Chapter Twelve
HANA DIDN’T REALLY remember much about the first few days back in Omrhain. By the time she arrived at the palace that first night, it had been dark and the staff had been uncomfortably surprised, rushing to prepare her suites for her.
She had waited in the corridor outside the rooms she’d grown up in, feeling like a stranger.
An outsider. Feeling, she realised, very much like she always had, as if she’d never quite fit.
As if she might forever be stuck, searching for a home.
Searching for a family that would let her love them as much as she wanted to love others.
If any of the staff saw the few tears that had escaped her desperate attempts to hide her emotional state, or to protect her husband’s reputation, they pretended not to notice and thankfully didn’t alert either her father or siblings.
Uncharacteristically, Hana gave herself twenty-four hours.
Hard work and determination were thrust aside for that period, and she truly allowed herself to wallow.
To feel what she was feeling. She drank little, ate nothing and slept almost as much as she cried, shattered by the thought that she was forever doomed to repeat the pattern she had fallen into: to love people who wanted very little to do with her.
Only she thought that Malik did want her.
Because when she closed her eyes, she remembered the ways in which he would reach for her, sought comfort from her, created pleasure with her.
The way he’d felt truthful with her on the island, as if they were talking in ways that they had not done with others…
The fact was that he didn’t want to feel that way.
And that was almost worse. As if he could love her, but wouldn’t let himself.
On the second day her father sent her word to ask why she had returned, and she chose to leave it unanswered. Before, she would have rushed to reassure him. To tell him that all was well, even if it wasn’t, because eventually she would make it well. As if will alone would make it so.
On the third day, she heard her siblings pass outside her suites, talking loudly as they travelled up and down the corridor.
Barely two months had passed since she would have rushed to the door and tried to insert herself in their conversation, to ask if she could join them. But now, she ignored them.
Instead, she was building emotional walls, brick by brick.
She forced herself to eat the food that staff brought her at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
She forced herself to shower and to dress for the day and then for the night.
She told herself that she was enough, even though it didn’t feel like that.
She told herself that Malik wouldn’t, couldn’t change, even though she so desperately wanted him to.
She told herself that she shouldn’t hope for something that would never happen, that he wouldn’t come for her, even though she dreamed of it every night.
And she told herself to stop being so foolish for wanting him to be the one to love her, whom she could love, with whom she could have a home, with whom she would finally feel at peace.
Because that foolish hope led to nothing but heartache.
She would have to be enough, by herself, for herself, and that was okay.
And one day, ‘okay’ might just be good enough to make her heart stop hurting.
She blinked back the wetness in her eyes as she put the last touches to her make-up and stood back. It was the fourth day and she had been summoned to dinner. Not by a father, but by Omrhain’s sheikh.
She eyed herself critically in the mirror. She had dressed in the clothes that Fatima had packed her for the tour and noticed how differently she looked to how she had dressed the last time she had been in Omrhain.
This Hana was older. More mature. A maturity that had been marked on her heart as much as in the hollows of her cheeks.
Leaving her suites, Hana made her way through the palace to the grand hall. It was unusual for the family to dine here, and it was the first time Hana had been back in this room since Malik had ended their engagement.
As she passed through the doors that had been closed behind her that day, she was unsurprised to see her two oldest siblings and their partners seated either side of her father, along with her other siblings sitting stiffly at the long table.
She was greeted warily by her siblings and with the merest incline of her father’s head acknowledging her presence, but nothing was said about her impromptu return.
The dinner table soon fell into a familiar pattern, her siblings all talking over each other, but all Hana could see was what she would have done before, how she would have acted, how she would have tried.
Tried to be something she wasn’t.
Malik’s words came back to haunt her, especially now that she could see that there was, at its root, the basis of truth to his accusation. She had constantly made mistakes and rubbed them the wrong way because she’d been trying so, so hard to be what they wanted. But not to be true to herself.
And now she realised that it didn’t matter what she did, or how hard she worked to be what others wanted her to be. It would never make someone want her, love her. Because she wasn’t being herself.
Love wasn’t something she could earn by being perfect. Love was something that was given—the way that she had given her heart to Malik. Even though he’d hurt her, even though he was pushing her away, she would never, could never, have called her heart back.
Because…loving Malik had set her free. It had shown her the mistakes she’d been making with her family, mistakes she was making with herself. A mistake she never would have realised were it not for him. And a mistake she would never make again.
Not with her family and not with Malik.
‘Hana?’
She looked up to find the whole table staring at her, waiting for her to reply to whatever her father had just asked her.
‘I asked if you were okay,’ he repeated, his gaze solemn and watchful.
‘No, Father. But I will be,’ she said, before getting up from the table and leaving.
The sound of the wind slipping across the dunes was a gentle hum that Malik needed to block out the recrimination that had followed him all the way to his uncle’s encampment from Merkeh.
He had chosen to set up his tent on the outskirts of the camp. His uncle’s people knew him well enough to welcome him yet give him his space. Here he was not a king. Here he was simply a traveller, stopping for a while before moving on.
But as he looked out at the desert, he felt as unsettled as the sand beneath his feet. Nothing seemed to give him the air he needed to breathe or the silence he wanted so much. Because all he could feel was stale oxygen stuck in his lungs and the echoes of Hana’s words ringing in his ears.
I want you to know that I understand. And that I love you anyway.
How could something so incredibly beautiful and generous hurt so much that Malik felt bruised by it? Broken even.
Above him, the sky turned the milky blue of dusk, streaks of desert rose shot across the sky, turning the edges burnt orange as the last rays of the sun sank from view behind sand dunes tall enough to rival a skyscraper.
Beside him was the small fire he’d made just like the ones he had made with Ishmail whenever they’d travelled out into the desert together.
But the silence hanging over him was heavy and eventually Malik couldn’t stand it any more.
‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ he demanded of his brother.
What do you want me to say? You know it already.
‘Know what?’ he asked.
How badly you messed up.
Malik clenched his jaw, because his brother was right.
‘Tell me what to do?’ he begged his brother.
Tell me about her.
‘She is…’ Malik searched for the right words.
‘Maddening,’ he chose to answer, thinking of just how crazy it was that she had sneaked into a spa to spy on him and then kidnapped him.
‘Infuriating. Determined. To the point where she’ll forget her own needs,’ he said, remembering how terrified he’d been when she had gone out into that storm, or when she had collapsed because she’d been trying so hard to be what he’d needed.
‘Chaotic. She could damage sand,’ Malik said, smiling a little, thinking of the trail of mess she’d left in her wake sometimes.
‘Beautiful,’ he whispered, remembering the nights they’d shared, their bodies coming together as if nothing could ever feel more or enough.
Then why are you out here in the desert alone and not with her?
The weight pressed against his chest again. It filled the space in his lungs to the point where he almost struggled to take a breath.
‘Because every second I’m with her, every single minute, and breath, I want more. I want her more. I want her to stay. And,’ Malik said, forcing the words around the stone that filled his throat, ‘and I can’t trust her to do that.’
The confession burned. His chest, his skin, his heart. He felt raw and exposed as if he’d been left out in the desert and the sun and sand had stripped him bare.
Everyone he’d loved had cursed him or left him. His father, his mother…his brother.
Her words came back to haunt him then, not his brother’s.
It’s not me and my love that you don’t trust, Malik. It’s yourself.
He looked up to the stars that blanketed the sky like diamonds.
Is she right? his brother’s voice asked.
Malik swallowed.
‘Yes,’ he replied, see-sawing between hurt and shame. He couldn’t trust that he was enough to be loved for who and what he was. Malik’s heart fractured under the weight of the truth. He didn’t trust that he was enough to keep her by his side.
No one can give that trust to you, Malik. That’s something you need to know for yourself. That you are worthy of love.