She turned her gaze to the pitcher, picked it up and proceeded to refill his wine, wishing that he wouldn't notice how unsteady her hand was as she poured its content into the cup. A mistake she immediately regretted. An opening for him to surprise her when he reached over and took her wrist without warning. Zahara jolted at the sudden contact, spilling the wine in the process and bit her lip. He would have caught that, seen through her, gained satisfaction from it. A loss on her part that she'd remember. A victory on his.

The evidence of that was written clearly on his face, in the small sound he made in his throat and the way his eyes devoured her, seizing ground around where she stood until she felt she couldn't move. Zahara willed herself to hold that gaze, despite the way his hand around her wrist tightened, how it dug into her skin hard enough to leave a mark. She knew that hand, every crook and dent in it, how those callused fingers felt on her body, what they could do to her, to render her defenseless and tear apart whatever fort she could build to keep him out.

"Come here, Zahara," he demanded in a tone almost uncharacteristically gentle as he tugged on her arm, pulling her toward him.

She drew a breath and straightened before stepping around the table to where her conqueror wished her to be, placing herself deliberately close enough within reach and yet half a step too far for him to catch the rhythm of her heart. For everything he would take from her, there were things she would never give, no matter how much torture awaited her in this room.

He rolled her arm gently to expose the underside of her wrist, brought it to his lips and lingered there, not touching, not yet, to sniff at her scent the same way he might have done to catch the aroma of an exquisite wine before tasting it. "How is it possible," he drawled, trailing his nose further up her arm and back down where he started, "that a girl half your age couldn't excite me with her cunt the way your scent did so splendidly when you entered the room?"

What was it, Zahara thought as she struggled to settle something in her stomach, that gave this man such a contrast within him? She could withstand all his torture and unforgiving ways easily enough, but never his vulnerability when he decided to let her see it, and he was vulnerable tonight. It would be easy to deny it to her grave that he possessed such a thing to justify her hatred for him, but there were moments, words softly spoken in this room that would make it a lie. She hated those moments, those words, hated them for what they could do to her.

"And yet it was enough for you to finish the job," she said in an attempt to change the mood, the way things were heading. "What was it that stirred your desire then, my lord? The thrill of discovering her spirit or of breaking it?"

He smiled, to himself, to her, amused at his own answer he was about to give. "The thought of you listening outside my door," he said and planted a brief kiss on the inside of her arm.

"Cruel." She scowled, more at the heat from his lips that lingered still on her skin than the words spoken.

"To her?" He asked, entwining his fingers with hers and kissed her again, this time on a spot closer to her palm. "Or to you?"

The place where he touched her felt tender, like a burn wound that had yet to heal. It took all her effort to not look away and put on a sarcastic smile. "Do you ever pick just one, my lord?"

He stilled for a time, looking straight at her, into her, reading her thoughts and considering something in his mind. She had come to know that look, that gesture he let slip when he decided to take a risk, to do something out of character. "And if I tell you that I can," he said, not smiling now, not anymore, "choose one?"

It was a question that aimed to wound, an attack of sorts at something too deep, too precious in her heart. A proposition that threatened to end her if she so much as considered it. She brushed it aside immediately, feigning indifference, ignorance. "To be the subject of your torture, my lord? I'd pity the woman." The woman would not be her, not for what he'd implied, this she silently swore by the loyalty to her land or whatever was left of her pride.

He tugged on her hand, gripping it tighter, demanding her full attention. "To win my heart, Zahara."

To win my heart.

One simple sentence, delivered like a spear, pressing hard against her chest, demanding her complete and total surrender. This was a response to her being his favorite, the path he'd chosen to take to deal with the problem. The way his grip tightened around her arm, his clear intention to not let go told her of his conclusion. It was simple. Simpler than throwing her into the dungeon and ridding himself of the entertainment, or to pretend that she was no longer his favorite. The solution, of course, was for her to lay her heart at his feet, and in doing so eliminate herself altogether as a threat.

She steeled herself against that possibility—that impossibility—and offered him an indifferent reply, "I wasn't aware that you possessed one, my lord."

The blade she'd wielded hit the mar. She could almost see it struck from the way his jaw tightened, and the way his breathing suddenly altered. There was an open wound in the man whose hand now tangled with hers, red, raw, and dripping blood.

"You wouldn't be here if I didn't have one," he said with a deadly calm. Another blade delivered in answer to her own, sliding with precision between her ribs, into her heart. "You have known this for a long time. From the first day we met, Zahara. You know what I want."

You know what I want.

And she had—known it—for a long time. From the first day they met. In the flickering light of the lanterns, the excitement in his eyes when she'd recited Eli, the tension, the fire that had been set alight behind every word of their conversation at that table. And then, in the years and years of being this room, sharing his bed, being touched, and touched again by his hands, his words, his unquenchable desire to have her, to conquer and reconquer more than once, and one too many times. She had known what he wanted from her, just as well as how much he'd wanted to destroy such a desire, how many times he'd tried.

Now he was offering her truce, a chance to change her life, the life of her son, the fate of the peninsula, to be one and the only one to wrap her hand around his heart, to have so much power to change and make a difference.

I can choose one.

Four simple words that told her everything could be undone. She had only to reach out and take it, to answer the call she'd known was there, the one she'd buried in the deepest part of her heart and kept hidden to deny its existence. It would be so simple, so effortless to say the words that would rewrite the history of what happened from then on, to take this life-changing gift she'd never imagined would ever be offered.

But there were, oh there were, things she would not—could not—surrender for lives or reasons, or the loyalty to her land.

"You took everything from me," she told him, a decade of lingering rage, of caged, controlled anger released and etched in every word she spoke, "my home, my family, my pride, my integrity, my freedom, my right to live as a person, as a human being, and you will ask for more."

She pulled away, putting an end to their physical contact, placing a distance between them. She would toss this offered gift to the floor and crush it with her feet if she could. It would be an act of treason, but one she was willing—even needing—to kill for if only to draw herself a line. "There are things you cannot have in this world, and my heart is among them," she spelled the words, carving them into his memory, into hers. "It is beating to see you die, never for you to claim."

He looked at her quietly then, and in the finality of that punishing silence, she had a vision of something breaking, of a sky falling down upon the world and into the deep, dark pit with no way out. He rose from the chair after a time and took a slow step toward her, to stand over her with his imposing height and impossibly large shadow made by the light of the night's full, achingly white moon.

"Do you know," he murmured, looking down on her from above, "what they do to prisoners that can't be sold in Sabha? How the guards find entertainment to pass the time, besides sticking their cocks where they don't belong?"

He lifted a hand to touch her hair, pushing it back behind her ear. The touch was tender, in the same way a butcher might touch an animal to relax its muscles before the slaughter.

"Every other month they pick ten prisoners, boys and young men who could fight," he whispered, the words so light she would have missed them had he not pressed them against her cheek. "They're put in teams of two, given weapons and one week to train, to fight until only one pair remains."

Large, unforgiving hand wrapped around the back of her head, holding it in place. Outside, a baby was crying somewhere from down below, its wails brought up by the wind that rushed into the chamber.

"In the trials, they kill you when your partner dies, so we'd watch each other's back, tend to each other's wounds, make sure the other one can fight the next day." His fingers clamped down around her neck, digging deep enough to reach her bones. "Then they pitch you against each other. Your partner, the one man who's taken care of you for the past four weeks, your one and only friend in that pit of hell, to be killed, or he kills you."

She could feel his lips on her earlobe, his hot, burning breaths scalding her skin as he spoke. "I was held in Sabha for two years, and in those two years I'd won the crown eleven times. The twelfth man who now stands outside my door is the only one I didn't kill from the trial." He pulled back to look at her then, to make sure she saw it on his face, in his eyes—the hurt, the burning, killing desire, his relentless, unforgiving fire to punish those who'd inflicted a wound. "I don't have a problem killing what is dear to my heart, Zahara. I never do."

She closed her eyes to the words she knew were coming, to the heat of his lips as they grazed hers, speaking them. The baby was screaming now, its cries cut through the silence like a shriek of an eagle. "You could have been an exception. You and Lasura. I would have given you the world, the freedom you wanted, even put your son on the throne and given him control of the Salasar. I have thought of it and offered it to you tonight. You are right, there are things I cannot have in this world," he said, his words grated on her skin, leaving scars.

"I live to crush those things, Zahara. That is who I am. You have one week to say goodbye to your son," he said. "I am sending him to raid your home."