Forty-six

"Get out of my way."

"Dani—"

My face was my own again, and he knew who I was. But my name on his lips brought back memories I wanted buried. The way his voice dipped low at the end, remembering the feeling of his fingers brushing across my shoulder when he whispered it in my ear.

"You don't get to call me that, not anymore."

"What should I call you, then? Sanaya?"

My head shot up. He knew.

He took a step toward me, as if he couldn't imagine me hurting him, as if I didn't hold my dead father's sword in my hand ready to slice his throat.

I lifted my sword high. He continued walking, his steps methodical and slow, his own sword still sheathed. He made no attempt to draw it.

"Thohfsa told you who I was?"

"You think I didn't know it was you?" His words were low and quiet, but I heard them clear across the courtyard. He tilted his head, examining me, roving over my now undisguised face, and I felt strangely vulnerable again. Anger rose in my chest, anger at myself that he still had the power to make me feel.

I moved back a half step, that anger burning into my tone. "You can't have."

"You didn't change your hands," he said, his voice a little rough. He held up his own right fist and pointed to his knuckles.

"I remember every scar on your body. Especially the ones I gave you. I felt that scar across your knuckles when you first came to the palace."

My heart lurched. I remembered the way he'd held my hand that day. The slow way he'd bent over and kissed my knuckles. His lips had brushed right over my scar.

"You knew and didn't say anything?" My skin felt cold. "You knew it was me. The entire time when we—"

I thought of our kiss, about when I had come to his room and what we had almost done. About every time I had flirted with him, when I had thought I was manipulating the situation. But the entire time he'd been doing the manipulating.

Fresh rage bled through me, as well as the hot flush of shame that he had outsmarted me again, even when I had been most on guard.

"I wanted to see what your plan was. And… I felt guilty. About what I'd done." He looked away, his lips thinning. "And I wanted to know how far you were going to take this. I would have stopped it before we… But in the end it was you who stopped it." He took a step closer. "I didn't know you'd escaped. The warden never told anyone. You escaped one of the most savage prisons in the empire. Then you came right back here. Why?"

"You know why," I growled as we circled each other. "You betrayed me. You betrayed my father. And now he's dead." I advanced, my voice nearly cracking with the weight of my anger. "You stole my whole life from me."

His expression was anguished but hard. "I was trying to get you out of there."

I pursed my lips together. "I don't believe you."

"Did you not wonder why you hadn't been executed? Your father would have been spared had he not been killed before I could intervene. I managed to smuggle you out to the prison and save your life."

"You sentenced me to suffer!" I shouted, that black rage seeping through me. Those whispered words, that voice that I recognized now, the djinn's voice, saying the same word over and over and over.

Revenge. Revenge. Revenge.

Maz's face was stricken.

I kept walking toward him, my sword raised. "You sentenced me to be tortured and tormented." My words were guttural, and with every step, his eyes grew bleaker. "To wonder why the person I loved had betrayed me. So why would you try to save my life when you had already destroyed it?" The last words were a whisper, ravaged and soft.

Mazin's fists were curled at his sides, his knuckles white. "Because it was the only thing I could think to do to save you. And they would have killed you."

"No, you just wanted me to live in agony."

"I didn't want that either." He shook his head, his eyes pleading.

"Then why?" I hated the way my voice cracked, I hated that I cared about his answer. I hated that I couldn't just run him through with my blade without thought. But I needed to know. I needed whatever answer he could give. "Why?"

A muscle ticked in his jaw, and he looked away, as if he could no longer meet my eyes.

"Vahid killed my mother. He laughed about it. I was never going to let him get away with it. But everything went wrong. Instead of rallying the northern tribes to overthrow the emperor, the warlord's death was blamed on you."

"So, you admit you staged it?"

He shook his head, his mouth grim. "No. It was my plan to work with the warlord, to take the throne from the emperor and overwhelm his forces. But the man was dead before I even had the chance."

"Liar!" I spat. "It was you who killed him. You who left his burned-out body for me to find."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because after everything, you still chose the emperor. Getting rid of the warlord was convenient. His death might have started a civil war if it wasn't blamed on me. I was the next best thing."

"Dani, I was going to get you out of that prison, I promise. But first—"

"First you had to watch my father die and pursue your own vengeance? Is that it? Even if your story is true, even if you didn't plan this entire thing to frame me, you still let me take the blame. All so you could get your own revenge on the emperor. You owed me more than that."

"You're right," he said quietly.

I reared back. "What?"

"I owed you more than that. But I couldn't have fought my way out of the palace with you. I had Anam to think about as well. What would he have done with my sister if I had left? I had her to protect."

Anam .

I tasted the acid in my mouth as he said it. I wanted to make him say the words. I wanted him to admit that he'd thought of everyone else but me.

Thunder echoed through the halls of the palace, and I looked up into the open sky of the courtyard, the heavy clouds darkening our figures, blending our shadows into one.

Rain splattered, thick droplets pounding the floor. A monsoon began to pour, the sheet of rain like a scream.

"Dani, the choice I made…" He shook his head. "It was the wrong one. I chose revenge over you. I chose it over everything."

His words grated on my skin, an echo of my own. But I brushed them away like the rain pounding my shoulders.

"Let me prove it to you now. Tell me what you want, Dani."

"What I want?" I lifted my sword in front of my face, the rain beating against the blade. "I want my fucking cat back."

I lunged at him, my sword pointed at his heart. My hands were slick, my vision blurry, but when it came to Mazin I saw clearly. I saw everything. He wouldn't be the one to take it all away from me again.

He finally drew his own blade, but raised his scimitar in defense instead of attack, flicking my blade away. But I knew him. I knew his body, the muscles in his arms, how long until he would tire, his ticks and habits.

I knew how to beat him.

I kept coming. Again, and again, and again. I arced my sword up overhead, meeting his blade in the flashing rain.

"I don't want to fight you."

"You don't have a choice."

He defended every attack I wagered against him, but never advanced himself. His face was a mask of anguish, but I recognized that determined clench of his jaw, the small crease in his forehead.

He was holding himself in check, and I wanted him to unleash. I wanted him to burn with hatred as much as I did, to fight like he meant it, to fight like I had meant something—anything—to him.

"Had you already plotted against me when we were together in your room?"

His eyes flashed dark as I chipped away at his stillness.

"And when we talked about your mother? Did you know then that you would abandon me to Vahid, just as she was?"

He slashed at my sword, but his blade faltered. My own slid down his and sliced his arm. He winced but sidestepped my next attack, spinning and lifting his scimitar to slam against my sword.

"When I opened my heart to you? You knew then that you were going to crush it, didn't you?"

I ducked low, my sword swiping to the side and the blade catching him across the middle before he fell back. He grunted, slamming backward, the rain pounding against him.

He got up on his forearms and flipped back up onto his feet before I could rush at him.

This time he moved against me.

I felt the rush of satisfaction as his sword hit mine, at the anger I saw bleeding into the darkness of his eyes.

"No!" He shouted the word, the rain amplifying the sound. "None of this was planned. None of this was what I wanted." His voice was hoarse, the stone facade of him finally cracking. "I wanted Vahid to suffer, not you. But you got caught up in it."

"And my father?" I twisted, slamming the hilt of my sword into his jaw. His head snapped back and he stumbled. I pressed forward my blade aimed at his chest.

But he pivoted at the last moment, and I caught him with the tip alone, a slice across his chest where his heart would be.

If he had one.

"What did you think would happen when I was arrested? You knew my father would come for me."

Pain laced across his features, making something break in my chest. "I thought I had more time."

I laughed, the bitter sound swallowed up by the rain. "You had it all planned out, you just failed to let anyone in on those plans."

"My revenge was supposed to be quick, easy."

"It wasn't."

"For neither of us," he agreed.

"Excuse me? You want me to pity you? You who live in your golden palace, who does the bidding of a man who murdered his mother to protect a sister who would likely be better off away from here? What do you know of betrayal? What do you know of anything that I went through?"

Mazin pushed my sword away with his, the sheer brute strength of his arms overcoming mine. I would never beat him that way, but I was faster, smarter—my tactics were always to weigh a man's weaknesses and use them to my advantage. He slashed the air in front of my face, more in an effort to ward me away from him. But I danced backward, arcing my blade.

"You think I don't understand?" His voice was guttural, his face close to mine as our swords pressed together in silent struggle. "You think I didn't mourn the death of your father too? I loved him like he was my own."

"And yet your loyalty suggests otherwise."

"I thought I could destroy Vahid!" shouted Mazin, and he pushed my sword away.

I lowered it.

"I thought I could undermine the emperor's influence in the north with the death of their beloved warlord and then finally take the throne from him."

His eyes were feverish, his mouth a bruise.

I gave him a grim smile. "And so, we come to the truth of it. You wanted the throne, not to protect your sister. Not revenge. This was never about anyone but you."

"I wanted revenge," he growled, the words reverberating through my body like I'd said them myself.

Because I had said them.

"Revenge for my mother. And look what it cost me. Tell me, what is your revenge costing you?" He threw his sword onto the white marble, then unbuckled the golden clasps of his sherwani. He peeled the plastered fabric off his body, the pale kurta beneath already soaked through with rain. The fabric had molded to his body like a second skin, and I could already see the scars beneath, could practically feel the ridges of them with my fingertips.

"What is your revenge costing you?"

He fell to his knees on the floor, looking up at me as if waiting for his execution.

"I am a shell of who I was for what I did to you. For what I did to your father. And still Vahid sits on that golden throne. Still he rules over the empire after all he has done."

He placed a wet hand over his chest. The rain had lessened, and now it was a dull drizzle. "You think it didn't feel like my heart had been eaten out of me when they took you away? Knowing that they had you, knowing you were imprisoned and I couldn't do anything?"

My sword was still. I tried to will my hands to move, to lunge forward and pierce him through the chest as he had done to me when he had me sent to that prison. But something stopped me. He knelt before me baring everything, as if there was nothing between us but this truth, this fight, this shared misery.

He said he hadn't betrayed me, but even if that were true, he'd abandoned me to get revenge. Was that any better?

I raised my sword with a scream that tore through me, the rage and hurt and anguish ripping through my body like a mad river.

Still, he didn't move. Those dark eyes watched me, as if he was perfectly fine with whatever I was about to do—even if I were to stab him through the heart.

My arms were aching and frozen, unable to move.

"What is your revenge costing you?"

Noor had said something similar, but I hadn't listened. I felt the storm of djinn magic still igniting my blood, and I knew I didn't have to fight Mazin with a sword to kill him. I could choke his body of life with a snap of my fingers. That dark rage engulfed me, dictating my sword like I was standing at the top of a mountain and ready to dive off into oblivion. I was at the point of no return now, the fury of the djinn magic so intense it was difficult to see straight, the bloodlust drowning me.

"Dani, I love you."

I closed my eyes, wishing he'd never said those words. They called me back to myself, to who I truly was before all this, before my father's death, before everything I knew and trusted was torn away.

And what about what I had done? Who I had become in order to best him?

My blade wavered.

"Dani." He said the words softly, so soft I could barely hear him over the rain. "I'm sorry."

I dropped my arms.

My sword hit the stone floor with a clatter. My knees followed, until I was on the ground, the rain falling around me.

"Dania."

His voice pierced my chest, because no matter how much I tried to outrun it, to dismiss it, to avenge it, half of my heart was still his. Even though he'd cleaved it out, it was still his, and I couldn't stop giving it to him.

He came toward me, his hands open.

And I took them.