A Royal Wedding(44)

Wasn’t that what he’d done today? Wasn’t that what she’d let him do? Emotion rose like bile in her throat, and she had to struggle to keep from crying out. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe.

She did not know this man. She had only the memories she’d held on to for years, and her own sense that she owed Marlena this—that she could not let her mother pay such a high price for their escape. That was all. And yet she had agreed to marry him? To be the queen of a country she hardly remembered—had gone out of her way, in fact, to forget? Lara shifted in her seat and wondered if she would wake up and find herself in her bed at home in Denver—if this was one more of those dreams she’d used to have, all desperate and yearning and dark until she woke, gasping for breath, her heart pounding in her chest.

But when she looked up, she was still on the plane. It was all too real. And Adel was watching her from his place across the cabin, as if he’d heard her very thoughts.

“You should rest,” he said. His gray eyes were shadowed now, storm-colored and stern, not silver at all. She did not know why she should feel that as a loss—why she should want to change them back. “You will need your strength, I think, for what lies ahead.”

“Thank you,” she said past the dryness in her throat and the clutch of panic that still gripped her. “That is very comforting.”

“Your father lies in state in the palace,” Adel said, his voice giving her no quarter, his hard eyes allowing her no mercy. “He must be buried as his legacy and consequence demand. As his country demands.”

Lara opened her mouth to make a wry comment on that— to mention, perhaps, what sort of legacy he’d always held in her mind—but swiftly thought better of it. Adel Qaderi, handpicked by King Azat to succeed him, always the son to her father that she could never be, was unlikely to find Marlena Canon’s stories of the cruelties visited upon her particularly persuasive. Given the way he’d referred to her mother already, however offhandedly, Lara suspected Adel believed a deeply skewed version of reality. He was King Azat’s chosen heir! She knew exactly what he believed: the story her father had told him.

But what if Marlena had made all of that up? a small voice asked. She swallowed. It didn’t matter any longer. It couldn’t. It was twelve years too late. She would have to go on believing what she’d always believed.

Something must have showed on her face, because his attention seemed to focus in on her then. Too intent. Too demanding. He exuded far too much raw power, even sitting there with his work in front of him, like some kind of common businessman.

Common, Lara thought, with a shaking deep within that she could not quite convince herself was panic, was something Adel Qaderi could never be.

“If you have negative things to say about King Azat, as I can see you do, I suggest you say them to me here,” Adel said. His voice was harsh, his gaze frankly condemning. “You are unlikely to find a receptive ear in Alakkul, where he has long been considered a hero as well as a monarch.”

“Perhaps,” Lara said, conscious of the edge in her voice, her skin prickling with the urge to slap back at that disapproving note in his voice, to defend herself and her mother, “he was a better king than he was a father or a husband.” She raised her brows in challenge. “For your country’s sake, I certainly hope so.”

“And you feel qualified to judge him as a man, as a father?” Lara did not mistake that silky tone for something soft—she could see the steel in his gaze. “You, who showed your daughterly devotion by pretending he did not exist for twelve long years? You, who were not even aware that he was ill, nor that he had died?”

“I do not need to justify myself or the intricacies of my family’s dynamics to you,” she snapped at him, surprised that his words pricked at her.

His eyes bored into her from across the cabin. Why should she want to squirm? Why should she feel something far too much like shame? “I witnessed, firsthand, what your abandonment wrought.”

“I can imagine how it must have pained him to lose two of his many interchangeable, nameless possessions,” Lara said sarcastically.

“Azat will raise you to be nothing more than a pet,” Marlena had told her. Repeatedly. “Meek. Easy. Forever owned and operated at his command, at his disposal. Is that what you want? Is that any kind of life?”

“Believe me, he knew your name,” Adel replied in that low, furious tone. His mouth twisted, and his gaze chilled. “And your mother’s.”