The Royal Collection. Rebecca Winters

the room,” Olivia said.

      He nodded once. “Indeed. Follow me.”

      They wandered down a maze of domed corridors, with silver walls inlaid with stone reflecting off the polished floor. The palace at Alansund housed the crown jewels of the royal family. This palace seemed to be made of them. It was ostentatious, a show of riches that awed even her.

      “This is beautiful.”

      He stopped, turning to face her. “Is it? I find it oppressive.”

      He turned away again, continuing to lead them in their journey. He was such a strange man. Impenetrable as rock, and yet, at the same time, honest in his speech. Still, for all that honesty, she found she could not understand him.

      “I suppose when you are used to open spaces, it might be difficult to become used to living behind stone walls.”

      “I’m used to stone walls. I’ve spent much of my time inhabiting caves, and an abandoned village out in the middle of the desert. But I have no good memories here.” He let his words die there, and she sensed there would be no reviving them now, no matter how persistent she was.

      She didn’t need him to go on. She didn’t need to know his story, didn’t need to understand him.

      She simply needed him to marry her.

      A wave of fear, of uncertainty, washed over her. She wondered what she was doing here. Why she was agreeing to marry this stranger.

       For Alansund. Because you were asked to. Because you are a queen who has no throne, no power. Because you have no husband. Because you have nowhere else, and nothing else.

      Her internal voice had ample reason, and she found it difficult to argue. But fear was not looking for rationality. Fear was simply looking for a foothold, and it had found one.

      Not so difficult to do in this situation.

      Still, she followed on. He paused at one of the ornate doors that led to what she assumed would be her quarters for the duration of her stay. He pushed the door open without saying anything.

      “You’re a scintillating conversationalist, has anyone ever told you that?” she asked.

      “No,” he said, the sarcasm skating right over his head.

      “I’m not that surprised.”

      “Conversation was never required of me.”

      In that statement, she felt all of the helplessness he would never otherwise express. And somehow, in that moment, with those words, she felt a connection with him. They were both in a situation they were ill equipped to handle. Olivia, having lost her status, having lost the man that was so much a part of her identity. And Tarek, pulled from the desert to become something he had never been trained to be.

      “We will find a way,” she said. She wasn’t sure who the assurance was really meant for. Him, or her.

      “And if we do not, you can return home.”

      “It isn’t my home,” she said, speaking the words that terrified her more than any others. “I don’t have one. Not now.”

      “I see. I have one. I simply cannot return to it.”

      “Perhaps we will make one here?”

      She tried to imagine finding a bond with this man, tried to imagine being his wife, and she found it impossible. Though not more impossible than returning to Alansund. Watching her brother-in-law sit on the throne, where Marcus had been before. Watching his fiancée take her place.

      That was perhaps an even bigger impossibility.

      “If not that, perhaps we can simply prevent the palace from falling into ruin? And the entire country with it?”

      “That’s a lot of faith you’re placing in a stranger,” she said.

      “I would more readily put my faith in you than anyone who worked under my brother.”

      “Was he so bad?”

      “Yes,” Tarek said, offering no further explanation. And she could tell, by the finality in that one-word answer, that he would not.

      “Then, perhaps you don’t have as far to go as you might think. You may look good simply by comparison.”

      “Perhaps.”

      Olivia didn’t say anything; rather, she continued to stand next to him, feeling intensely uncomfortable. Socially at sea. That almost never happened to her.

      “I thought you wanted to be shown to your room,” he said.

      “I do,” she said, walking past him and into the vast space. Different than her quarters in Alansund, but no less grand. It glittered like the rest of the castle, full of gold and jewels, the bed wrought from precious metal, twisted together like gilt tree branches. “I suppose I just feel a bit—” She turned as she spoke the sentence, and saw that she was talking to nothing.

      Tarek had excused himself without a word. Obviously finished with her for the moment.

      She was alone. Something that had become far too common in recent months.

      How she hated the emptiness.

      She crossed the room, taking a seat on the edge of the bed, trying to squash the feeling of terror, of sadness climbing up inside her, mixing together to create a potent cocktail that made her head swim, made it difficult to breathe.

      “You can’t break now,” she said. “You must never break.”

      * * *

      He wasn’t sure if it was a memory or a dream. Both.

      Right now, though, it was agony, reality. As it had been ever since he had come back to the palace. Ghosts of the past long banished rising back up to haunt him.

      He had spent a great many years out in the middle of the desert with nothing but a sword to act as protection. There, he had known no fear. Because the worst that had awaited him was death. Not so here in the palace. Here, there was torture.

      He sat up, his breath burning like fire, sweat rolling down his face, his chest. He was disoriented, unsure of his positioning in the room. Certain, in that moment, that he wasn’t alone.

      He was on the floor, a blanket tangled around his naked body. He stood, disengaging himself from the fabric, searching the dark space around him, his every sense on high alert. He felt as if he was dying. His brain lost in a cloud of fog that made it impossible to sort through what raged inside him, and what he had to fear outside.

      He walked to his nightstand and took his sheathed sword from the surface. Something wasn’t right about any of this, but he couldn’t sort through what it might be. There was nothing in his mind but a tangle of demons, and he couldn’t see around them to figure out what his next action should be. So he defaulted to what he knew.

      Violence. And the intent to draw blood before any could be shed by him.

      He pulled the sword from the scabbard and held the blade high, walking toward the door, toward the threat.

      * * *

      A thunderous sound woke Olivia from her sleep. She sat upright, her hand pressed to her chest, her heart beating fast. Instinctively, because she was confused, disoriented, she looked to her left, checking to see if Marcus had heard the sound, too.

      But of course he hadn’t. Because he wasn’t there.

      He was dead. She knew that. Was unbearably conscious of it almost all the time. Forgetting now, in a palace in a faraway land, in the bedroom next to the man she was considering marrying in place of Marcus... It seemed cruel.

      She heard the sound of metal scraping against stone and clutched the blanket more tightly. For the first time she questioned her safety. She had made a lot of assumptions about Tahar, about Tarek, based on the fact he was a royal. Based on the fact that this was a palace.