Page 55 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
From between his teeth.
The old man glared at him for a moment so long that Cyrus wondered if he was going to have to take matters into his own hands—but then, at the last, turned on his heel with a hauteur that was meant to land like a slap, and did.
Cyrus found himself feeling more shame that he could remember ever experiencing before in all his days.
“You had better start with your own mother,”Hope had said.
Had he known all this time that if he dared, this would be the reception he’d get? Or worse, that he would deserve it?
But he’d come all this way. And he was not a coward, despite all evidence to the contrary, so he continued.
He followed the old man deeper into the house and pretended he didn’t recognize the place with every step he took. The rooms he had treated as his personal playground. The banister he had treated as his own, particular slide. The games of tag in and around precious artifacts, heedless of the fact that lords of the desert were not meant to enjoy themselves like grubby peasants, according to his father.
They were meant to conduct themselves with dignity in all things.
That desert he loved now, deeply and fully, had been a hard landing. He had been forced to change his own memories in his head to survive it, or he wouldn’t have made it—not with his father so determined to claw out any hint of weakness in his only son.
It had been easier to pretend he’d hated it here. Safer, maybe.
In time he’d believed his own reframing.
Maybe that, too, had been survival.
But he cast the clamor of his memories aside as he was ushered, with freezing cold courtesy, into what he recognized as his mother’s favorite drawing room.
He stepped inside, then stopped still.
Because she was there.
His mother stood at a window that looked out over the drive, and Cyrus realized she must have seen him coming.
She looked older too, even from behind. She was tall and willowy, still clearlyherin every way that mattered, and he wanted to go to her more than he wanted to admit.
The last time he had hated that urge in him. He had wanted to claw it out with his own fingers. This time he did not quite dare approach her.
“Mother,” he said, getting the words out even though he wasn’t sure what there was to say. “I’ve come to you because—”
But the woman who had once graced every major magazine on the planet with her face, and who had briefly been one of the richest women in the world entirely because of her commanding presence, turned then and silenced him with a single glance.
From dark blue eyes far too much like his own.
Though hers were haunted.
And he knew without having to ask that any ghosts there were his fault.
“You have said quite enough over the years,” she told him, in that quietly cultured voice he remembered so well. “I believe I’d like to take a turn.”
“You don’t understand,” he started. “It isn’t—”
“I love you, Justin,” she said, stating it baldly. She did not drop her gaze, not even when she shook her head. “To me, you will always be the baby I carried in my body. The baby I made with your father, in love. The word he always hated most because he could not control it and so it made him feel weak.”
When he had been eighteen she had tried to say something like this to him. She had called him by that name he had rejected for years then, too. Cyrus had refused to hear it.
He could almost see himself standing here in the corner of this very same room, shouting at her.My father is the Lord of the Aminabad Desert, he had thundered at her.He has never known weakness, nor ever shall.
But Cyrus wondered now if he had been that angry because she’d called himJustin.Because she’d made him remember and he’d been too concerned about chasing his father’s approval back then.
About living up to all the harsh expectations his father had made sure he felt as if they were branded into his flesh. As if he could not be whole without them. As if they were as real as the bruises.
