A Secret Birthright(44)
Marry her. Without confronting her. Make her give you all rights to Ryan, secure Hesham’s son. Then deal with her, according to her innocence or guilt.
His steps ran out. They’d taken him where he’d experienced his life’s first true happiness, the consummation of his most profound bond. Where he might now end it all.
He opened the door, stepped inside. She wasn’t there.
He’d have the respite of ignorance, of hope, a bit longer.
A vase swayed as he bumped into it. It crashed, broke into countless, useless shards. Just like his heart might moments from now.
A door slammed and footsteps spilled onto the hardwood floor.
She emerged from the chamber leading to the bathroom, half-running, the face of all his hopes and dreams, alarmed, concerned, sublime in beauty. “Fareed, what…”
She faltered as she saw the ruins at his feet, took in his frozen stance.
Then it was there in her eyes. The realization. The desperation. The fear. Of exposure.
Certainty flooded him, drowned anything else inside him.
She was Hesham’s woman.
Gwen stared at the stranger who looked back at her out of Fareed’s eyes, desperation detonating in her heart.
He’d somehow found out.
“Laish?”
“Fareed, please…”
They’d spoken at the same moment. But he’d finished even as she stumbled to find words to implore him with.
He’d said all he was going to say.
He’d only asked, “Why?”
Why she’d lied. Why she’d kept lying.
She could only ask her own burning question, “How?”
The stranger who now inhabited Fareed’s body said, “Emad.”
She had no idea how Emad had found out, where she’d gone wrong. He couldn’t have gotten it out of Rose. She didn’t know.
“This is why you kept pushing me away, insisting on leaving.”
Statements. She could do nothing but nod.
She’d trapped herself the day she’d withheld the truth from him. And only sealed her fate when she’d grabbed at that one night with him and hadn’t left right afterward, when she’d kept telling herself, just one more night.
“Ryan lahmi w’dammi. Laish khabbaiti?”
Ryan is my flesh and blood. Why did you hide it?
The way he said that, that haunted look in his eyes crushed her. She’d seen him in that videotaped request for her to come forward. He’d looked and sounded wrecked over his brother’s death. He looked like that again, as if he’d lost him all over again.
She still couldn’t tell him why.
But his eyes weren’t only deadened with that grief she’d experienced for as long and as intensely. In them still lay his inexorableness. He’d have an answer.
She gave him all she could. “I was abiding by Hesham’s will.”
The moment she uttered Hesham’s name, Fareed swayed like a building in a massive earthquake.
And if she’d thought his eyes had gone dead before, she knew how wrong she’d been. He now looked at her as someone would at his own murderer.
She couldn’t survive his pain and disillusion. She had to try to alleviate them, with what she could reveal.
“I had to keep on doing what he did. You know the lengths he went to to hide his family’s whereabouts and identity.”
In that same deep-as-death voice, he asked, “Gallek laish?”
He’d always spoken Arabic unintentionally, to express his hunger and appreciation with the spontaneity and accuracy he could only achieve in his mother tongue. He’d usually been too submerged in passion to explain.
Now he spoke Arabic as if he was convinced she understood, wanted more proof of the depth of her deception.
Her heart twisted until it felt it would tear out its tethers. “He—he was convinced it would ruin his family to have…your family know of…our existence. This is why he hid. This is why I did, too. I—I only sought you out because of Ryan’s problem, thought I’d get your opinion and leave. But things kept snowballing, then things between us…ignited, turning my position from difficult to impossible and I kept wanting to leave, to disappear, so you’d never know, never feel like this…”
“Too late now.”
Silence crashed after his monotone statement.
She waited for him to add something, to restart her heart or still it forever.