Chapter 33
I awoke in a room I didn’t recognize. It was dark, the only light coming from the cracks in the curtains to the right of me.
I tried to sit up, but my chest was too weighty, head swimming.
I scanned the room, finding Zain perched on a desk chair across from me.
He straightened up, like he had been sleeping there before I woke.
“Where are we?” I managed to say, throat scratchy.
He crossed the room to hand me a glass of water from beside the bed. I drained the entire glass in one long gulp. It cooled some fire within me—and yet, I still felt Rabiya’s defensiveness, her guard, even now. I tried to temper it with difficulty.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the circles under Zain’s eyes showed. He scratched his stubbled jaw; he looked exhausted. “What time is it?” I asked.
“Four a.m., and we’re in my room.” He reached to switch on the lamp on his bedside table. Despite everything that had happened, a familiar panic rose within me.
“My dad is going to kill me,” I said, scrambling to get out of bed and ignoring the way my head spun.
Zain put his hands on my shoulders to still me as my feet hung over the edge of the bed. “Steady,” he murmured.
I didn’t even remember coming here. I remembered nothing since being at Heaven Forbid and all my past selves’ memories flooding my consciousness.
“Why do you seem fine?” I asked.
He moved to sit next to me at the edge of the bed. “Marissa told me it affects those of fire more because their past selves are more…passionate.”
I couldn’t look at him when I said, “Rabiya did bad things.” The words came out like a breath, so quiet I didn’t know if he heard me. “But she loved you. They all did.”
“I know,” he said just as quietly, his voice rough around the edges.
“What happened at Heaven Forbid?”
“You got sick and then blacked out. Marissa was…let’s say less than impressed.
” His voice held a smile while I wanted to crawl into a dark hole and cease to exist. I looked down to find I was wearing one of his football jerseys that was so big it went down to my thighs.
I wasn’t wearing any trousers. The realization that I must have been sick on myself and therefore had to be changed by Zain made me wish for more than a dark hole, a cave in which to end my sorry existence.
“I want to die,” I said.
Zain chuckled, and I felt his eyes commanding mine to meet his. “It’s fine,” he said. “I like seeing you in my jersey.”
“Are you not…freaked out by everything we learned? I can literally feel my past selves within me now, humming under my skin.”
Zain dipped his head low, to the base of my neck. I stilled, the simple touch of his nose caressing my exposed skin sending my nerves into a frenzy.
“I can sense them,” he murmured against me before moving his head back.
“I need to go home,” I forced myself to say. “My dad will be wondering where I am.”
“I handled it,” he said, his eyes heavy like he was intoxicated—but I knew he wasn’t.
It was the Zal in him, that version of him that would do anything for Rabiya, and she the same for him.
They were too close to us now, taking over.
I wanted to say that, but the look in his eyes made my body go both taut and loose at the same time, and I struggled to find words.
Moments passed, and neither of us said anything, until I forced out, “What do you mean you handled it?”
He blinked, and the lust in his eyes dampened ever so slightly, like he was forcing himself to focus. “I texted him from your phone and said you were staying at Cleo’s house because her mom is out of town, and she needed company.”
I raised an eyebrow and scoffed. “And he accepted that?”
Zain reached across the bed and handed me my phone. I saw my dad’s terse reply.
Dad
Fine, but next time let me know in advance.
I got up, conscious of how short the jersey was once I stood up. “I need to shower,” I said—and I did. The jersey clung to me from the fever I must have had. And while I did feel gross, I needed to get out of whatever haze I was in right now—being so close to Zain was…difficult, to say the least.
He stood, crossing the room to retrieve a clean towel and a T-shirt from his dresser. “First door on the left,” he said. I took the towel and T-shirt from him and practically bolted.
I took a long shower, scrubbing my body until it was pink.
In front of the bathroom mirror, I wiped away the condensation and studied my face.
I looked the same as I always did, though there was this glow within me, and not just from the hot shower.
My eyes were brighter, cheeks pinker, fuller almost, my lips a plum pink.
It was like I was dull before and now light and color had been brought back into me.
My body swayed to the left, like there was an invisible string attempting to lead me to Zain.
And this was why people didn’t unlock their past selves.
Each time I shut my eyes, new memories emerged.
They were not wholly clear but flashes of moments that had stuck out to each of my past selves.
Moments that they could never forget. I could block them, I realized, if I concentrated on forcing them out of my head.
I needed to, like now, when one of my selves showed me what Zain—or, rather, Younes—had done to her when she was last naked before him.
But then, in shoving that memory out, another emerged, of myself ripping a man’s body apart with my bare hands to protect Armeen.
Or at least, that was what she told herself she was doing.
I glanced down at my hands. These hands had those powers, I just needed to know how to yield to them.
Another memory: Gol in an alleyway in Mashhad.
A stream of water running by the side of the road, the sound prominent before footsteps ran in.
Five men in all leather, grinning with their yellowing teeth.
These were not jinn but angels, specifically jinn hunters.
On their hips were daggers that they would use to kill me, to carve out my heart and wave it around as a prize.
The jinn princess slayed once more. Majid was in his home, unaware.
I raised my hand—they had underestimated me—and shot out fireball after fireball, not caring about their roars of pain, their anguish as they burned alive. It was either them or me.
I was jolted out of the memory and gripped the edge of the sink, panting.
My hand was slick against the porcelain and I slipped.
I caught myself with my other hand, forcing myself to straighten up, to stand firmly on my two feet.
Like it or not, my past selves were telling me something.
Showing me what I was capable of. I had to learn from them if I was to survive this.
I left the bathroom in Zain’s oversized T-shirt. He was lying on his bed, a book in his hand. He glanced up, and his gaze traveled downward, to my lack of clothing, and back up to my face. I might have thought he was unbothered by it if it were not for the bob of his Adam’s apple giving him away.
“A little nighttime reading?” I said, unsure how he could read, or focus on anything, right now. “Or morning, I guess.”
“I was trying and failing. It’s difficult to care about Heathcliff and Catherine at this very moment,” he said, discarding the book on the bed. “Are you feeling better?”
“As good as someone who has both jinn and angels after her can feel.” I had aimed for my tone to be light, jokey even, but there was a prickle to my voice.
Zain got up from the bed and crossed the room to me. I wasn’t expecting him to be inches from me so fast, and my heart began beating quickly once more. He drew me into a hug and whispered into my wet hair. “I won’t let them get you.”
I hesitated for a moment before giving in. I wrapped my arms around his neck, inhaling his familiar scent. “They’ll kill you, too.”
“Let them try,” he whispered, moving an inch away to meet my eye. “I’ve seen the many ways they have killed us, but I’ve also seen the many ways we fall in love—the joy we have in each other. I can’t…unsee that.”
“I don’t know what’s our feelings and what’s theirs,” I whispered.
His hand moved underneath my chin, raising my head so I could better meet his gaze. He was so close I could feel his breath on my face and found myself shutting my eyes.
“I know I felt the same way I do about you now as I did then, before I had these memories. This just…heightens it,” Zain said.
“I’ve always felt drawn to you. Like if you’re near me, I have to be nearer to you. But now it’s even stronger. Even now, you’re so close, but I feel like it’s not enough.”
“Roxana, look at me.”
When I did, I noticed his eyes on my lips, which then parted, my body a traitor, desperate for him to take that as a sign.
“We…” Shouldn’t. But being this close to Zain, I wasn’t sure why we shouldn’t. All I could think was that we had been killed time and time again, and here we were, alive, not yet murdered, together.
He inched closer, lightly brushing his lips across my cheek.
I stopped breathing and felt that tightening and loosening inside me all over again.
He was so much taller than me and had to bend down so his face was level with mine.
I reached up to allow him better access, and one of his hands rested on my waist, steadying me.
The moment was fragile, and still, and I both loved and hated it.
I wanted him to just kiss me, but was equally terrified that once he did, we wouldn’t be able to stop.
The air was too thick, too much, my pulsing need for him overtaking all my senses.
I inhaled and then expelled Rabiya’s feelings for Zain—Zal—and it lessened. The needy desperation eased, but my desire for this version of him, an attraction that had always been there, stayed. That was mine alone.
“What do you want, Roxana?” he murmured, his nose traveling down from my cheek to my neck. I gasped quietly at the feeling of his warm breath against my throat.
I couldn’t say anything—didn’t know how to say what I wanted in this moment. I pressed my body gently into his.
“Roxana?” he asked again, kissing the sensitive spot beneath my ear.
“You,” I gasped. “I want you. I want…this. When we die, I want us to have had this.”
He stilled at that, moving his head back to look at me. “We’re not going to die,” he said with a certainty that seemed impossible.
“We’ve seen the ways we’ve been killed—”
“We’re not them,” he interrupted, something like fire in his dark eyes, but it was almost like he was saying it to convince himself.
And perhaps he was. Perhaps I should go along with it—for him.
Besides, what was the alternative? Accepting our fate and drowning in hopelessness?
We would try, and we would die trying for a different outcome, the odds painfully against us.
“Kiss me,” I found myself saying.
Zain wasted no time, like he had been waiting for me to say those words.
He pressed his lips to mine, his hands raised to my cheeks as he cupped my face.
I opened my mouth for him and our tongues meeting only made me want more.
I found myself walking backward until the back of my knees hit the edge of his bed.
I should have been self-conscious, like I had been all my life around boys.
And yet, I felt comfortable with Zain. More than that—confident in myself.
I lay on the bed with Zain on top of me.
My mouth watered as I reached for the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it off, running my hands down his smooth, broad back, feeling the hard, raised areas where his wings emerged.
He shivered against my touch, and it was wild to me that he responded to me the same way I did him.
He hovered over me, and I pressed myself into him, not wanting there to be any distance between us.
“I can’t think properly around you,” he murmured, skimming his nose against mine.
“Is that a bad thing?”
He shook his head, his pupils dilated. The moment too still.
His lips found mine again, though this kiss was deeper, his tongue exploring mine. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he pressed some of his body weight against me, only slightly, his arms caging me in on the bed.
His hair was all messed up, contrasting with the hardness of his strong body.
His muscles rippled as he held himself up, and I briefly wondered if he looked the way he did because he was an angel, whether it was part of their genetics or from his training.
Either way, I couldn’t help but marvel at him—that this boy’s soul was somehow bonded to mine.
He kissed my jaw, my neck, just beneath my ear, his trail of kisses running my breath ragged. I had never wanted someone this badly before and I think I must have said what I was thinking because he paused, still with that intoxicated look in his eyes.
“We should probably slow down,” he whispered, with difficulty.
“No thanks,” I breathed.
“Isn’t this why we’re being kept apart?” He rested his forehead against mine, rationale rearing its ugly head yet again.
“I want you.”
“You have me,” he said, eyes locking with mine, snatching my breath as he said, “I’m yours.”
Then he kissed me again, his tongue caressing mine in a way that turned me into a pool of need.
“Whenever I kiss you, I feel like I’m dying,” he whispered, drawing back.
“I make you feel like you’re dying when we kiss?” I quirked an eyebrow.
“It’s too good,” he clarified, before closing the gap between us and robbing me of my breath. And I understood, then, what he meant.