This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(68)

Under the pretense of offering assistance, Mrs. Amina drew the girl closer. “If I could, I’d snap your neck right now,” she hissed. “And don’t you dare forget it.”

Alizeh squeezed her eyes shut.

The housekeeper shoved Alizeh down the hall, the sound of Duchess Jamilah’s voice fading with her every step.

“Your heart is one of legend,” the duchess was saying. “Of course, we all heard the story of your saving that filthy southern child, but now you come to the defense of a snoda? Kamran, my dear, you are too good for us. Come, let us take tea in my personal parlor, where we might have more quiet to reflect . . .”

Kamran.

His name was Kamran.

Alizeh did not know why this revelation comforted her as she was dragged away—or even why she cared.

Though maybe, she wondered, this was the reason why the devil had shown her his face. Maybe it was for this moment. Maybe because his was the last face she’d think of before her life was ripped apart.

Yet again.





Twenty-Six





KAMRAN STARED, UNBLINKING, AS THE girl was half dragged, half shoved down the hall. As if the bandages around her hands and neck weren’t evidence enough, he’d noted with a modicum of fear that he’d begun to recognize her now merely from her movements, from the lines of her figure, from her glossy black curls.

Kamran murmured a vacant thanks to his aunt, who’d said something he did not hear, and allowed her to lead him to another room, the details of which he did not notice. He could hardly focus on his aunt as she spoke, nodding only when it seemed appropriate, and offering brief, monosyllabic responses when prompted.

Inside, he was in turmoil.

Why do you not fight back? he’d wanted to cry.

In the privacy of his own mind, Kamran would not cease shouting at the girl. She was capable of killing five men in cold blood but allowed this monstrous housekeeper to treat her thus? Why? Was she really left no recourse but to work here as the lowest servant, allowing her lessers to treat her like trash? To abuse her? Why did she not seek employment elsewhere?

Why?

With that, the fight left his body.

This was the true agony: that Kamran understood why she stayed. Not only had it recently occurred to him how difficult it might be for a Jinn to find employment in a noble house, but as the days wore on his imagination expanded even to understand precisely why she sought work in such a grand home. He’d begun to discern as much when she hesitated to remove her mask even in the midst of a rainstorm; he’d understood fully only when he realized how fraught her life was with danger. Kamran had known the girl but a matter of days, but in that short time he’d already been privy to three different attacks on her life.

Three.

It had been made clear to him, then, not only that she wished to live her life unseen—but that she did not feel safe enough in the city to live alone.

These were two desires directly opposed.

Her work as a servant, Kamran had realized, provided her with more than the basic needs of coin and shelter. The snoda itself offered her a measure of anonymity, but there was safety, too, in the walls of a grand estate. Guaranteed protection. Guards stationed at all access points.

A faceless servant in a busy, heavily secured house— It was, for a young woman in her position, a brilliant cover. Doubtless she accepted as incidental the regular abuse she suffered in exchange for security.

It was a situation Kamran despised.

The tea he sipped turned to acid in his gut, the casual position of his limbs hiding an interior tension coiling him taut from the inside out. He felt as if his muscles were atrophying slowly in the suit of his skin, a silent litany of epithets perched in his mouth even when he smiled.

He murmured, “Yes, thank you,” and accepted a second puffed pastry from his aunt’s proffered dish. He tucked one pastry next to its sibling, then placed the dessert plate on a low table. He’d no appetite.

“. . . much excitement about the ball this evening,” his aunt was saying. “The daughter of a dear friend of mine shall be attending, and I was hoping to introduce . . .”

Why Kamran felt this overwhelming need always to protect this nameless girl, he could not explain, for she was not at all helpless, and she was not his responsibility.

“Hmm?” his aunt prompted. “What do you say, dear? You would not mind terribly, would you?”

“Not at all,” the prince said, staring into his teacup. “I’d be happy to meet anyone you respect so highly.”

“Oh,” his aunt cried, clapping her hands together. “What a lovely young man you are, how . . .”

Still, Kamran thought it must be exhausting to live such a life as hers; to know in your soul your own strength and intelligence and yet live each day insulted and berated. The girl went every minute overlooked unless she was being hunted. And devils above, he was tired of hunting her.

The prince had been sent to Baz House as a spy.

It was not the first time he’d done covert work for the empire, and he knew it would not be the last. What he detested now was not the work itself, but the nature of the directive he’d been given.

Though Kamran doubted the anger and animosity he now felt toward his grandfather would abate, he also knew he was doomed to bury the feelings regardless, carrying on forever as if nothing untoward had transpired between them. Kamran could neither condemn the king nor disregard his duties; he’d no choice but to persist even in his current dilemma, loathsome though it was.