Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 126823 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126823 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
“Qadri.” Rainier breathed the name he often called her. Destiny. “I’m with you.”
That was all. I’m with you. So simple, but it was everything to her. She wasn’t alone. She never would be as long as she had Rainier.
“I can do this, Rainier,” she said, more for herself than for him. She was determined to solve the puzzle once and for all. To know the truth.
“Scorpion and his cabinet hated me. It was personal. Very, very personal. I’d never met them. I tried to stay quiet and do exactly as I was ordered, but it didn’t matter. Scorpion was determined to torture me. He didn’t need excuses. He took great pleasure in finding ways to not just physically but emotionally hurt me. I asked myself why a million times.”
Rainier kept his gaze on the road. “Baby.” There was caution in his voice. “Be sure you want the answers.”
“She didn’t look back.” The sudden lump in her throat nearly choked her.
“Who didn’t look back?”
“My mother. Her security team pushed her into the armored SUV, and they drove away. I was looking straight at her, and she didn’t even look over her shoulder at me. I took that to mean she was confident in the system, that I’d be ransomed easily. It was just business, and I should be calm. But that wasn’t the reason, was it?”
Rainier cursed under his breath. He brought her fingertips to his mouth and bit down gently. “I feel as if I’m always bringing bad news. I hate doing this.”
“I’m doing this, not you. I need to face the truth, Rainier. I can’t keep hiding from it. That’s part of the reason the PTSD episodes are so severe. These are things I can’t talk about to anyone else.”
She didn’t trust anyone enough other than Rainier. She loved her parents, and she didn’t want anyone else to know anything she uncovered that would put them in a bad light.
Rainier was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “I understand, baby. You need to talk about this, we talk about it.”
How could she not love him? His reluctance and his reasons were clear, but for her, he would do it. More than ever, she knew she was making the right decision to spend her life with him.
“Scorpion hated my mother, didn’t he? He intercepted the ransom because he was making his own demands. That was what was happening, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Rainier sounded terse. Grim. The tension inside the car grew.
“Was he making her part of the negotiations? Money and my mother to get me back? If Scorpion did that, my father would never agree. He’d surround my mother with ten million guards.” She wasn’t really asking, because how could he possibly know? Could he? She was musing aloud the way she often did when she was piecing together a puzzle.
Rainier didn’t utter a single word.
Shabina refused to be a coward any longer. She hadn’t trusted Talia Warren enough to explore her worst fears with her. Her father had hired the therapist, and, although she’d explored going to a few others, she didn’t like repeating the story, so in the end, she’d stayed with Talia. Even though she was told often everything she said was confidential, for all she knew the therapist reported every word to her father. Her father had enough money to buy a tremendous amount of loyalty, and she’d been pretty messed up when she’d first come back. Who was she kidding? She still was. She probably always would be.
Shabina considered whether the silence from Rainier meant he knew the answer to her question. He was astute, very intelligent, and he had access to various sources of information she never would. She decided not to press him. Her mind was already coming up with answers, and she was certain she would find the truth without forcing him to reveal anything he was reluctant to say, especially if it made her parents look bad.
“My mother’s family is from the Middle East. Since I was a very little girl, I’ve never seen them or heard from them. My mother always speaks of them lovingly, but she doesn’t visit them, and they don’t come here, although my father could afford to bring them here.”
Why hadn’t she ever put that together? Her thigh ached. Her headache began to return with a vengeance. She tasted copper in her mouth. That meant she was coming very, very close to a revelation she should have put together long ago.
“Arranged marriages are very common in Saudi Arabia, especially in the smaller villages, either through a matchmaker or family. My mother comes from a family where they most likely promised her to someone.” Her voice sounded strangled, even to her own ears.
Of course, her mother had been promised in marriage to a man. Her father would have had many offers for her. Yasemin was beautiful, strikingly so. She had been raised in a traditional family. She was quiet, submissive and made the perfect wife.