The Royal Collection. Rebecca Winters

      “With a sword. It’s easy to protect yourself while you do that.”

      “I suppose it would be.” She moved her fingertips over his arm, glorying in the feel of his bare skin beneath hers. “My parents didn’t come to my fifteenth birthday. It’s such a small thing compared to this.” She brushed her palm over a raised scar on his arm, continuing, “But it hurt me. Scarred me. Scars you can’t see. Our housekeepers made my birthday cakes. At least I had them. You didn’t, I know.”

      “Olivia,” he said, his voice rough. “My pain does not erase yours. Do not make what is so large for you smaller just because I, too, have suffered.”

      She swallowed hard. “You are...a wise man.”

      “I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

      “So you have.” She hesitated. “For my fifteenth birthday I made my own cake. My own dinner. I told my family it would be special. I knew...I knew Emily couldn’t come. She’d been in the hospital for a week. Her platelets were low and...anyway, I just asked my parents to come home for dinner. For my party.” She blinked against a dry, painful stinging in her eyes. “They didn’t come.” The words were a whisper. “I waited and waited. They didn’t come.” She could feel his muscles tense beneath her touch. “I threw the cake away. I couldn’t bear to eat it.”

      “Olivia...” His voice was rough.

      “There’s more. They got home late. And I...I yelled at them. Why couldn’t they spare a couple of hours for me? All I wanted was for them to spend more time at home with me. And my father just looked at me. My mother cried. Then he said...he said it wasn’t like they wanted to be away. They didn’t want to be in the hospital with a dying child. And how dare I want to take any time from Emily when she might die and...I was living. I shouldn’t complain. Everything with them changed after that. It was never the same. Never.”

      “And so you left,” he said. “Changed countries.”

      “Met a man I didn’t want anything from. That helped. He didn’t hurt me because...because I knew then never to demand anything. Never to make waves.”

      “Your parents were fools,” he said.

      “No. They were just in an impossible situation. They are.”

      “Perhaps you feel the need to be fair. I do not. They hurt you. That, in my mind, is all that matters. I judge them by that sin.”

      She took in a sharp, jagged breath, her fingertips trailing over his scarred flesh. “And I will judge Malik by his sins against you.”

      “He had me starved.” Tarek rolled onto his back, his eyes focused on the ceiling. “He withheld water from me. To make me stronger,” he said, his voice rough. “Because I would need to spend much time out in the desert, and there I would not always have food or drink. I had to be prepared. He had me beaten. Because I needed to learn strength. He whipped me. And he...” Tarek touched a patch on his arm that was smooth, shinier than the rest of his skin. “He liked fruit. I remember watching him peel the skin from a pear. He was perfectly capable of peeling off a layer of human skin with as much efficiency. I wear the evidence of that.”

      “Tarek. No,” she said, her stomach twisting painfully.

      “When I returned to the palace it all came back to me. That is why I woke from my sleep. That’s why I walked the halls with a sword. To kill his ghost if he lingered. I could feel everything he’d done to me again. As though he was wounding me afresh. I found his journals. He admitted to having my parents assassinated. He...detailed the work he did on me to make me a loyal soldier. He liked the whips, as you saw. Liked to isolate me, as well. Deprive me of all sensory input, then...flay my skin with something sharp. My brother. My own brother. My parents were dead, and then...and then he betrayed me, and I have truly...truly never felt so alone as I did in that first moment when he tied me down and traced shapes in my back with the blade of his knife. That was when I started thinking of myself as a rock. Because a rock is unmoved. It might be reshaped, but it doesn’t bleed. It will not die. It is simply reformed. And it remains strong. A rock is never weakened.”

      Olivia closed her eyes, stifling the sob that was climbing her throat. “How could he have done that to you? How?” They were empty words. Meaningless. And yet they were all she had.

      “This is why I turn away from indulgences. From lusts of all kinds because...look at where it brought him.”

      “You aren’t Malik.”

      “No,” Tarek said, his voice blazing. “I know he did not intend it, but he gave me purpose. He ensured with all he did that I would guard myself against the weakness that infected his blood.”

      “Why? Why did he do it?”

      “To break me, though he didn’t say it. Strength, he said. It was always strength. Truly, I think he wanted me to rejoice in being banished to the desert. To make me hate the palace so much that I would never want to return. He wanted me too broken to rule. Too broken to realize his true character. Brainwashed. He did a magnificent job. Out there, I felt nothing. I had but one purpose—to fulfill the bargain I had made with my brother. The one that meant he would leave me be. There was clarity there. A beauty in the simplicity. I cherished it. In that way, I suppose he did his job. He made me strong. He made me the rock. He made that existence feel easy.”

      “It was a mind game. He didn’t care for you. He didn’t make you strong. You were strong. Any other man would have been broken.”

      He looked up at her, his eyes so black, so empty, they wounded her. “Was I not broken, Olivia?”

      “No, Tarek. No. You are not broken.” Her throat tightened, tears rolling down her cheeks. She put her hand on his chest, felt his heartbeat rage beneath her fingertips.

      “Do not cry for me, Olivia. Not for me.”

      “Who else will?”

      “No one needs to.”

      “That isn’t true. It isn’t.”

      “Whatever I was before Malik... Whatever happened before... I am different now. I’m another man. Whether or not I’m broken is immaterial. I am not what I should be. I can never be.”

      “You are everything you choose to be, Tarek,” she said, the words ringing with conviction. “He cannot command control over you, not anymore.”

      “You don’t understand. You don’t understand the years I spent there. That they were my refuge. You cannot possibly understand what they meant to me, what they did to me.”

      “Make me understand. I’m tired of being alone, Tarek. I’m so tired of being alone. Let me see. Let me see you.”

      He rolled out of the bed, standing upright, naked, beautiful and unashamed. “Tomorrow,” he said, his voice strained. “Tomorrow I will show you. I will make you understand. I am not the man you wish I could be. I am not the man you should have.”

      “But you have me,” she said, as close to an admission as she could muster right now.

      Pain flashed through his eyes, but almost as quickly as it appeared, it was replaced by the flatness again. “Tomorrow, I will show you.”

      “Tarek...” She blinked rapidly, looking down at her left hand, at the blue stone there. “Just...before you go... Why did you choose this ring for me?”

      He looked at her, a subtle shift in his face softening his features. “Your eyes,” he said. “The stone was blue. Like your eyes. And I very much liked the look of it. Since it made me think of you.”

      Her breath caught in her throat. A simple answer. But from Tarek...it may as well have been poetry. It was the truth. So simple. So perfect. It came from his soul, and touched her all the way down to hers.

      Then he turned and walked out of the room, leaving her alone once again.