Chapter 20
Rachid’s fingers grazed her shoulder and collarbones in soft caresses, mapping out the ridges and scars that he could find in their dimly lit room as she lay on his chest. Her legs entwined with his own, her fingers played with the hair on his chest. It was a position they had often found themselves in before, yet this time, they lay naked.
“You are so beautiful,” he muttered, and the softness in his tone made her smile.
“Would it be too much if I returned the compliment?”
“Of course not,” he smirked. “I will never tire of being reminded of my incredibly good looks.”
Aicha stifled a laugh, half-heartedly pushing herself away until he pulled her back towards his chest.
“I wish nothing waited for us beyond the curtain,” he mumbled; face buried in her hair.
“Me too.”
They had not been disturbed since their marriage had been sealed.
Between his kisses, and their soft slumber, everything else felt distant.
All their troubles and responsibilities were a faded memory, and Aicha wished she could simply just exist in the moment with Rachid.
He sat up, leaning forward to pull the blanket from where it bunched up by their feet, and slowly proceeded to wrap it around them.
With Aicha’s back resting against his chest, and him up against the cushions, they descended into a silence she always loved when with him.
It was peaceful, gentle despite the pain that lingered in the edges of her mind, and the ache she felt now that pieces of her heart were gone.
She waited for that pain to shift, and form into something else, something sharper.
Angrier and laced with a malice she both feared and marvelled at.
“Did you say goodbye to Naima?” Rachid asked, disturbing her thoughts as if aware that she was beginning to stray into a corner of her mind that would only bring more pain.
“I did,” she said quietly, before sighing softly. “I miss her.”
Their fight, and reconciliation, felt so long ago.
So much had happened since then that Aicha felt a slither of shame over wasting what little time she had with Naima.
All that they had fought over felt so insignificant when placed beside everything that she had endured and lost. She swallowed back the heaviness in her throat, beginning to feel the pressure of tears building behind her eyes.
“I wish things could have been different. I wish it was all easier.”
Tightening his hold around her, Rachid’s fingers wrapped themselves around the strands of her curls, placing his chin atop her shoulder. “I know.”
For the first time, Aicha longed for a version of her life that was free of loss, of battle and blood and nights spent learning to wield a sword.
A life where she did not go to sleep hungry, was not turned away at the well because of a drought.
A life where her family remained intact.
Aicha pulled herself out of Rachid’s hold, sitting forward and drawing her knees up to rest over them.
Her curls fell over her shoulders, partially obscuring her vision, and she placed her forehead on her knees as she thought of the last thing Ilham had said to her.
“Did Baba ever tell you anything about me?”
“Such as?” Rachid asked, his fingers trailing her spine, following every bump and ridge in a way that could have almost distracted her.
“Anything he ever found strange about me.”
“He found it strange that you ate the chickpeas first before drinking your harira.” She heard a breath of amusement escape his throat as he said it.
But instead of playing along, which she assumed he expected, exasperation flooded her veins. “That is not what I meant!” she snapped.
The softness and light humour that had accompanied their conversation, and Rachid’s touches, shifted into something tenser.
Silence descended upon them, and though she couldn’t see his face, Aicha knew he watched her with a pensive expression as he tried to decipher what would have elicited such a dramatic change.
She heard the rustle of blankets, and felt him loom over her before a hand pushed her hair out of her face, and the other gripping the back of her neck, turning her head until she faced him.
“Tell me what worries you, habiba.” His eyes were soft, and his plea caused warmth to crawl into her chest and fill the emptiness. “Please.”
“I’ve been having dreams of… something. I’ve seen it since I was a child.” Aicha felt the tightness inside her begin to loosen.
Rachid tilted his head, his gaze searching her face, his thoughts undetectable. But when he spoke, it was without intonation. “And what happens in these dreams?”
Giving space to what she felt, or saw, in her dreams and when her anger flared would make it real, would allow it room to grow and form a physical shape that might have scared her more than it already did.
Yet the way Rachid looked at her, and the way he held her, with protectiveness and underlying awe, allowed her to believe that it would be okay.
So she told him every little detail that had haunted her waking and sleeping moments.
How she felt a presence loom around her, and inside her, when her rage became unbearable.
How she would almost be blinded with that rage, and merely became a bystander in her own body when she had no reason to constrain it.
And how—for reasons she could not explain—she simply knew that the woman who plagued her nightmares was the same woman that demanded release when fury consumed her in the daylight.
Rachid listened carefully, his face unchanged as she recounted each detail.
There was a deepening of his brows, but no clenched jaws or flicker of fear in his eyes.
When she finished, he only held on to silence before he eventually spoke. Carefully, as if the wrong tone could propel Aicha’s mood down a path he did not wish to be taken to. “Aicha, what the shawafas believe is not always so.”
His grip tightened on the back of her neck, as if anticipating that she would attempt to pull away from him. Frustratingly, he was right.
Aicha was met with physical protest when she tried to push against his grip, and pressed down on his wrist to pull it away from her chin.
“I know that!” she snapped. “But when I feel angry or frustrated I… I cannot control it. It feels as if I am on the verge of exploding. It feels like something else is with me, something dark. Ever since then I have thought about the times I have found Baba looking at me when I lost my temper. He seemed almost guarded, not afraid, but as if he were expecting something terrible.”
“Aicha—”
Desperation gripped her throat, fear planting roots inside her as she barrelled on, despite Rachid’s interruptions. “What if there is something inside me, something… evil?”
“Aicha!” Rachid leaned closer, releasing her neck as he shifted to fully face her.
“What if I’m cursed, and because of it I am destined to destroy everything around me? What if it was my fault that Baba and—”
“Stop, Aicha. Baraka.” Rachid raised his voice, forceful and with a heaviness he never used with her. Anger was laced within his next words, as if hurt by what she had just said. “The only person who is to blame for that is Duarte, not you.”
“But—”
“Listen to me,” he said, placing both hands on her cheeks and forcing her gaze into his eyes. “I know you feel a darkness inside you when your temper rises.”
His confession caused a stutter in her heartbeat. Quiet settled over them as she watched his face, the same angry determination present since interrupting her tirade. Shock pooled in her stomach.
“You do?”
“I have seen the way your eyes darken each time you strike someone,” he admitted. “I watched your excitement after your first kill, and how you did not shake after doing it again on the docks. I saw what was left of that soldier’s face back in the workroom. Of course I know.”
There was no hint of fear, no horror or shame. No resignation. Just acknowledgement, as if Rachid had made peace with whatever she was long ago.
“The counting,” she realised, like a match lit in the dark. “That’s why you taught me the counting?”
He nodded. “But then why did you not tell—”
“Because I also remember how you jumped in to spare Elias from lashings, and that your first kill was to save Samira,” he replied, as if he had known—for a long time—that this conversation would come.
He recalled every incident from memory without much thought.
“Every time you have acted viciously, you have done so to protect someone who needed your protection, and whom you loved.”
Aicha could only stare, eyes wide, as she realised there had never been any reason to have hidden this part of herself from him.
“Whatever darkness resides in you is not powerful enough to burn out the good. Allah chose you to walk this path for a reason; never doubt that,” he said, pressing his forehead against her own, one hand coming to rest below her jaw as his thumb caressed her bottom lip.
If he believed that, then perhaps she could too.
If every time she felt that unnatural rage, and she used it to protect and fight for others, for her home, then would it be so bad?
“You do not fear me?” she whispered, vulnerability ebbing into her tone.
“I will never fear you. You enamour me too much to scare me away.” He placed a kiss, slow and attentive, on the corner of her lips, drawing back only so that she could see his smile. “And you are my wife now. It is too late to flee.”
A breath of amusement escaped from her nostrils, and she watched Rachid’s eyes brighten as the darkness she felt on her shoulders lifted away.
“Come, let me make you feel good,” he said, voice edging into something less playful and more heated.
She did as she was told, allowing Rachid to pull her onto his lap, as his hands danced across her collarbones, and he followed it with soft kisses.
Because it would be their last few hours together as man and wife, and come nightfall, when they dressed into their leathers and sheathed their swords, these moments would feel like a distant, perfect dream.