Page 44 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

CHAPTER TWELVE

FORALONG time after Malak left, Shona simply...stood there.

She felt empty, somehow. As if he had done more than simply say those things to her. It was as if he’d dug into her with his fingers and scraped out her insides, leaving her hollow. Almost unbearably raw.

And altered straight through.

She didn’t know how much time passed, but eventually she realized what she was doing. Standing stock-still in one of the entirely too many sitting rooms in this palace. In this suite of rooms, for that matter.

What four-year-old required a selection of seating areas?

But her attempt to manufacture some irritation on that score faded almost immediately, as if it had never been.

Because this particular sitting room was fitted with billowing tapestries and the kind of pillows people here used as chairs scattered all over every surface. There were golds and silvers, mosaics on the floor and some parts of the walls, and thick, patterned rugs thrown here and there.

But worst of all, there was a mirror that took up the whole of the far wall. The fact that it, too, was made of gold and precious stones only made it worse.

Shona stared at herself. She could see her chest rise and fall too quickly. She could see the faint sheen on her skin that broadcast exactly how flustered she was, in case she might have missed that on her own.

Though flustered was a weak way to describe how she felt.

It hardly touched on the swirling darkness that threatened to take her over. That threatened to drop her where she stood, and leave her there for Yadira to find, crumpled on the floor like the trash she’d always been.

Shona didn’t let herself fall. She refused to crumple. She frowned at her reflection instead.

She had tried to get used to this new version of herself. She had tried. She had done her best to attempt to see herself through Miles’s eyes instead of her own. She had tried to let the way Malak touched her, tasted her and made her feel far more beautiful than any woman ought to, be her guide.

But the words she most feared whirled around and around in her head and all she could see when she looked in that mirror was her own folly.

She was no princess. This was no fairy tale.

And she had been insane to imagine that her story could ever end differently.

How had she ever managed to imagine otherwise for even a moment?

She knew that woman in the mirror. Shona knew what mattered wasn’t the shape of her face or the way she filled out yet another one of the gowns she found laid out for her each day. It didn’t matter that this morning, when she’d dressed after another long night with Malak, she had actually smiled at this very same image. She’d found something hopeful in it. In her. There had been a light in her own eyes that she’d never seen before. She’d felt pretty, and more than that, something perilously close to happy.

She should have known better.

Shona had never yet made it through anything resembling a good moment without that other shoe crushing her flat. How could she possibly have imagined that this time it would be different?

“It’s never different,” she whispered to herself, as fiercely as she could when she felt as if she was nothing but jagged pieces of a broken thing. “It’s never, ever different.”

She heard Miles call for her from one of the other rooms, and pulled herself together. Painfully. She smoothed her hands over her dress, though her palms were damp. She straightened. She smoothed out her expression and forced herself to smile.

She knew better than to give in to the feelings that slapped at her and beat her over the head then. Just as she should have known better than to give in to that other feeling that she’d foolishly given voice to over and over again.

The truth was, she’d known better as she was doing it. She’d known. But she’d gone ahead and done it, anyway.

She had no one to blame but herself for that sick feeling deep in her belly now.

“Enjoy,” she muttered at herself as she left that awful sitting room and its terrible mirror and went to find her little boy.

Shona spent the rest of the afternoon with Miles, forcing herself to act calm and normal and fine, but all the while her head spun around and around. And Malak’s words echoed inside of her as if he’d tattooed them on her rib cage.

Maybe if he had, it would have hurt her less.

Would Malak really send her off to some stronghold out there in the desert somewhere? Had she truly done this to herself? All by herself? Had she made all of this up—all the things she’d been so certain were building there between them?