Chapter Eleven #2
The happy, bright faces of the staff of the five-star hotel were unintentionally jarring and he barely heard a word that Ehsan said as he walked beside him as Hana made small talk with the manager who was proudly escorting them to the royal suite.
All the while the vicious, terrible argument that waged between his head and his heart was nearly cutting him off at the knees.
‘Your Highness,’ Ehsan murmured discreetly. ‘Your brother’s doctors would like to—’
‘Yes, do it,’ Malik replied. ‘Set up the meeting. And, Ehsan? No disturbances this evening.’
Ehsan cast a concerned look between Malik and Hana, bobbed his head and disappeared.
Malik followed Hana and the manager into the lift, Hana somehow being capable of keeping up some kind of conversation with the staff member, when all Malik wanted to do was howl.
Everything was converging to force him into something he didn’t want.
He couldn’t find an outlet for all this…
emotion…all these feelings. All he’d ever wanted was to look after the country until it could be given back to his brother.
His brother who had never been anything but kind and good to him.
And here Malik was, taking everything that should have been Ishmail’s.
The doors to the elevators opened onto a large, bright, expansive suite decorated in rich creams and bold golds, textures filling the different spaces, but he barely saw any of it. Finally, the manager seemed to recognise the tension in the air and made his excuses and left.
Malik stalked into the wide-open space where floor-to-ceiling windows displayed the Merkeh skyline as if it were a work of art.
But all he saw was the island Hana had miraculously managed to kidnap him away to.
All he saw was the way in which she had slowly, brick by brick, built a road from her to him.
One he didn’t want. One he couldn’t allow and couldn’t risk.
‘You’re glaring again,’ Hana said, trying to make things light. But all he could see was darkness.
He looked up to find her standing as still as a statue, while he paced back and forth. The eye of a storm that he couldn’t afford to get caught up in. He opened his mouth to object, but realised he couldn’t, shook his head and continued to pace again.
Hana didn’t know what she’d done wrong. Only that whatever it was had happened during the visit with Ettenu and Hiba.
She’d retraced her every step from the moment she’d arrived in Merkeh until the moment they’d left.
She’d been polite, interested, she hadn’t spilt anything, hadn’t offended anyone to her knowledge.
So why was it that she felt the icy edge of Malik’s frustration cool the air around them?
Her heart ached with a strange kind of prescient knowing. As if the terrible devastation of what was about to happen had already happened, but she just hadn’t experienced it yet. Like the shock wave of a blast before seeing the explosion.
Malik was restless, pacing back and forth in the hotel suite.
The kind of restless energy that she’d caught a glimpse of before they had left the Summer Palace.
But she hadn’t wanted to see it, hadn’t wanted to face what that meant.
Hana thought that it might have something to do with the visit from Yara.
And perhaps it did, but Hana couldn’t shake the fact that whatever this was went deeper than that.
‘Did I…?’ she started, half fearful of what she might be calling down upon them. ‘Did I do something wrong?’
‘No,’ Malik replied, seemingly unhappy with that.
‘Then I don’t understand,’ she stated.
‘You did nothing wrong,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘You said all the right things, and did all the right things.’
‘Yes?’ she asked, utterly confused by what was wrong with that. And now she was frustrated. Because she could see it. She could see him beginning to push her away. When she’d done everything in her power to be what he needed. What Al Surrahin needed.
‘Malik, I wanted this to be a success for you. I wanted to be what you need,’ she said, almost pleading, as she closed the distance between them with a single step. A move enough to have him almost raising his hand to ward her off.
As if he couldn’t bring himself to be near her, to touch her.
A shiver of ice worked its way across her body from such blatant rejection.
He stopped pacing then and turned to her, his eyes unreadable, his gaze intent.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want me to be a success?’
‘Because I am your wife,’ she said simply. Because it was that simple for her.
He waited as if her answer wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t what he was looking for.
‘Because your country needs this, because I know how much it means to you. Because I…’
This wasn’t how she’d wanted to tell him, but she knew, instinctively, that this was what he was looking for, pushing her to say. Not because he wanted it. But because he didn’t.
And her heart broke as she said it.
‘Because I love you.’
There was an infinitesimal pause—a moment where her life split down two separate pathways. One to happiness and the other…
‘Love me? You don’t even know me,’ he dismissed.
No matter how prepared she’d been for it, the seismic shock that she felt at the blunt force of his disbelief shook her very foundations.
‘Malik!’
‘You don’t,’ Malik insisted, as if she were a child, ignorant of her own feelings.
The agony tore through her heart, rendered it in two as she blinked at her husband, who was so desperate, so fearful of what her feelings might mean that he was practically shoving her away from him.
He didn’t want her love. He didn’t want her.
‘Malik—’
‘Hana, you’re so desperate to be loved,’ he said, as if he were trying to make her see something even as he wanted to protect her from it, ‘that you would bend and shape yourself into something you’re not to try to get that love, and I can’t do that to you, Hana. I can’t,’ he all but begged.
‘Bend and shape myself how?’ she demanded.
‘By trying so hard to be absolutely perfect that you forget to eat or drink and collapse. Or end up twisting yourself into knots trying so hard not to make a mistake that you do.’
Hana frowned at him, wanting to explain that she just needed to try harder. And she’d done that today! She’d tried hard and it had worked! She opened her mouth to explain, but Malik pressed on.
‘Or like denying yourself something you want so badly.’
‘Such as?’ she asked.
‘Children!’ he bit out, a trace of the anger he felt finally showing through.
‘Is this…is this because I spent time with Faiza?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s because I can see how much you want them, and I can see how being with me would force you to abandon that dream.’
Hana’s heart pounded painfully in her chest.
‘Deny it,’ Malik all but begged. ‘Deny that what I say is true. That day by day, week by week, month, year, years, of not being able to have the thing you so desperately want, won’t turn into bitterness.
Into an agonising pain that would eat into whatever foundation we lay for our marriage. And that you would hate me for it.’
And that you would leave.
She heard the unspoken words that simmered beneath his accusation, but reeling, she was unable to see the hurt he felt over the hurt he had made in her.
Desperation.
Was she that desperate for love?
Everything in her roared in denial. She knew how she felt about this man.
She admired his desire to protect his country, the need to serve in a position he’d never wanted to keep it safe for his brother and nephew.
A country that had never protected him. She’d even admired him for being willing to carry an unjustly earned reputation for a father to use for his own ends.
A father that had never loved him. A fiancée that had run away from him, and a mother who had stood by and let so much injustice happen to him.
And just like that, she could see it. How love was something that was so deeply entrenched in rejection and lies and abandonment for him. How it was something that he couldn’t trust, not even when she was standing in front of him telling him that she loved him.
‘I can’t deny it, because I don’t know the answer to your accusation. Because instead of talking it through with me, you’ve already decided. Because it’s easier that way, just like it’s easier for you to believe that I couldn’t love you,’ she said in a quietly broken voice.
He peered at her as the sun sank beneath the skyline behind him, casting him in rays of gold and burnt orange.
‘What do mean?’
‘It’s easier for you to believe that I know myself so little that I can’t possibly tell how I feel about you, rather than to consider the possibility that I could.’
He flinched at the word ‘possibility’. She wasn’t even sure if he knew he’d done it.
‘Because what if I am telling the truth?’ she asked, taking a step towards him, trying to close the distance between them. Trying to reforge that connection that terrified him so much.
‘What if I do love you? What would that mean for you?’
Too much. It would mean too much, and be too much.
Malik’s head hurt from the furious pounding that had started long before this conversation.