The Sheikh's First Christmas - A Warm and Cozy Christmas Romance (12 page)

SEVENTEEN

I followed him through the house. The passages and rooms seemed more familiar to me now, and I knew we were heading toward the kitchen. When we reached the doorway, I stopped short.

"Well, I'll be damned," I said.

The last time I'd seen this room, it had been dusty and disheveled, with cobwebs in the corners and gritty dust on the floor. Now it was immaculate. Pots and pans, newly polished, hung in orderly rows on hooks. The counters, stovetops, and floors all shone. The faint musty smell was gone and had been replaced by disinfectant and lemon.

Sadiq grinned as he reached up on a shelf and took down a steel coffee pot.

"I decided the place could use a bit of freshening up."

"You did all this yourself?"

"I did. I suppose I was trying to keep busy, while we were apart. I cleaned the rest of the house, too. You'll find it's not so haunted anymore." He was still smiling, but a shadow passed over his eyes. That same expression of pain, always present, but never named. He turned away from me as he filled the pot with water and set it on the stove.

We'd come to this place again, where history pushes to the front and demands to be seen. Each time this had happened, I'd looked away, pretending not to see. I'd waited for that painful bit of his past to recede. I'd done it because I thought he needed me to. Now, though, I wasn't so sure. I knew what it was to live with a secret, how it burns and twists inside you, never letting you be. I knew the terror and relief of the moment the secret becomes known—the moment its power begins to fade.

"Sadiq," I began carefully, "you know everything about me. You know the worst things I've done. You've seen me at my weakest, at my most vulnerable..."

He left the coffee pot on the stove to heat and came over to me.

"What is it you're trying to ask me?" he said, and laid his hand over mine. I looked at our hands together, mine pale and small, his darker and rougher.

"I wish you would tell me about it," I said, meeting his eyes.

He took his hand away from mine and walked towards the window. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his back turned to me. I waited, watching as tongues of steam started to curl from the spout of the coffee pot.

"It's hard for me to speak of this," he said. The words sounded heavy as he said them.

"I know it must be. I won't hold it against you if you can't, but I do wish that you would. I can feel it there, with you, all of the time. I want to understand."

Silence filled the space between us, but I waited. Finally, he began to speak.

"Five years ago... just over five years ago, I came over to the U.S. for a meeting in Seattle. I was planning to visit some friends of my family once I’d met with the clients, and my sister traveled with me."

He hadn't mentioned a sister before.

"Are you close to your sister?"

"I was," he said. Parts of his strongest self seemed to break away with the words. "Aaminah was a child come late to our parents. She was ten years younger than me, and I doted on her. I taught her about our family's business, even when others said she was too young. Like me, she wanted to follow in our father’s footsteps. I think she loved our business more than I did."

"Like I said, she traveled with me that time. She was fifteen, and I worried about leaving her behind at home, as by that point our parents had passed. It seemed safer to have her with me, where I was sure she would be protected." His voice hardened at the last few words.

"What happened to her?" It made sense now. It all fit. She'd died here, and he'd believed he was protecting her.

"She was shot," he said. From his face, I could see that, even now, he struggled to believe it had actually happened. He shook his head and ran a shaking hand through his hair. "It was Christmas Eve, the first since our parents passed. We met up with some friends at a restaurant downtown. The restaurant was stylish, exclusive; you know, the kind of place people go to be seen. I remember the strange electronic music that was playing, and the way the blue light from the sign on the front of the building made Minah's skin glow the wrong color as we left the place together. She was arguing with me about something. She wasn’t really mad, though. I think it was that I hadn’t let her order a cocktail, and she took exception to being treated like a child.

"We were waiting for the valet to bring our car round. I stepped away to have a cigarette, trying to show her that I didn't want to talk it anymore. She paid no attention, though. She pressed it, the way she always did. She—"

The pain of the memory played over his face. He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. His eyes moved as though he were watching a film inside his mind.

"She was pestering me, and I turned around to tell her so. I had the cigarette in my mouth, but I hadn't managed to light it yet. It was so windy that night. I think that's why the shot hit her and not me. They were shooting from too far away; the wind took the bullet, and spun it toward my Minah.

"She just stopped talking, in the middle of her sentence. Her eyes went strange, and she fell. I saw the blood, here." He touched the top of his breastbone. "She... she didn't die right away. I held her, told her she would be fine. I told her these lies until she could hear me no more. Even then I kept saying them, but for myself."

"Sadiq, I'm so sorry," I said. I didn’t know what to say; what he described was a horror beyond my imagination. And he'd lived with it all silently for the past five years. "Did they find the person who killed her?"

He shook his head, his expression darkening. "The police were no help. They told us it was probably gang-related violence; an accidental bullet meant for someone else. But there was no one else around us that night—the valet had gone for the car and left us there. A Sheikh of a wealthy family knows that there are many people with reasons to want him dead. I'm certain that whoever did this meant to kill me, and killed my sister by mistake. My people conducted their own investigation, but found no clues. The police told me that it was hopeless, that it would never be solved."

"What did you do?"

"I took Aaminah's body home and made arrangements for her to be buried. After her funeral, I came back here, determined to find the person who'd taken her from us."

"And that's why you've been here so long? You're looking for her killer?"

He gave a short, bitter laugh.

"I was, but it was difficult, knowing that an assassin had made an attempt on my life. Everywhere I went, I felt as though he was watching from some window or rooftop, studying me through the scope of his rifle. I stopped going out to the clubs and parties I'd once enjoyed. I didn't go on dates with women anymore, and I didn't allow people to visit me in the hotel where I was staying. The few friends I had here drifted away, and I don't blame them. I wasn't the man they'd known before, and the man I'd become was good company for no one.

"I began drinking more, which only made my moods worse. I was certain that every stranger on a bus stop bench, every vendor offering a magazine, was only waiting for the right moment to reach inside their jacket, take out a gun and shoot me. I spent less time on the street investigating and kept to my hotel, but I soon became suspicious of the people there. The maids, the bellhop—I imagined any one of them might be coming to kill me. So I bought this house, and had the panic room built—although I had no use for it until the day you came to rob me."

Something about his story bothered me, and it took me a moment to pinpoint what it was. Thinking back to the night I'd first entered Sadiq's house, I realized what didn't make sense to me.

"You don't seem paranoid to me, though," I said. "If anything, you're pretty careless about your security. Your alarm system's lousy and out of date, and you don't even keep your windows closed."

"I used to lock every window and door," he said. "And I didn't choose the alarm. It was here when I bought the house. It isn't actually connected to anything, you know. I just left the stickers where they were. For some robbers, this is discouragement enough."

"Why not have a good alarm installed?" I knew he could have afforded it.

He shook his head and smiled, as if the answer should be obvious to me. "They wouldn't be coming to rob me, Annabelle. And they wouldn't care if the alarm sounded. I would be dead long before the police arrived, and they would be gone from the house moments after. That’s why I chose the panic room. It would have given the police time to arrive, as well as some of my own people."

"But the window..."

He sighed. "The story I'm telling is about who I was five years ago. At that time, I believed that I would catch Minah's killer quickly, and that after that I would return to Almarain. I lived in fear, thinking that they would find me and kill me any day. Time passed, and they didn't come, but still, I couldn't shake my wariness, and I didn’t feel that Aaminah was truly at peace. I mourned her. I plotted and I lurked; I worried and slept very little. It was a miserable existence. By the end of that first year, an assassin's bullet would have seemed like a blessing.

"I began to behave in ways that were deliberately careless. I left my doors unlocked, the windows open. I let my plans be known to many people, making myself an easy target for the one who was meant to kill me. I wanted them to hurry up and do it so I could stop waiting; so I wouldn't have to feel that way, every day and every night.

"They never came, though," he said solemnly. "But maybe they didn't need to. After Minah died, I took a less active role in my company. I spent all my time here, drinking in a dark room, too suspicious to hire a maid or a cook. I might have been alive, but I was no longer any threat to them. I suppose that, even today, that's still true."

The coffee had started to boil as he spoke, and now it spattered a mess onto the stovetop. I hurried over and turned off the burner. Without speaking, Sadiq brought mugs for us. I poured the steaming liquid into the cups and added sugar to mine. We stood beside one another and leaned against the counter, sipping from our cups in silence as his story settled over us.

"Why do you still stay here?" I finally asked.

He stared thoughtfully ahead. All of the anger and hardness had gone from his face.

"I stay because, if I go home, it means I go home without her. I could not face that day five years ago, and I still don’t think I’d be able to." He shrugged and took another sip from his cup. "I know that she's dead, that she's never coming home, and that it's because of me. All of that is bad enough. But to go home, back to the comfort of all that I know, when I've not even named her killer..." He shook his head.

I searched for words, but couldn't think of what to say. There didn't seem to be much for anyone to say.

"I can tell that you loved her very much," I said finally.

He smiled, and I saw in his smile all the love and sadness that I'd seen the first night I'd met him.

"She was a special person. She was precious; I can't forget her absence."

"You never will," I said. "And you never should."

His hand found mine where it rested on the cold metal of the counter. He linked my fingers gently in his.

"And now you will remember her, too," he said. "I wonder if you can understand why knowing that brings me comfort."

I thought of my mother, and tears stung my eyes. I smiled, though, because it didn't hurt to remember, not anymore. And if it did hurt, it was a sweet pain.

"I do understand," I said, brushing away tears. "Anyone who's lost the person they loved the most understands that feeling."

He thought about it for a moment, studying me as though seeing me differently than he had before.

"How strange it is, that we're ever so foolish as to think ourselves alone; that we're so foolish to think no one else can know our pain."

His words felt like some sort of compliment, and I felt my cheeks go red.