It would be days before the dignitaries arrived, ample time to do away with the medallion and then scour the palace for any indication of the Lion’s and Altair’s whereabouts. Letters from Ghameq’s hand. Men with strange orders. Anything. As the guards unnecessarily led Nasir to his chambers, he turned to Lana. “Do you trust me?”
He appreciated the way she paused to consider his question.
“Yes,” she said.
Nasir spoke to the guards. “The room adjoining mine—is it clean?”
One of the fools had the audacity to grin mischievously as he nodded, but it was the other who spoke. “Shall we procure you a woman?”
Nasir pressed his lips thin until the guard shifted uneasily. His sheathed sword caught in the other’s robes and nearly toppled them both.
“And their rooms?” Nasir asked, gesturing to Aya and Lana.
“We—we will escort—”
“Answer the question,” he said slowly.
The guards pointed to the two rooms across the hall from Nasir’s chambers and couldn’t hurry away quickly enough.
When they left, Nasir scanned the hall before looking at Aya. “There is room for two in the adjoining room. It isn’t safe here.”
Aya refused with a smile. “I have held to immortality this long, Prince.”
Lana was watching her, likely awaiting an invitation to share her room, but Aya’s gaze only fluttered her way. Nasir wasn’t surprised. Laa, he had counted on that, for Aya had not been able to keep her own son alive, and he trusted no one but himself to keep Zafira’s sister safe.
“Prince?” Aya called him back.
Nasir turned with a passive lift of his brows, masking the caution rearing its head.
“Removing the medallion will not help.”
“It’s how the Lion controls him,” Nasir said tiredly. “He’s been controlling him through it for years. Corrupting him.” For more than a decade, perhaps. “Remove the medallion, and there’s—”
“The absolute certainty that he will remain corrupt,” Aya finished. “If the medallion has corrupted him, as you say, it no longer serves a purpose.”
But Nasir remembered those flashes of humanity simmering beneath Ghameq’s coldhearted front. He knew his father was still there.
Aya waited, pity and disbelief clear on her face. “I know what you believe, my love. I know what you hope for. But you cannot get him back.”
She was wrong. Nasir didn’t hope for anything. Hope is for … He left the thought unfinished and turned away without another word, ignoring Lana’s inquisitive gaze as he ushered her through his door, past the antechambers, and into his bedroom. The gray sheets were as neat as the day he had left them, his curtains closed, and the scent of his soap familiar and calming. She’s wrong, he convinced himself.
“It’s so lonely here,” Lana said softly as Nasir slid open a drawer and shifted its contents to retrieve a key.
The rooms struck him like an oddly tailored robe, his but not, and he almost expected to see Altair lounging on his covers with a sly grin. The walls would echo the general’s laugh because they, too, loved the sound of his voice. Thinking of Altair here was easier than thinking of her. Imagining her here, in his rooms, in his arms.
Did she think of him as she rode for the House of Dreams? Did she miss him as he missed her, an ache that stretched from the pads of his fingers to the corners of his conscience? The way no one else missed him?
After an uncomfortable silence, he unlocked the door to the adjoining room and swept inside the small but lavish space with an attached bath. The bed was curtained with crimson, the sheets meant for all but sleep. He crossed to the door on the opposite end and turned the lock. Then he checked the window, pressing down on both latches, and looked behind the screen just in case before returning to the door connecting the rooms, satisfied.
“Do you love her?”
Nasir froze for the barest of moments.
He didn’t have time for questions from girls he didn’t know. “The door will be locked from the other side, and I have the only key. Don’t try to leave no matter what you hear.”
Lana stared at him. “Do you?” she asked again. Rimaal, this girl. “What do you know of love?” She flinched. His irritation cracked.
“I—” She floundered. “I once liked someone so much that I thought it was love. Then he went on an adventure with someone he loved more and never came back.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, refusing his sympathy. “I was too young for him anyway.”
He studied her, the bold line of her shoulders, the resilience between her brows. Worlds apart from her sister, yet exactly
the same.
“First loves are difficult things,” he said finally, softly. “And second ones?” she asked.
“Everything the first was not.”
He closed the door and turned the key, tucking the cool metal against his hip. He had forgotten what it was like to lie on his side in his own bed, in his own home, and feel utterly incomplete with nothing but his gauntlet blades for company. He flicked them out and retracted them with a sigh.
On this very bed, in a bout of sorrow, his mother had mended the burns on his back. On this very bed, in a bout of hunger, Kulsum had slid the linen from his shoulders and he from hers. On this very bed, in a bout of companionship, Altair had propped up his sandals and teased him without mercy.
Were all monsters lonely, he wondered, pretending to be aloof and unafraid? Was it that falsity that nurtured them, cultivating them with careful precision, unique and unmatched?
He missed him. In the way it felt to lose feeling when a limb went numb.
He missed her. In the way it felt to stop breathing. Like he was losing himself.
And it was because of this loneliness that he knew with sudden awareness that he was not alone.
