Before Amjad charged his brother and pummeled his suggestive face, he snarled, “Maram is sorry for a slightly less trivial reason. She uncovered the identity of the mastermind behind the conspiracy to depose our father. Your beloved, bilious mother.”

Haidar jerked around, gaped at him. Amjad could feel Jalal doing the same. But it was Maram’s eyes that burned him, for handling this with such insensitivity. He regretted it, too. But the sight of her and Haidar’s closeness had fried his restraint.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Haidar hissed, the temperamental ruthlessness at his core—his mother’s legacy—simmering to the surface.

“And what the hell does it have to do with our mother?” That was Jalal, his default relaxed calculation gone. “Seems you’re all in the know. Why is this the first we’re hearing of it?”

Shaheen, being the middle brother and closest to their younger half brothers, intervened. He outlined in the most neutral way the terrible things their mother had done.

“We’re sorry we kept this from you,” Shaheen said. “But it seemed to involve Johara, then Talia, and we wanted to keep as few people as possible involved. We haven’t even told our father.”

“Bull,” Haidar barked, looking as if he’d been stabbed through the heart. “You didn’t tell us because you thought it wouldn’t matter to us because we’re not the damn heirs to the throne.”

“Or worse,” Jalal seethed, “because you thought we were in on our mother’s schemes so we would become the heirs.”

“We believed nothing of the sort,” Harres spoke for the first time, the one who always brought sibling fights to an end. “Or we wouldn’t be telling you now, before we…” Harres paused, loath to spell it out to Haidar and Jalal’s faces. He exhaled, apology staining his gaze. “Before we arrest her.”

The significance of the situation seemed to descend on Haidar and Jalal only then. They stood paralyzed under its enormity, gaping at their brothers, shock and denial giving way to anguish.

Then those opposite-as-two-people-could-get twins, who had been pretending the other didn’t exist, apart from during emergencies such as when they’d stood together with their brothers to fight against the council who’d been trying to dissolve Shaheen’s marriage to Johara, finally looked at each other. A lifetime of love and empathy, rivalry and bitterness passed between them as if they needed to channel each other’s strengths to grasp how this erased the underpinnings of their worlds and would change their lives forever.

They seemed to come to an unspoken understanding, turned to face the others, Haidar looking at Maram like someone forgiving a surgeon’s decision to amputate his limb. She rushed to him.

“I’m sorry, too, Maram,” Haidar whispered into her hair.

Amjad didn’t care if Haidar thought his world had collapsed. If he didn’t take his hands off Maram, if Maram didn’t step away from him right now, he’d…

“What are you waiting for?” Jalal’s growl yanked him out of his rising aggression. “Get it over with.”

Maram watched in horrified fascination as her plan, implemented with Amjad’s meticulous ruthlessness, worked.

Queen Sondoss was taken by surprise, and placing her under arrest went without incident. It all seemed too easy.

But as Maram looked at the imposing, statuesque figure of the queen of Zohayd, who looked an incredible, flawless forty at fifty-four and whose name meant the most luxurious silk but who seemed to be made of steel razors, she knew the situation couldn’t possibly be as simple as it seemed.

After the initial shock and dismay when the Aal Shalaan men—including her husband, King Atef—entered her quarters in force, realization of her exposure instantaneous, Maram could almost hear Sondoss’s frightening intellect going into high gear, resolving on a way out.

Seeming to find it, she rose from her computer with studied grace and goading tranquility, preceded them out of the room, sparing Maram one annihilating, pitying glance.

Throughout her interrogation Sondoss inspected the perfection of her manicure, the stunning face that was unlined by emotion and frozen by a lifetime of self-serving malice betraying nothing, only her eyes gleaming with venomous whimsy.

Haidar and Jalal, realizing she’d never confess the whereabouts of the jewels for anything, starting with her own well-being, gambled she might still do it for theirs.

She looked at them as if they were two schoolboys begging for hard candy that would wreck their teeth.

Then she spoke, her voice a husky drawl as mesmerizing as it was repulsive. “You’ll thank me later, my sweets.” She dismissed them, turned to the other men. She favored her husband with a baleful glance before focusing her hatred on his sons. “You pompous boys can imprison me and I’ll sit in my prison cell until Exhibition Day. When you have no jewels to show, you’ll be deposed anyway. When someone takes power, he’ll set free everyone whom your regime imprisoned. I might not remain queen, but I’ll have jewels that I can buy a new kingdom with. Even if I don’t, it will be enough for me to spoil your lives and cost you your throne and kingdom.”

Eleven

As days became weeks, with Amjad and his brothers racing to search everywhere the queen might have hidden the jewels in and out of Zohayd, Maram remained in the palace.

He took every opportunity to approach her. But to his horror she became closer and closer to Haidar instead.

His determination to give her time to heal, his willingness to be punished, evaporated at every sighting of her hand in Haidar’s, at every look of empathy she poured into Haidar’s filled-with-gooey-tenderness eyes.

Amjad didn’t care if they were best friends and she was “being there” for Haidar in his most trying time. He wasn’t waiting until their need for solace drove them into each other’s arms.

He couldn’t let that happen.

For Haidar’s sake, really.

He preferred not to have to kill his own baby brother.

“Stay away from Haidar, Maram.”

Maram had shuddered as she’d stepped into the room. She’d felt him there even before she’d heard his rumble in the dark, a leopard lying in wait.

She turned on the light, struggled not to fold to the floor.

He was propped up on his elbow, draped diagonally across the king-size bed she’d been sleeping in alone. His great body dwarfed it, his long legs hanging outside its boundary, feet bare, the steel-gray jacket she’d seen him in earlier tossed at the foot, cream silk shirt unbuttoned to expose the silk-smattered bronze torso she’d spent days worshiping and experiencing the most intense of ecstasies beneath.




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