CHAPTER THREE
The trip was conducted in silence. The driver never turned to speak to her, and if he had the radio turned on, it was so soft that she couldn’t hear through the glass. She sat in the plush backseat, and even as she wondered what in the world was going to become of her, she noted how luxurious it was. She had spent weeks in the prison of metal and cement. She might as well have been in another world.
Somehow, Irene fell asleep. In her dreams, she was back in her cell. All around her were the noises of the prison, but over all of them, she could hear a swift, sure step. She knew that it was Raheem before he appeared at her cell door, and when he opened it, she could see that he had a cane in his hand.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked in her dream, her voice tinny and far away.
He laughed, a singularly cruel thing.
“I’m going to give you what you deserve,” he said.
She awoke with a jerk, startled to feel tears on her face. For moment, she had no idea where she was. She was convinced that she was still in the cell in Khanour. Instead, the car was coming to a stop, and the driver came around to open the door for her.
“Are you all right, miss?” he asked solicitously, and there was a brief moment before she realized she was the one he was speaking to so kindly.
“I am,” she said, her voice little more than a rusty croak. It felt like the first time in years since she had been able to speak so clearly.
Irene looked around in confusion.
They had taken her to an airfield in the middle of the desert. The sun was beginning to set, dyeing the sky a vivid orange. The only plane on the runway was a small thing, looking like a toy against the enormous sky. There was something very private about the airfield. It was obviously a space that belonged to one man, not to the world.
At that moment another car arrived, and Raheem himself appeared. He continued to give instructions to the woman in a crisp business suit who walked by his side, and then he when he approached Irene, he shook his head.
“It’s not enough, but it will do for now,” he said finally. “If you need anything, you can give me a call, but I would frankly rather you avoid calling me.”
The woman nodded, glancing curiously at Irene before continuing.
“No, I think it will be fine,” she said. “You’ve given me a lot to work with, and after that, I can guess. Will you need anything yourself?”
Raheem shook his head.
“No. But if I think of anything, I will be in touch.”
“As you say, Your Highness.”
When she got back into the car to leave, Raheem turned to Irene. Without thinking, she took a step back. There was something tempestuous in his expression, but something terrifyingly possessive as well. He looked like a man who had won a prize, or one that was ready to claim one. Instead, he only nodded toward the plane.
“That is where we are going,” he said. “Come on.”
He guided her up the gangplank and into the plane. For a moment, Irene’s frightened brain conjured up plane rides that ended with a frightened person being pushed out the door. As she entered the small but luxuriously appointed cabin, however, she realized that most executions likely did not use such glamorous planes.
Everything felt too vivid and too strange. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. Raheem, who had taken his place at one of the seats around the small table, glanced at her.
“Don’t just stand there,” he said, his voice gentler than it had been before. “Come sit down.”
Obediently, she came to sit at the table, facing him. She was startled when a lovely young flight attendant came out with warm towels for them to wash their hands. For some reason, that small courtesy, offered without hesitation or coercion, told Irene more than anything else had that she was not in prison anymore, at least for the moment. She blinked back tears, hoping that Raheem couldn’t see.
She held her breath as the plane climbed into the air. The flight attendant had retreated back to her own compartment, and she was alone with Raheem. Outside, the setting sun gave the clouds an orange glow. She was almost tempted to sleep again, but she couldn’t relax. Finally, she turned to Raheem, who was idly scanning something on his tablet.
“What have you done?” she asked, her voice gravelly. They were more words than she had spoken in sequence for a very long time. They were almost painful, and she wondered if he would mock her for them.
Instead, he gazed at her with a calmness that soothed her. No matter what, this man was one who knew his place in the world.
“So you can speak after all,” he said casually. It was as if he took plane rides with women accused of felonies every day.
“You should know,” Irene found herself saying. “We talked before…”
Her voice trailed off, and when she looked up, she found him watching her with that intent predatory ferocity.
“Before I realized that you were a thief,” he said, and she flinched. Irene started to speak, to deny it, but at the last moment, she caught herself. She was horrified by how quickly she had allowed herself to be lulled by a sudden shift in scenery. Things had been moving so fast for her that she had somehow forgotten that it was Peter’s life on the line. If she slipped up, there was every chance he would meet his end. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
While she was internally reprimanding herself, Raheem watched her with a curious gaze.
“You were about to say something just then,” he said softly. “Don’t bother denying it, I can sense it quite well…”
She smiled a little ruefully.
“I suppose I was.” Irene knew that the smart thing would have been to retreat back into silence. There was nothing that he could do with her if she refused to speak. There was nothing that she could give him if she didn’t say a word. However, she had been silent for so long that it felt as if a cork had been popped, then lost. She wanted to talk with someone; she craved the human contact that she had been denied for the past few days.
He shrugged, a slightly cruel smile on his face.
“No matter, you will,” he said. “I mean to get to the bottom of this, Irene Bellingham, and sooner or later, you will find out that I always get what I want.”
“And what do you want right now?” she asked, aware that her voice was faintly challenging. It was a poor idea to challenge her captor, but a part of her couldn’t stop herself.
“I want to know who you were smuggling that statue for,” he said. “I could simply order you to prison for the next twenty years and think nothing of it, but the truth of the matter is that if I do that, sooner or later, there will simply be another pretty girl who will lose her head and attempt something so foolish. No, I want to know who sent you, and then I want to crush them. I will make sure that they are never able to harm my country and its history again.”
There was something so serious about Raheem’s statement that Irene found herself stunned. This was a man who believed in what he was saying with every bit of his being.
“I’m sorry,” she found herself saying with a soft regret in her voice. “I cannot help you.”
He looked at her, and instead of being furious, as she was half-afraid he would be, he only smiled.
“Of course you will,” Raheem said with absolute certainty. “You are my wife now, and you will follow my commands.”
“What do you mean?” Irene asked, her voice uncertain. “I know that we… we married in the prison. But surely that is not real? Surely you don’t truly see me as your wife?”
He laughed.
“As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I mean. That was how I got you out of prison, pretty thief. Even I am not above the law, and it took me a while to figure out how I could extract you after your arrest. Finally, I hit upon this ancient law. You are mine now, and I can do with you what I wish. That means that you will be telling me who hired you and what you are doing for them.”
“I can’t…” she whispered. “Please. Please do not ask me.”
He was silent for a long moment as she looked down at the floor. Finally, he tapped the table with two hard fingers.
“Stand up. Come here.”
For a moment, she wanted to make the truly disastrous choice to disobey. Irene wanted to force herself into a ball, ignoring everything he had to say. She wanted to retreat into herself, but when he looked at her with those burning eyes, she found that she could not.
Swallowing hard, she stood up and walked around the table to him. He sat and watched her with a kind of menace that made her heart beat faster. When she was close, he struck like lightning. His hand flashed out, wrapping itself around her wrist. She had just enough with about her to be terrified at how quickly he moved when he jerked her against his body.
With a careless strength that she never would have guessed at, he pulled her up into his lap, cradling the back of her head with his hand as he held her still for a rough kiss.
The sheer sensuality of the kiss overwhelmed her senses. Suddenly, it felt like all of the noise and the stress that she had been dealing with for the last few weeks simply faded away to nothing. All that her mind had time and space for was his kiss, the way his body felt underneath hers, the muscles of his frame, the way his tongue danced teasingly along her lower lip with utter assurance. His touch was certain and sure, holding her still without hurting her.
When he finally let her go, she lurched back away from him, staring at him with wide eyes.
“Why did you…”
“Because you are my wife,” Raheem said, his eyes glittering. “Unless things are very different in America, I believe that husbands and wives do this there as well…”
“You are teasing me,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with the emotions that were crashing through her. She should have been outraged and frightened, but instead, there was something else going on in her mind. Instead of being terrified, all she could think of was how much she wanted this man, and how deeply she wished she had not pulled away.
“Perhaps I am a little,” Raheem admitted, “but let me tell you something else.”
His eyes hardened a little. Irene felt herself shiver. Despite the comfortable temperature of the cabin and the long robes that she wore, she was suddenly cold.
“In Khanour, we have always treasured our women, and that means that we treasure their choices as well. While a sheikh can marry a woman no matter what her situation, it is the woman’s choice whether she stays married at all.
“If you wish to divorce me, simply say ‘I divorce you’ three times. After that, it is done.”
She looked so skeptical that he smiled a little.
“Of course, if you are no longer my wife, you are a thief who belongs in the prison system. I will no longer be able to protect you from those who are baying for your blood. If you choose to sever our bond, I will have no choice but to put you back in prison, where so many believe that you belong.”
“But if I am your wife…”
“Then of course your punishment and your disposition belong to me,” he said with a shrug. “I become your judge and your jury in all matters.”
She could feel the gossamer wings of his trap fold around her, binding her as surely as shackles or a straitjacket.
“As long as I am your wife, I stay out of jail,” she said softly. “When I am no longer your wife, I will take my chances where I may find them.”
“It is all a matter of whose authority you choose to submit to, yes,” he said. “As I have said, the choice is yours.”
Irene bit her lip. She knew what the right choice was, the brave one. She would have demanded that he turn the plane around and bring her back to the prison. Even if the prison was brutal, she was known to be there as an American student who had run afoul of the local police. People knew who she was and what her crime was.
If she went with Raheem… literally anything could happen. However, some part of her, no matter what kind of sense she tried to offer it, told her that she was far safer where she was.
“Why?” Irene asked. She hadn’t thought she had said it. When Raheem tilted his head to one side, she blushed, aware of how she sounded. When he answered her question, however, he was serious.
“Because I could not get you out of my head,” he said simply. “Because I was already enchanted with you when I spoke to you at the airport. When I found out that you were involved with such a heinous deed, I was furious. I spent days in my chambers in Khanour, trying to see how I had been fooled so badly. I have always been a good judge of character. I have staked my position and my government on such judgments, and they have always been right. When I found out that you were thieving a true part of my country’s history, I wanted to know just how I had been so very wrong.”
He paused, gazing out the window for a moment. For just that instant, Irene could see why Khanour followed him so willingly. He was a man who always thought of his country first, who would fight to the death for them.
“And what did you decide?” she asked softly.
“I decided that I wasn’t wrong at all,” he said, and as he did so, he looked straight into her eyes.
In that moment, it looked as if he could look straight into her soul and her spirit, finding the secrets that she hid there. She resisted the urge to cover her eyes with her hands, instead continuing to stand there and look right back.
“I have not offered any defense,” she said, but he shook his head.
“You have offered very little at all,” he said with a shrug. “You are hiding something, and the woman I spoke to before all hell broke loose, I think she would have a very good reason for hiding. She needs to realize that she is safe before she gives up her secrets.”
“Safe…” She echoed the word softly, startled by how it woke a deep longing inside her. She hadn’t felt safe in weeks… if she were honest, she hadn’t felt safe for most of her adult life. There was always one more wolf to be kept from the door, her brother to protect.
“Yes. And I swear to you as the sheikh of Khanour, there is no one in the world who is safer than the person standing next to me. You are my wife.”
“What do you want from me?” Irene asked, and this time, there was a tremor in her voice, something that felt just a few inches away from being tears.
“I want you to be my wife for a week,” he said, as if it was the most simple thing in the world.
“What?”
“For the next seven days, you will be my wife in all things. At the end of that time, we will either see eye to eye on what you tell the police and you will give them what they want before you walk free…”
“Or?” she asked.
“Or you have decided that you do not trust me and I will leave you in Romania, a country with whom we do not have an extradition treaty. You will walk out of here, if not free, then freer than you would be if you had persisted with your silence in prison.”
“Why are you doing this for me?” Irene asked, dazed. “You surely do not make a habit of breaking out women you think are innocent from prison to help them…”
“Who is to say I don’t?” he asked teasingly, but when she looked up at him in surprise, he shook his head.
“No. I would not do this for just anyone else. I think it was the moment where our eyes met at the airport when you were being taken away. You wanted to tell me that you were sorry. I have known many thieves in my life, Irene, but believe me when I say that no thief has ever told me that they were sorry, not like you did.”
Irene bit her lip, unsure of what to say, but he continued, his tone light and casual.
“After that, I simply had to make sure that I actually could help you.”
She looked down at her hands. “So I have to be your wife for the week, and after that, one way or the other, I will walk free.”
He nodded. Irene knew that she should keep the next part to herself, but some innate honesty refused to allow her to do so.
“I… I am not going to tell you anything,” she said quietly. “I won’t. I can’t…”
To her surprise, he did not seem to be angered by her pronouncement. Confused, Irene tried again.
“I mean it. I have no intention of telling you what you want to know.”
“I heard you,” Raheem said, his tone gentle. “I only know that that is going to change.”
For a moment, she wanted to laugh at him for his confidence. Regardless of the situation she had landed in, she had always been a very strong-willed person. Now he was implying that his will was stronger than hers. Instead, Irene nodded.
“All right.”
“And I hope you understand that you are my wife. This is not an arrangement in name only, or something created merely to remove you to my custody. This is a real thing, consecrated by law and by tradition.”
Under his hot gaze, she could feel the color rise to her cheeks. She knew exactly what he was talking about. Perhaps another woman would have been afraid or horrified, but for her, her heart began to beat faster.
“I understand,” she said softly. “And I submit.”
Something about the way she said the words made the desire in his eyes explode into a bonfire. For a moment, she thought he would simply lunge at her and make her his right then. To her surprise, she saw him rein himself in, a slight smile on his sensuous lips.
“All right. Good. Then we shall have no problems.”
***
The plane touched down next to an oasis in the middle of miles of desert. Irene couldn’t get over how the land seemed to jump for a moment, dropping the lush green forest of the oasis in the middle of the barren desert.
“The sands look like they could kill you,” she murmured, looking out over the darkening land.
“They can,” Raheem replied, coming to stand next to her. Together, they watched the plane take off into the night. It would return for them at the end of the week.
“I don’t feel as if I am in danger, however,” Irene mused. “I feel… safer here than I have in a long time.”
To her surprise, he pulled her back against him, kissing the top of her forehead. It was a different kiss from the one they had shared on the plane. This one was tender, almost ordinary if it hadn’t been happening in the most extraordinary of circumstances. It felt affectionate, and though she knew that they were operating in a strange space, a part of her craved more.
“Good. That is how I want you to feel.”
He led the way to a luxurious house set back by the water. It was a gorgeous home, a gem of modern design set in the middle of an ancient landscape. It had all of the modern conveniences of the city while being lost in a wild paradise.
He went to build a fire in the steel pit at the center of the living room, looking over his shoulder at Irene.
“You should go shower. There are clothes in the small bedroom to the right, if you wish to get out of those robes.”
“You gave me these robes,” she said, and he shrugged.
“You can wear what you like. The robes were simply convenient and would get you out of the city without too much trouble.”
She wasn’t sure what to say, so she found her way to the bathroom, where there was a shower in an enclosed glass chamber with water sprinkling from the ceiling in a gentle rain. For several long moments, she simply luxuriated in the spray, reminding herself of her freedom all over again.
When she got out, she considered the clothes in the bedroom. They were obviously new. Someone had come out with clothes that were roughly her size, the tags still on them. Irene wondered if she should be worried at how thoroughly Raheem had planned all of this, but she pushed it aside.
She found a simple dress with a lovely flowing skirt in deep blue, shot through with silver threads. It was a dress she would have sighed after before, and now, after a moment of hesitation, she slipped it on.
Before Irene made her way back into the living room, she found herself looking at the pile of jewelry she had discarded. She hesitated for a moment, and then she simply went with what was in her gut. She left the earrings and bracelets, but she picked up the necklace. Something about its cold heavy weight comforted her, and when she put it around her neck and looked in the mirror, the moonstone seemed to wink at her. Good enough, she decided.
Back in the living room, the fire was crackling away. Raheem had removed his own robes, and now he wore a simple pair of dark trousers and a dark tunic. Though they were simple, the cut and quality were obvious, and she thought absently that he looked like a model in the gorgeous living room, the fire crackling merrily and throwing lively shadows on the wall.
When his eyes lit on her, they brightened, and he gestured for her to come sit next to him. Though she felt more than a little shy, she came to sit on the couch. Then it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to lean her weight into his body, pressing against him.
“Tell me something about yourself,” he said, and she laughed a little.
“Is it a command from my lord and master?”
“A request from your husband,” he said instead, and for that reason alone, she considered for a moment.
“All right,” she said softly. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Why you studied art. Where you grew up. What you think of Khanour.”
She bit her lip. Talking about growing up and Khanour seemed too risky, but the other…
“I was never an artist,” she said. “A lot of people who go into art history are artists, and surprisingly good ones, but that was never me. Instead, I always wanted to spend all my time fascinated by the art, allowing it to surround me and subsume me. It was something I have always wanted, from the first time I saw a Matisse painting at the art museum in Chicago. There was always something about how good it felt to look at a painting that was beautiful, and that had history behind it. It was… uplifting. Elevating.”
“And so you wanted to make it into your career?”
“I would have been happy waiting tables if it had covered my tickets to the art museum for the rest of my life,” Irene said with a rueful laugh. “But I won a scholarship in my senior year of high school, and I thought that I could simply go work with the art myself.”
“I saw in your records that you were in graduate school,” he said thoughtfully. “What do you think you would do with that degree?”
“Work in museums,” she said promptly. “In conservation especially. There is so much art and beauty that could be returned to the world if we only knew the right ways to take care of it…”
She stopped abruptly. What museum or archive would be willing to hire her on if this came out? If she had a future at all after this week? She shivered, pressing a little closer to Raheem. His arm tightened around her, but he didn’t comment on it.
“I have never had a choice about what I was going to do,” he said. “From the time I was very young, I knew that I was going to be the sheikh. I knew that I was born to rule and care for my country.”
“Do you regret that?” she asked.
There was nothing but sincerity in her voice, but he laughed.
“You mean do I regret the wealth and the luxury?”
She tilted her head to the side, wondering if she was going to be laughed at or mocked.
“Yes,” she said. “When I got that scholarship, I could feel the world open up for me. I could be anything. I could be a nurse who helped people, or I could be an engineer who built things. I could be a librarian or a lawyer.”
“And you chose to study art.”
“I did,” she said thoughtfully. “And I don’t regret it at all. That moment of choice… that was freedom.”
He laughed, but this time, there was a slightly strangled sound to it.
“I don’t regret it,” he said with a soft sigh. “Not really. I am good at what I do. My country prospers, and my people love me. The wealth and the fame doesn’t’ hurt. But that choice. You are right. It is a freedom that my money and my family could not buy for me.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and then he spoke again.
“I wonder what it would have been like if our places had been switched,” he mused.
“You mean if you were a poor scholarship student from Pennsylvania and I was the sheikha of Khanour?”
“Hmm. I imagine that I would have wanted to go to college,” he said, “and perhaps I would have studied engineering, but I wonder if history would have called to me.”
“History?”
He grinned, slightly rueful.
“Yes. Where you saw the beauty of art, I saw the wide stretch of human history. From the moment we could write, we started writing down where we had come from and what we wanted. Who we were and what we did. Those stories… above almost anything else, they are precious. We are no one without knowing where we came from.”
“Where we came from…” Irene repeated.
It was such a luxury to imagine the past as history. If it was history, it was carefully contained in a book. It couldn’t hurt her. It couldn’t be used to hurt the people who shared it with her. A memory popped into her mind, and before she could stop herself, she started speaking about it.
“When I was just a little girl in Pennsylvania, my brother, Peter, and I went out to play. There was a pond behind the house, and the ice had been frozen thick. It was warming up, however, and we all knew that the ice was going to go… well, maybe Peter didn’t know.”
“Was he your younger brother?”
“Yes, but as twins, that matters less than you think,” she said with a wry smile. “He was reckless, running out onto the ice. I knew better, but after a terrible moment, I ran out after him. There was a crack, like the end of the world, and he fell in.”
She paused, remembering how terrible it had been, how the black water seemed to open up under the rough ice, ready and able to swallow up something as small and unwise as a little boy.
“What happened to him?”
“If I hadn’t followed him out there, he would have died,” she responded. “He would have thrashed under the water until his strength gave out, and he would have died. Instead, I was there to pull him out, screaming for help as I did so. When I pulled him out, I was exhausted, but fortunately a neighbor heard.”
Raheem’s arm tightened around her as if afraid for the little girl that she had been.
“And what happened then?”
“The neighbor took us into her garage, stripped off our sodden clothes, and got us into a warm bath. It’s an old trick for people who have suffered a shock. She gave us hot chocolate, which looking back, I’m certain was laced with a bit of brandy, and she called our parents.”
Irene laughed to herself a little bit.
“They were furious. We were both grounded for months, until it was spring at least. Terrible.”
“But you had done nothing wrong,” Raheem protested, frowning at the injustice. “You saved your brother.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Irene said, her voice slurring a little. In the warmth of Raheem’s body, and clean and dry in a way that she hadn’t been for what felt like years, she could feel herself dropping off.
“I would think it matters a great deal,” said Raheem, who already sounded a little distant.
“Doesn’t,” she insisted. “He’s my brother. He’s my family. I have to look after him. Always.”
She had the idea that Raheem was saying something else, but it didn’t matter. Instead, the world was falling away into a deep and indigo haze. She was safe now, and her body needed it so badly that she fell asleep without another thought.
***
Raheem watched his wife sleep for a few moments. She was a warm weight against his body, gorgeous and soft and pliant in a way he had never seen her before. It took all of his strength not to touch her, not to kiss her again. It wouldn’t be right. When he kissed her, he wanted her to kiss him back, to know what was happening and to want it as much as he did.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he had bought a kind of trouble that would be with him the rest of his days. He could feel that fingerhold she had on his spirit and his heart growing greater, but he put it out of his mind. That reckoning could come later on.
Right now, there was more to think about. For several long moments, he simply stroked her bright hair, relishing the way the firelight glinted off it. She fell asleep in his arms so trustingly that it made a foreign part of him ache. He was not known to be a sympathetic man, or sometimes, even a compassionate one, but this little thief brought it out in him.
If she was a thief at all.
The story she had told echoed in his head until he realized what he had to do. With a gentle touch, Raheem detached himself from her, leaving her curled on the couch. She uttered a small sigh of protest before drifting into a deeper sleep, and he smiled a little.
He stepped into another room briefly, his phone in hand.
“Yes, it’s me. No, sorry about waking you up, but this can’t wait. All right. I want you to put together a dossier on Peter Bellingham, Irene Bellingham’s brother. Yes, her twin. All right…”