Exquisite Captive (45 page)

“Malek,” she whispered. He didn’t move, his face peaceful and relaxed. After a few minutes, his breathing settled into a regular rhythm.

Nalia’s body trembled as she slowly sat up. She eased off the futon, moving her limbs back across the mattress until she felt the patio under her feet. Then she stood and walked silently to her bottle. It sat innocently on the table, waiting for her. She took the chain between two fingers, so light for a thing that had weighed so heavily on her. The antique gold and jewels that studded the outside of the bottle glinted in the warm candlelight. She slipped the necklace into a small leather coin purse she’d hidden behind the futon, careful not to touch the bottle itself. One touch and she’d be inside, right back where she started from. She looked around guiltily, then grabbed Malek’s white shirt and threw it on over her bathing suit.

Nalia looked back at the futon. He still lay there, nestled among the colorful pillows. Pity and something else, the echo of what she shared with Raif, spilled over her. She walked over to her master, her captor, and she leaned over and pressed her lips against his, a silent apology for breaking his heart.

Then she ran away without a backward glance.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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RAIF FROWNED AT THE NIGHT SKY THROUGH THE
grimy windows in Malek’s loft. He could see his reflection in them, haggard, too old for his nineteen years. Ever since Nalia had driven away, he couldn’t stop thinking about what she would have to do to get the bottle. That sense of powerlessness rose up in him, burned like fire. Why would she want to be with him, when he couldn’t protect her from anything? All he was good for was this one spell, the unbinding magic. Once she was free, Nalia would be even more powerful than she already was. Raif—he could fight and pretend he knew what the hell he was doing as a leader, but nothing more. How would he explain his feelings for Nalia to his tavrai, when he couldn’t understand them himself? They’d think he’d lost his mind. Maybe he had.

Raif pressed his knuckles against the windowsill, chips of dirty white paint sticking to his skin. He was closer than ever before to getting the sigil, and it should have been the only thing he cared about, but everything had become so complicated. This was why he’d stayed away from Shirin, his second-in-command, even though there were nights when he’d had to use all of his willpower to say no to her arms and lips and the solace of another body close to his own. His feelings for Nalia weren’t just a distraction, they were a game changer. He’d nearly died trying to save someone who’d been trained to kill him. And when she lay in his arms, the fever high and deadly, he’d poured himself into her, every last ounce of his
chiaan
, knowing that if Nalia didn’t survive, it wouldn’t matter whether the revolution succeeded or not.

And he hated himself for it.

“You need to relax. You won’t be strong enough to do the unbinding,” said Zanari. Her light tone seemed forced. She was sitting against one of the concrete pillars, her eyes closed, surrounded by a circle of earth.

Raif snorted. “I hope you’re joking.”

Zanari opened one eye. “Maybe a little.”

He stepped away from the window and crossed to where his sister sat. “What do you see?”

“Calar’s too protected—I can’t see anything around her. There’s a lot of movement near the portal. Voices, feet kicking up dust. They must know Haran is dead. They’re coming.”

“How many?”

“I’ve counted twenty so far.”

After what he’d seen Nalia do on the beach, Raif knew she could put up a good fight, but twenty against three was a lot.

He leaned against another pillar. “Do you think Haran told Calar where Nalia is?”

Zanari shrugged. “I have no idea. Whenever I was connected to him, he seemed to be operating in his own little world. But I’m sure he must have told her something.”

So the Ifrit were sending troops and, until they were upon her, Nalia couldn’t do any magic lest she give away her exact location.

“Come on,” he whispered under his breath. He wished he could grab Nalia and make a run for it. Screw the bottle, her master, the sigil. Just go as far as they could.

He should have stayed at the mansion. He could have disguised himself, fought Malek if he tried to put her in the bottle. But Nalia had insisted on being alone.

Probably didn’t want me to see what was going to happen.

He clenched his fists and looked at his scuffed boots, afraid his sister would take one glance at his face and be able to read everything he was thinking. He hated the waiting, the inaction of it. In Arjinna, Raif was always surrounded by his
tavrai
, issuing orders, leading missions, killing Ifrit. He was necessary. Here, he had less power than a half-Ifrit
skag
who was, at this very moment, kissing his
rohifsa
. The word came to him, unasked for, unannounced. It scared him, how it popped into his head so naturally. But it was true. Nalia
was
his
rohifsa
: the song of his heart, his soulmate.

In Malek’s bed. His hands all over her. Kissing her, touching—

Stop it,
he thought. He could still feel Nalia’s kiss on his lips; it was something outside of Malek and Arjinna. Outside of the world and all its constraints. That moment—and so many others like it—that was their truth. He tried to hold on to it, felt it slipping from his grasp. He needed her here, to remind him of it. Of them.

“How long are we going to wait?” his sister asked, after another silent hour had passed.

“As long as it takes.”

But he knew he couldn’t do that. Nalia had been very clear—if Malek put her in the bottle, it could be months.
Years,
even. He was to go on without her.

Another hour.

Raif checked the time on the cell phone Jordif had given him when he’d first arrived earlier this week. It’d been hours since Nalia had kissed him good-bye.

He turned to Zanari. “I’m going over there.”

“You can’t,” she said, her voice hard. “If Malek suspects anything, you know what he’ll do to her.”

“It’s been
six hours
.”

“These things take time,” she said softly.

She wouldn’t look at him and he gave the wall a vicious kick.

Ten minutes later, Raif pushed away from the window. “I’m going.”

“Raif—”

Tendrils of smoke were just beginning to curl around his feet when there was a furious pounding on the door. He ran to it, his heart throwing itself against his chest. He threw it open, terror and joy and fury fighting inside him. Nalia stood there, barefoot and wearing nothing but a man’s white button-down shirt over a skimpy bathing suit. She fell into his arms and he held her close to him. She smelled like a strange chemical, like the fake pond of water he’d seen in Malek’s backyard the night of the party, and under that he caught an unmistakably masculine scent.

She’s here,
he thought, fighting against the sheer awfulness of what Nalia had had to do.
She’s okay.

An image of Nalia in Malek’s arms flashed in his head. He let go of her and took a step back. If it weren’t for Draega’s Amulet, Raif would be killing Malek in his sleep right now.

“Do you have it?” His voice sounded cold and far away. He wanted to comfort her, but the gentle words were lost under a mass of dark, heavy frustration.

Nalia looked at him for a moment, her eyes searching his. Something like defeat settled over her lovely features and then she nodded, holding up a small bag that had been clutched in her fist. He was just now seeing the redness around her eyes, evidence of tears she’d be too ashamed to admit having shed, and he saw her struggle to master the shivering that wracked her body. Still, his arms wouldn’t move to hold her like he wanted to.

“I don’t know how long he’ll be asleep,” she said. “I had to drive here because I couldn’t evanesce, and I got lost and—”

“We better hurry, then,” he said, cutting her off.

Everything in him strained toward the tremulous, beautiful girl in front of him, but he turned around and strode back to the window. He couldn’t touch her when she smelled like Malek, when she wore his shirt against her bare skin.

“Zanari, why don’t you manifest some clothes for Nalia?”

The request came out wrong, with implications and accusations swimming underneath it. He’d make it up to Nalia later, when Zanari wasn’t around.

When he wasn’t so angry.

His sister frowned at him, but he ignored her. In the window’s reflection he could see Nalia looking at him, confusion and uncertainty spreading across her face. He wanted to tell her she was his
rohifsa
, that it was killing him that someone else had been close to her in a way he’d never been. He wanted to tell her how ashamed he was, that he’d waited in a room across the city, letting her pay such a terrible price for her freedom.

“Raif,” she said. Nalia crossed the room and put a hand on his arm, but he kept his eyes, unseeing, on the window.

“Look at me,” she whispered.

Look at her. Look at her, you stupid skag.

He couldn’t.

“We need to leave,” he said.

Nalia’s hand dropped and she stepped away from him. The tenderness in her face vanished; in its place was the hard, resilient mask of a trained soldier. Someone who expected the worst and wasn’t surprised when it happened.

Raif reached for her, but his hand grasped nothing but air; Nalia had already turned her back on him.

The canyon was pitch black, inky like an underground cave. They’d chosen this location days ago. Raif needed a lot of earth to draw power from, and privacy. There wouldn’t be any humans hiking the canyon’s paths in the middle of the night, and there wasn’t a home or business for miles around. Just across the highway lay the sea, and the air was wet and salty. Nalia picked her way over fallen branches and rocks, the faint ball of light Raif had manifested bobbing in the air ahead of them. Since she couldn’t use magic, they’d had to drive. The journey had been tense, with Zanari babbling nervously whenever the silence became too loud. Now they were quiet again, each lost in their own thoughts. The fear was palpable. Malek could be waking at any minute, and Calar’s assassins—or,
gods
, Calar herself—might have already come through the portal.

Nalia kept one hand clutched tightly around the coin purse containing the bottle. At the very least, Malek wouldn’t be able to summon her if he woke up. She still didn’t know how he’d been able to find her the first time she’d stolen the bottle, all those years ago. It left her unsettled, this one piece of the puzzle she couldn’t figure out.

Please don’t wake up.

Raif was behind her and she hated how her body had already become attuned to his presence. Their exchange of
chiaan
and the pieces of herself she’d offered up to him like a gift made it so that she could sense his mood, the restlessness inside him. If she were blindfolded and thrown into a room filled with a hundred jinn, she’d be able to find Raif in a second.

Malek’s face flashed into her mind. His joy when he saw her waiting for him on the tarmac. The gentleness in his eyes when he’d said he loved her. His cruelty had been so much easier to bear; his kindness—and Raif’s rejection—left her raw and confused. She wasn’t sure she knew what love was. If it were even possible. Bitterness welled in Nalia’s heart. Was this all the universe was going to give her—the love of a man who had traded money for her body?

You are Ghan Aisouri,
she reminded herself. None of this should have been a surprise. From the moment she could understand speech, Nalia had been told that love could not exist for her, except love for the realm. Why had she let herself believe the gods would grace her with something she had never been destined to have? Why would they bless her with more than a few moments of happiness when she had taken a life and rained destruction upon her realm?

A loveless existence was what she deserved. She was lucky she had even that much.

Her thoughts wandered back to those first moments with Raif, her master’s shirt heavy on her body. Nalia had known something was wrong the minute he opened the door. Saw the look of disgust on his face. He had no idea she hadn’t slept with Malek. All he saw was that shirt, her tousled hair. She’d wanted to tell him right away, but something had stopped her. Maybe it was because Zanari was in the room and the conversation felt too private, something she and Raif needed to whisper in the dark.
No,
she thought. He’d looked at her differently—she’d done what she’d had to do, what they all knew she had to do, and then he’d judged her for it.

Nalia stared at Raif’s back as he walked ahead of her, thinking how lucky he was that Haran had put that trace on her
chiaan
. Her fingers itched to show him how much he’d hurt her. A fight was just what she needed. At the very least, it would distract Nalia from the immense disappointment that was threatening to overpower her. Here she was, on the brink of freedom, and she was more miserable than ever. Raif had been the one good thing in her life; now, everything they shared was just more collateral damage in an endless war.

“We’re here,” she said, when the ball of light hovered over a small clearing, hidden off the path by a cluster of trees and bushes. Her voice was short, cold, and her eyes skimmed over Raif and Zanari as she stood in the center of the clearing, one hand on her hip, the other gripping Malek’s necklace. Waiting.

Zanari immediately set up a sacred circle in the center of their chosen area, muttering over the dirt as it slid through her fingertips. Her
chiaan
lit up the circle and when she was finished, she moved away toward the outer perimeter of the clearing and made a smaller, second circle.

“I’ll keep watch,” she said, sitting inside it and closing her eyes.

Nalia took in the tense lines in Zanari’s face and wondered if she knew something Nalia didn’t.

“Has Calar sent more Ifrit after me?” she asked.