Sheikh's Purchased Princess (22 page)

She nodded jerkily, as if her head was a ball on a string. He reached out, jerking her head up with his hand at her chin. When she looked up at him, he was even more terrifying. This was a man who held the power of life and death over his people. She had been caught stealing from him.

“Say my name.” His voice was pure command, something that she could not defy.

“Raheem,” she whispered. “Raheem ben Ali, sheikh of Khanour.”

To her surprise, he broke into a smile that was bright and cruel.

“It has been heard, and it has been witnessed,” he said, his voice pitched to carry to the people at the door. Irene looked up in surprise.

“She has recognized me for who I am, and thus in the old way, I declare this woman my wife.”

The people behind him broke into an excited murmur, and the guard watched them with stunned eyes, but Irene felt as if she had been hit with the cane after all. The world was swimming, and things were happening much too fast for her to figure out what was going on.

The guard spoke up.

“Your Highness… what does this mean?”

“It means, warden, that this prisoner is no longer your responsibility. I am choosing to marry her in the old way, and thus her crimes are mine to punish and my responsibility to bring to rights. Her crime was against the country of Khanour, and as I am Khanour, I will take over her custody.”

With a careless hand, he tossed Irene a cloth bag.

“Cover yourself up,” he said, his voice brisk. “We are leaving as soon as you do.”

For a moment, Irene wondered if she wasn’t leaping straight from the frying pan into the fire. In prison, she knew exactly what to expect, but with Raheem… who knew what kind of tortures he had planned. And married? It shouldn’t be legal, but from her studies, she knew that it was. The marriage he had declared was one from Khanour’s ancient history, a law that was in place only for the sheikh, who might take a woman as wife for just a week. Under that law, she was his property, and he could do with her what he liked.

When he made an impatient sound, she hastened to open the bag. Inside, she found a loose robe and skirtlike trousers that buttoned at her waist. The clothes were similar to what the more traditional women wore in the Khanour countryside. The other items were more puzzling.

There was a pair of delicate gold bangles studded with tiny red gems that she suspected were rubies and a pair of intricately worked knotted gold earrings, but the prize was obviously the necklace. No, not the necklace; it was more of a collar. It was a piece that recalled some ancient distant past, a heavy piece of metal that fitted closely around her neck with a gleaming moonstone at the center.

Raheem looked her over with a critical eye before nodding briskly.

“Good,” he said, his voice crisp and commanding. “Now you will follow me. You will not attempt to escape, or I will show you that I can be just as savage as any prison. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded, feeling as shaky as if she stood in an earthquake. Things were happening so fast that she had no idea what was going to come or what she could do about it. Instead, she followed the sheikh in a daze. He walked her out of the building, past the guards and the gates and the bars, and then she was handed into one of the dark cars that were waiting outside.

I don’t have my passport
, she thought suddenly.
There was no procedure to show that I had left the prison, nothing that will tell people that I was here at all…

She realized, sitting alone in the car where she was separated from the driver by a pane of safety glass, that she was truly on her own. No one knew where she was or where she was going. Instead, her life was utterly in the hands of a man who had no cause to love her, who saw her as a traitor to his people and as a filthy thief.

As the car drove through the dimming afternoon, Irene wondered what was going to happen to her.

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