Chapter 49
“The best way to keep your child safe is to keep her here as a prisoner. If she escapes to the United States, she’ll never be able to bring your heir back here, Kamal.
Especially if she gives birth there. The courts in that country will always defend a citizen’s right to remain on American soil.
If what this woman said was indeed part of a scheme between the two of them, Madeline plans to use your child as a bargaining chip. ”
“It won’t happen. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my descendants,” I reply, wanting to end the conversation.
“Perhaps you’ll have to go much further than you imagine.”
I don’t like his tone. “You don’t know what I’m thinking, Adil.
Don’t try to guess. Madeline isn’t going anywhere with my child.
After my baby is born, if she wants to leave, I’ll grant her the freedom, but she’ll go alone.
” When I finish speaking, a feeling of unease hits me, and I quickly detect what it is: the feeling of being unjust.
Something is wrong with that recording.
“You’re dismissed,” I say, and he makes a move to take the phone from my hand, but I push him away. “No, I’ll keep it. I need to listen to the call again.”
“I can send it to your phone.”
It’s not what he says but his tone that sounds an internal alert in me.
“No, I want to listen to it right here,” I say carefully, studying his face.
If I didn’t know him so well, I might have missed the nuance of fear and the paleness he quickly tries to hide, but we’ve known each other our whole lives. I’ve memorized his expressions almost as well as my own.
“You can go, Adil. If I need you, I’ll send for you.”
Once he leaves, I call Raez, the head of my security. “I want three of your best men monitoring my future wife and also the counselor Adil.”
“The counselor, Your Highness?”
“You heard me. Don’t let him out of your sight until further notice.”
I sit at my desk to listen to the recording again.
By the third time, I understand what has been bothering me from the beginning, and Adil, being who he is, wouldn’t have failed to notice: at no point in the phone call does Madeline agree with what her mother says. It’s almost a one-sided conversation.
Far beyond the feeling of having been unjust to her, even if only in thought, my mind lingers on the reason why Adil brought me that recording.
His role in my government is to strategize; he has an analytical mind, so he would never fail to notice that my fiancée only listened and never agreed with her mother.
And what about me? What’s my excuse?
Only the insanity from being jealous, which prevented me from seeing the obvious.
Feeling guilty, I put Adil’s phone in my pocket and decide to look for Madeline, but before I take two steps to the door, my phone rings.
“Your Excellency, we have a problem. Your fiancée, Miss Turner, has disappeared.”
“Disappeared? How?” I ask, already running out of the room.
“A servant said she hasn’t seen her since this morning. We’ve searched the entire palace but couldn’t find her, except for her broken phone lying in a corner of the garden.”
“Initiate an emergency alert and have the palace and surrounding areas monitored, but find her.”
When I reach the official vehicle, it’s already surrounded by bodyguards, probably at Raez’s orders. For the first time, I don’t know what to do or where to start looking for her.
And then, to make matters worse, the last person I want to run into appears in front of me.
Zarif.
“You need to come with me,” he says.
“Get out of my way, damn it. What I need is to find my fiancée.”
“I know. Just like Adil.”
“What?”
“I don’t have all the facts yet, but while you were away yesterday, Odin called me.”
He finally manages to catch my attention. “You’re not making any sense. Odin, Christos’s cousin?”
“Yes, we’re friends. Long before you asked him to investigate Hiba’s death a few days ago, he was already doing it for me.”
I look at him, the confirmation of what I’ve always suspected driving me mad. Not because of her, the unfaithful one, but because Zarif is my blood and he betrayed me.
“I never touched her,” he says. “I didn’t even want her that way. I liked her as a friend.”
I look at him to detect any trace of mockery, but all I see is hurt.
“How could you believe I would betray you like that?”
I take a step back. “You did nothing to refute my suspicions. Quite the opposite.”
“My pride wouldn’t allow it. I wanted you to understand on your own that I would rather die than betray a brother.”
I’m not ready to apologize yet. I had no idea who the father of Hiba’s child was when she killed herself, but Zarif’s anger towards me made me think a few months ago that it could have been him. “If you had nothing to do with her getting pregnant, then why do you hate me so much?”
“You have no idea? I loved Hiba as if she were one of our sisters. Until recently, I thought the child she was expecting was yours, that you dishonored her and then ran away from the commitment, driving her to death. It took me a while to understand I was wrong, but then, because of your suspicion of me, I allowed you to think the worst.”
“You said you went to Odin. Why?”
“To find out who the father of her child was. I have no doubt it was the same man who drove her to kill herself.”
“Who is he, Zarif?”
“Adil.”
“What?”
“I don’t know why he seduced her, but the baby she was expecting was Adil’s.
Odin found evidence this week. Adil visited her a few times, without any apparent reason to be alone with the Sheikh’s fiancée.
It was him, Kamal. I’m sure of it. We can exhume her body, if necessary, to recover the fetus’s DNA, but everything points to him. ”
“If we do that, people will know about her pregnancy and her parents will fall into disgrace.”
“And if we don’t, a murderer will escape.”
“You said he disappeared?”
“Yes, just like your future wife,” he replies, confirming what Raez informed me over the phone a little while ago.
Seconds later, my cell phone rings and an unknown number flashes on the screen. My heart races when I hear the voice of the woman who holds my heart in her hands.
“Kamal? Come and get me. I need you.”