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“Your wounded pride is showing. That probably isn’t allowed in Tamar either.”
“I would follow you,”
“You are something, or you are not. A title that someone else bestows upon you does not make it more or less true. You,” he said, “are a queen as I had never dared to hope might exist.”
“I will give you credit, you may be the first man to compliment me for something other than my beauty.” “I will happily compliment that as well, at no cost, but I think we both know that would be a waste of breath,”
“Don’t do that.” “What?” Naime felt as if she snapped awake. “Don’t.” He grimaced, swiping a hand over his face. “Just don’t look at me like that.”
“I am not a monster,” he pleaded. “I am not…I do not kill for the joy of it. Please don’t“—he took a shuddering breath—”please don’t think I’m a monster.”
“I see a man who is loyal even when others may not deserve it. Someone who stands beside those he believes in with humility, without diminishing or being diminished. I see“—she swallowed back her trepidation—”shadow like dusk, the peace at the end of struggle, magic to break down barriers that imprison us.”
“You are necessary.” She mirrored his touch by lifting her other hand so his face was caught between her fingers. “Your magic is necessary. And beautiful, like night.”
“You are the most beautiful thing to ever happen to me.”
Naime had never heard the word made reverence, into a state of being, into the warmest, truest expression of feeling. It had never meant anything. You are beautiful. They said. What a beautiful princess. How fortunate she is beautiful. A word that described nothing of who she was or what she wanted, how she worked to be everything she needed to be. But in his voice, shaped by night and peace, it became everything she knew he saw in her.
They were a swirling, ever-changing harmony, his peace for her tempest, his restlessness for her calm, his recklessness for her planning, her independence for his loyalty. Night and day, dusk and dawn, the end, and the beginning.
“Anyone who tries to harm you is going to be reminded why, exactly, Tamar fears the Sixth House so much,”
“I wanted them. Every single one. I wanted you to unleash yourself on me, so that you are mine, your secrets and hurts mine to keep and guard.”
Not until Makram, who was not afraid to break things, to see the new paths revealed. And how could he be afraid, who walked with ruin in his wake and dawn in his sights?
“I am made and born to serve. You are the one I want to serve, the one I wish to stand beside.”
“And me?” Ihsan asked. “Shall I hang a sign about my neck and take a stroll through the market?”
“And you may rest assured I will stop my own heart before I ever allow my magic to hurt her. I own my magic, it does not own me.”
