ice he continually fought beginning to build, to overtake him. That dark, inner core freezing over, obliterating honor, morality. He stared at Azir and all he could see was the bastard’s blood on the floor, sinking in, staining the stone and forever marking his sins.
How easy it would be to kill him, Abram thought without so much as a hint of guilt. But killing him now would only cause more problems than it would fix.
He was aware of Azir watching nervously now. Abram could only stare, his entire being centered on not killing the evil old bastard.
He couldn’t trust himself to speak, to move. Not just yet. Not until he could wipe away the image of his hands wrapped around Azir’s throat, his bloated, fanatical expression slowly turning blue.
“Forgive me, Abram.” Azir suddenly spoke nervously as though realizing how close to death he was coming. “That was never an option. Never would I see you turned over to the authoritie”
Too little. And he would have preferred that if only he could have kept Lessa safe all those years ago.
“In three weeks the king’s emissary will arrive to take your vow to oversee the lands and return to our family the payments they froze so many years ago. Before that day, I give you leave to bed the daughter of my faithless wife. Her bastard child is my gift to you until that day. I have spoken with Tariq and given him leave, nay, I have ordered him to assist you however you wish in the enjoyment of her corrupt body. Once you have given the emissary your vow, you may escort her back to her mother, or if you so choose, you may have her as the first addition to your own harem.”
To his harem?
Abram could feel his stomach recoiling sickeningly. In what demented fantasy did his father ever believe he would actually give that vow and remain here to allow Ayid and Aman’s legacy to continue to grow?
“Do not betray me again, Abram.” Azir’s voice was hoarse as he spoke. “Betray your king if you must and leave to join your brother and your whore when it is done. The account is held until your vow is given. It will be mine, or what happened to your precious Lessa will seem a blessing compared to the hell that bastard sister of Khalid’s will know. I beg of you, do not test me in this.”