The Wrath and the Dawn(67)
The same maddening glory.
Shahrzad tore into a piece of flatbread with vicious precision.
“Shahrzad?”
She ignored him, despite her heart’s sudden clamoring.
Khalid strode to the other side of the table and sat down on the cushions with soundless grace.
Still, Shahrzad did not look up from her tray. She was tearing the piece of flatbread into tiny bits she proceeded to pile in a heap before her.
“Shazi.”
“Don’t.”
He remained still, awaiting clarification.
“Don’t pretend with me.”
“I’m not pretending,” Khalid said quietly.
Shahrzad threw down the rest of the flatbread and met his gaze with stinging circumspection. His eyes were ringed in deep lines of fatigue. His jaw was set, and his posture was rigid.
He doesn’t look sorry for hurting me.
Something knifed in Shahrzad’s chest, behind her heart.
But he will be.
“Shahrzad—”
“You once lamented the fact that the characters in my stories place so much value on love.”
Khalid returned her penetrating stare in silence.
“Why is that?” she continued. “What is your aversion to the sentiment?”
His eyes flicked across her face before responding. “It’s not an aversion. It’s merely an observation. That word is used too often for my taste. So I attribute it to things, rather than to people.”
“Excuse me?”
Khalid exhaled carefully. “People fall in and out of love with the rising and setting of the sun. Rather like a boy who loves the color green one day, only to discover on the morrow that he truly prefers blue.”
Shahrzad laughed, and the sound was lemon to her wound. “So you intend to go through life never loving anyone? Just . . . things?”
“No. I’m looking for something more.”
“More than love?”
“Yes.”
“Is it not arrogant to think you deserve more, Khalid Ibn al-Rashid?”
“Is it so arrogant to want something that doesn’t change with the wind? That doesn’t crumble at the first sign of adversity?”
“You want something that doesn’t exist. A figment of your imagination.”
“No. I want someone who sees beneath the surface—someone who completes the balance. An equal.”
“And how will you know when you’ve found this elusive someone?” Shahrzad retorted.
“I suspect she will be like air. Like knowing how to breathe.” He regarded her with the stillness of a hawk as he said these words, and Shahrzad’s throat went dry.
“Poetry,” she whispered. “Not reality.”
“My mother used to say that a man who can’t appreciate poetry lacks a soul.”
“In that respect, I’m inclined to agree.”
“She was referring to my father,” he intoned drily. “A soulless man, if ever there was one. I’m told I resemble him greatly.”
Shahrzad studied the tiny mountain of bread before her.
I will not feel sorry for you. You do not deserve my pity.
Guarding herself against a rising tide of emotion, she looked up again, resolute in her next course of action. “I—”
“I hurt you today.” He spoke softly, in a voice of soothing water over scorched steel.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her cheeks flushed.
“It matters to me.”
Shahrzad exhaled in a huff of derision. “Then you shouldn’t have done it.”
“Yes.”
Shahrzad stared at the cut-glass angles of his profile. Even now, his handsome face gave no hint that her pain affected him in any way.
The boy of ice and stone . . .
Who dashed her heart against a jagged shore, only to walk away without so much as a glance.
I will not let him win. For Shiva’s sake.
For my sake.
I will learn the truth. Even if I have to destroy him to get it.
“Are you done?” she asked under her breath.
He paused. “Yes.”
“I have a story for you.”
“A new one?”
She nodded. “Would you like to hear it?”
Khalid inhaled cautiously and then leaned an elbow onto the cushions.
Shahrzad took another sip of cardamom tea and eased back against the pile of vibrant silk on her side.