Come on, Katie. No one else will ever know.
With Shane, I was just trying to be someone I wasn’t.
And I could kill him right now.
Oh god. How will Kai ever trust me again? This will destroy him. Destroy us.
‘One night. A few hours. A taste of what he has.’
‘What?’
‘You and I. In exchange for the hard drive. The photographs.’
I almost burst into tears on the spot. ‘So you can tell him afterwards, tell him what we’d done?’
‘No,’ he answers so solemnly that, for a moment, I almost thinkhethinks he means it. He lowers his hand and the photo along with it. ‘Never. I want only something to feed the fire I have inside.’ For the first time since this conversation began, Essam’s language is fired. ‘We are the same, he and I, yet he behavesso superior. I want the knowledge, the secret admission, that he is not so superior after all.’
The same. How can he believe that? He’s nuts. I’m having a conversation with a madman. Maybe he’s high? My eyes dart to his nose, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go with this line of enquiry. I won’t draw nearer. No chance.
Cold shivers dance along the base of my skull.
‘Essam, please don’t ask me to do this to him. You don’t want me, not really.’
‘I’m not asking you to do anything, just giving you a choice. Better than sharing this on the internet.’ He shakes the picture in front of me again. Another threat. One that squeezes my heart.
‘Some fucking choice.’
‘Keep your secret, add one more. Or lose your husband’s trust and perhaps lose him as well. You know how he is, how this would make him. He’d punish you with more than words, punish beyond your body. He’d return to his whores.’
Quickly, he steps towards me, not giving me a moment to react. His hand grasps my wrist and with one pull, I’m yanked to his chest, Batool frozen, not moving and squashed between us.
‘A memento.’
He tucks the photograph into the open neck of my shirt. I shiver as his fingers graze between my breasts before he steps away just as quickly, pushing the cat against me as her tiny claws dig into my shirt.
‘Madam.’ Rashid speaks from somewhere behind me, his tone low. I almost stumble backwards to the safe side of the open gate.
One glance over my shoulder at Rashid and guilt floods my chest.
‘It’s okay. He—he just caught the cat. The door was open. She ran out.’ But as I then glance back, Essam is already walking away.
