LITMIR.BIZ

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we will make one here?”

      She tried to imagine finding a bond with this man, tried to imagine being his wife, and she found it impossible. Though not more impossible than returning to Alansund. Watching her brother-in-law sit on the throne, where Marcus had been before. Watching his fiancée take her place.

      That was perhaps an even bigger impossibility.

      “If not that, perhaps we can simply prevent the palace from falling into ruin? And the entire country with it?”

      “That’s a lot of faith you’re placing in a stranger,” she said.

      “I would more readily put my faith in you than anyone who worked under my brother.”

      “Was he so bad?”

      “Yes,” Tarek said, offering no further explanation. And she could tell, by the finality in that one-word answer, that he would not.

      “Then, perhaps you don’t have as far to go as you might think. You may look good simply by comparison.”

      “Perhaps.”

      Olivia didn’t say anything; rather, she continued to stand next to him, feeling intensely uncomfortable. Socially at sea. That almost never happened to her.

      “I thought you wanted to be shown to your room,” he said.

      “I do,” she said, walking past him and into the vast space. Different than her quarters in Alansund, but no less grand. It glittered like the rest of the castle, full of gold and jewels, the bed wrought from precious metal, twisted together like gilt tree branches. “I suppose I just feel a bit—” She turned as she spoke the sentence, and saw that she was talking to nothing.

      Tarek had excused himself without a word. Obviously finished with her for the moment.

      She was alone. Something that had become far too common in recent months.

      How she hated the emptiness.

      She crossed the room, taking a seat on the edge of the bed, trying to squash the feeling of terror, of sadness climbing up inside her, mixing together to create a potent cocktail that made her head swim, made it difficult to breathe.

      “You can’t break now,” she said. “You must never break.”

      * * *

      He wasn’t sure if it was a memory or a dream. Both.

      Right now, though, it was agony, reality. As it had been ever since he had come back to the palace. Ghosts of the past long banished rising back up to haunt him.

      He had spent a great many years out in the middle of the desert with nothing but a sword to act as protection. There, he had known no fear. Because the worst that had awaited him was death. Not so here in the palace. Here, there was torture.

      He sat up, his breath burning like fire, sweat rolling down his face, his chest. He was disoriented, unsure of his positioning in the room. Certain, in that moment, that he wasn’t alone.

      He was on the floor, a blanket tangled around his naked body. He stood, disengaging himself from the fabric, searching the dark space around him, his every sense on high alert. He felt as if he was dying. His brain lost in a cloud of fog that made it impossible to sort through what raged inside him, and what he had to fear outside.

      He walked to his nightstand and took his sheathed sword from the surface. Something wasn’t right about any of this, but he couldn’t sort through what it might be. There was nothing in his mind but a tangle of demons, and he couldn’t see around them to figure out what his next action should be. So he defaulted to what he knew.

      Violence. And the intent to draw blood before any could be shed by him.

      He pulled the sword from the scabbard and held the blade high, walking toward the door, toward the threat.

      * * *

      A thunderous sound woke Olivia from her sleep. She sat upright, her hand pressed to her chest, her heart beating fast. Instinctively, because she was confused, disoriented, she looked to her left, checking to see if Marcus had heard the sound, too.

      But of course he hadn’t. Because he wasn’t there.

      He was dead. She knew that. Was unbearably conscious of it almost all the time. Forgetting now, in a palace in a faraway land, in the bedroom next to the man she was considering marrying in place of Marcus… It seemed cruel.

      She heard the sound of metal scraping against stone and clutched the blanket more tightly. For the first time she questioned her safety. She had made a lot of assumptions about Tahar, about Tarek, based on the fact he was a royal. Based on the fact that this was a palace. Based on her position. She questioned all of it now. Now, when it was too late.

      She got out of bed, grabbing hold of her robe, sliding the diaphanous fabric over her flimsy nightgown. She pushed her hair back from her face and walked quietly toward the door, the marble cold beneath her feet. That unbearable curiosity of hers was warring with her sense of self-preservation.

       You are being overdramatic. You are in a palace. You’re a visiting political ally. Nothing is going to happen to you.

      She was just firmly in that place of paranoid thinking she’d been knocked into after Marcus’s sudden death. Where everything was potentially fatal, and most certainly out to get her. She blew out a determined breath and took another step to the door, cracking it cautiously, peering out at the corridor.

      Her breath froze completely in her lungs when she caught sight of the figure prowling in the darkness. A man, large, imposing. Naked. In his hand was a sword, a deadly, curved blade glinting in the moonlight that filtered through the high-set windows that lined the long hall.

      She should be terrified. And she was, rivulets of fear sliding through her, freezing, increasing the icy terror that wound itself around her lungs. She was also fascinated.

      He turned, long hair sweeping to the side with the movement, and she caught sight of his face. Tarek.

      He didn’t look like anything that should be here in this time. He was like a relic of a bygone era. A Viking warrior or fierce desert marauder. His chest was broad, thick, the muscles of his arms massive. They would have to be to wield the sword the size of the one in his hand. He was a statue made flesh, the perfect specimen of a man lovingly crafted by an artist’s hands. Brought to deadly, feral life.

      He turned away again, prowling down the same length of hall he had done the first time before coming back, moving toward her room. She froze, stopping her breath. She would have stopped her heart for a moment if she had the power. But just like before, he ended his march at the edge of the door to his chamber. A sentry, on guard, weapon in hand.

      He didn’t know where he was, that much she was certain of. Though she couldn’t be entirely sure why she was certain. Perhaps simply because she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t normally stand watch without anything to cover his body.

      A shaft of light fell across his bare back, highlighting the ridges of muscle along his spine and down lower. Now she couldn’t breathe even if she wanted to.

      Her heart thundered a hard and even beat, the blood in her veins running hotter. Faster.

      She had no explanation for it.

      Except that it had been two years since she’d touched a man. But surely she wasn’t that basic.

      So basic that she found herself captivated by a naked man holding a sword, a stranger, when she should be afraid and possibly calling for help.

      But her mouth didn’t work anymore, her throat too dry for words to escape.

      When he turned again, the light fell across his face. In that moment, it wasn’t his beauty she was captured by, but his torture. His pain. It was there, evident in the lines etched into his skin, in the deep hollowness of his eyes.

      She could feel his pain. As though it had invaded her own chest, wrapping itself

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