Despite the pain, when I reach the bottom of the hill, I quickly get up and run towards the tents. I hear the man cursing behind me, but his voice becomes more and more distant.
I reach the camp, terrified, and almost cry with relief when I see a group of women. My hijab is lost, and they look amazed at my blonde hair.
I kneel down, feeling weak. “Help me! There’s a man running after me. I’m Madeline Turner, and I’m carrying the heir to your Sheikh.”
At first, they just stare at me, and for a split second of madness, I think they will tell me to leave.
“Please, I need help. The man who kidnapped me is after me. You must protect the Sheikh’s child.”
“The Sheikh’s child?” one of them asks in poor English.
I place my hand on my belly.
The world seems to spin. I’m weak, my strength fading. “Yes, I carry the Sheikh’s heir in my body. Please help me.”
They come closer and lift me off the ground, helping me lie down on some cushions.
“Water, please,” I request.
After drinking a few sips, I say, “Tell His Excellency that you found me. I don’t know if the man who kidnapped me will come back. I need to leave.”
I struggle to stay strong, but the words seem to come out muffled from my throat, and a slumber like I’ve never felt before overtakes me. And the whole world goes dark.
Chapter 49
“The best way to keep your child safe is to keep her here as a prisoner. If she escapes to the United States, she’ll never be able to bring your heir back here, Kamal. Especially if she gives birth there. The courts in that country will always defend a citizen’s right to remain on American soil. If what this woman said was indeed part of a scheme between the two of them, Madeline plans to use your child as a bargaining chip.”
“It won’t happen. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my descendants,” I reply, wanting to end the conversation.
“Perhaps you’ll have to go much further than you imagine.”
I don’t like his tone. “You don’t know what I’m thinking, Adil. Don’t try to guess. Madeline isn’t going anywhere with my child. After my baby is born, if she wants to leave, I’ll grant her the freedom, but she’ll go alone.” When I finish speaking, a feeling of unease hits me, and I quickly detect what it is: the feeling of being unjust.
Something is wrong with that recording.
“You’re dismissed,” I say, and he makes a move to take the phone from my hand, but I push him away. “No, I’ll keep it. I need to listen to the call again.”
“I can send it to your phone.”
It’s not what he says but his tone that sounds an internal alert in me.
“No, I want to listen to it right here,” I say carefully, studying his face.
If I didn’t know him so well, I might have missed the nuance of fear and the paleness he quickly tries to hide, but we’ve known each other our whole lives. I’ve memorized his expressions almost as well as my own.
“You can go, Adil. If I need you, I’ll send for you.”
Once he leaves, I call Raez, the head of my security. “I want three of your best men monitoring my future wife and also the counselor Adil.”
“The counselor, Your Highness?”
“You heard me. Don’t let him out of your sight until further notice.”
I sit at my desk to listen to the recording again. By the third time, I understand what has been bothering me from the beginning, and Adil, being who he is, wouldn’t have failed to notice: at no point in the phone call does Madeline agree with what her mother says. It’s almost a one-sided conversation.
Far beyond the feeling of having been unjust to her, even if only in thought, my mind lingers on the reason why Adil brought me that recording.
His role in my government is to strategize; he has an analytical mind, so he would never fail to notice that my fiancée only listened and never agreed with her mother.
